After having a bad experience after a game hang (the game kept stealing focus, even from Task Manager...I had to lock and unlock [i.e. Win+L] to regain control) I decided to do something about it. I wrote a quick app for my G15 keyboard to let me kill out of control processes.
Here's a YouTubey thingie where I show it off:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e9Y4JPVxrYWhile it does a fairly good job of killing tasks, there are two things that it desperately needs before I do a proper release: (1) a better way of locating tasks and (2) the interface smoothed out a bit. It's a little clear in the video that it's a bit "choppy" when going through the tasks. The former is going to take some thought and the latter is directly caused by lazin...err, the program not being finished. Basically, it's being caused by the button pressed event on the keyboard firing while in the middle of a Thread.Sleep. It does have a slight hold-off period after pressing a button before it'll start putting the thread to sleep again, but that's pretty much a hack supporting another hack. Correcting that behavior is going to be priority one, obviously.
As for the first issue, my first thought was to make it possible to actually search the list. For instance, maybe if you were to hit the third soft key, it would let you "type" directly onto the LCD screen and do a textual search. Short of displaying a process list on the LCD display and paging through it that way, that's the best way I can think of. The problem in this case would be actually pulling it off without showing anything on the actual monitor. I might have to pop up a form to receive the keystrokes to avoid throwing a few serious hacks into the mix.
So, I dunno. We'll see how it goes.
