Nominated programs

Blank-it allows you to nominate a number of programs that are available for use, even when the vehicle is in motion.

Program matching

To correctly manage your windows, Blank-it needs to have a way of determining whether or not a window belongs to a nominated program.

For traditional Windows applications, this is a relatively straightforward approach, but for applications installed via the Windows App Store, the process is a bit more complicated.

Traditional Windows applications

For traditional applications, Blank-it can use the Microsoft Windows API to determine which process owns each window, and then compare that process's executable path to the path specified in the nominated program configuration.

As a result, the only configuration required is that you specify the correct executable path in the nominated program configuration.

Applications installed via the Windows App Store

There are two main issues when using applications installed via the Windows App Store:

1. Applications installed from the app store are placed in a path that may change relatively often, thus invalidating any hard-coded paths in your nominated program configuration.
2. If the application is a UWP application (as most store applications are), the Microsoft Windows API does not allow Blank-it to match a window to its associated process.

As a result, the configuration required is a little bit more involved.

Firstly, when configuring your nominated program path, it is recommended to replace the version number and hash value with a * wildcard.

For example, the path:
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsMaps_11.2303.5.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\Maps.exe
should be configured as:
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsMaps_*\Maps.exe

In addition, you must provide a regular expression (opens in a new tab) that matches the application's Window title. For a simple application with a static window title (such as Windows Maps, which always has the Maps window title), it is sufficient to just enter the window title in this configuration field. For a more complicated application with dynamic window titles (such as notepad, which has %document_name% - Notepad as its title), you will need to write a regular expression (in this example: .+ - Notepad).

As a complete example, here is how you would configure Microsoft Maps as a nominated program:

• Name: Maps
• Path: C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsMaps_*\Maps.exe
• Window Title Regex: Maps