JcRabbit

A superb collection of utilities and desktop enhancements, Winstep Xtreme will change the way you work with Windows forever. Roughly 1 year in the making, the official upgrade to Winstep Xtreme v9.5 is finally here! Winstep Xtreme v10.6 features the same modern and clean User Interface with multi-language support that you can find in the free version of the Winstep Nexus dock. v10.6 has so many new features in relation to v9.5 that listing them all becomes impossible - just try the new release, you will love it! Winstep Xtreme offers a free 30 day trial and is available from $28.45. Winstep Xtreme runs on the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and Windows 7 and is currently available in the following languages: Czech, Dutch, English, Farsi (Persian), French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brasil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish. A maintenance update to Winstep Nexus and Nexus Ultimate (v10.6) has also been released: The Winstep Nexus dock is a FREE, dock for Windows. Every feature youÂ’d expect from a dock, including widgets, mouse-over effects, skins, drag-and-drop, and even others not available in most other docks, such as live icon reflections, in-dock system tray, Vista Blur-behind effects, and much more. Completely customizable, Nexus has thousands of backgrounds freely available online and is fully compatible with skins for all 3rd party docks. Nexus Ultimate is an enhanced version of the free-to-use Nexus dock which is available stand-alone or as a component of Winstep Xtreme (a single easy-to-install package featuring all of Winstep's popular desktop enhancement products for Windows). Nexus is free. Nexus Ultimate is Available from $24.95. Nexus runs on the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and Windows 7 and is currently available in the following languages: Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Farsi (Persian), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brasil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish.

Winstep has released Nexus v10.4 (and Nexus Ultimate v10.4). The Winstep Nexus Dock is a FREE professional dock for Windows. With Nexus, your most frequently used applications are only a mouse click away - and Nexus turns working with your computer into a FUN and enjoyable experience once again. Nexus includes every feature you’d expect from a dock, including widgets, mouse-over effects, skins, drag-and-drop, and even others not available in most other docks, such as live icon reflections, in-dock system tray, Vista Aero Glass effects, and much more. Completely customizable, Nexus has thousands of backgrounds freely available online and is fully compatible with skins for all 3rd party docks. Nexus Ultimate is an enhanced, multi-dock, multi-level version of the free-to-use Nexus dock which is available stand-alone and as a component of Winstep Xtreme, a single easy-to-install package featuring all our popular desktop enhancement products for Windows. Nexus is free. Nexus Ultimate is $24.95 and adds, besides multiple docks and multi-level sub-docks, a powerful tabbed dock able to display not only regular shortcuts as well as virtual folders such as the Control Panel, Desktop, My Computer, etc..., and even file system folders of your choice. With Nexus Ultimate your whole computer is literally only a single mouse click away! Download the final release of Nexus 10.4 Nexus runs on the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and Windows 7. It's available in the following languages: Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi (Persian), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brasil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish. Major hightlights of the 10.4 release: lots of performance enhancements, Nexus initializes much faster, negative edge offsets, ability to customize the system tray expansion icon, further improved compatibility with 3rd party dock themes, the dock no longer 'flashes' when adding or removing items, smoother animation effects, fixed potential freeze when returning from hibernation, fixed issue in which the dock could become unresponsive after exiting a DirectX full screen game, and many other improvements! Watch Nexus in action: Winstep Website: http://www.winstep.net Registration: FREE You can download Nexus from HERE (18 MB).

Sorry for the delay in replying. Check THIS out then.

Yes, if necessary the dock will automatically adjust icon size to make sure it fits on the screen, but only down to the absolute minimum of 16x16 - after that the dock has no choice but to allow itself to extend off-screen. When automatically adjusting the icon size, the height of the dock obviously changes with it. Since the reserved screen space is relative to the dock height (obviously talking about an horizontal dock here), the space available for maximized windows will change too, which might cause them to 'blink' when changing sizes to take advantage of the newly available space. One can argue that the space reserved for the dock should remain the same even if the automatic icon size adjustment is taking place, but then I'm sure many users would then shout 'bug' when setting the dock icon size to, say, 256x256, which would be impossible to deliever if the dock hasn't enough screen space for this size, therefore resulting in a large gap between the dock and maximized windows because of the actual icon size and what the user set the dock to (hope this makes sense, hehe). Anyway, if this is happening to you, it means you are running out of dock space because you're trying to fit into a single dock more functions than it can actually support given your screen resolution. You can either set the default icon size to a smaller value, or start thinking about upgrading to Nexus Ultimate, wich is Nexus with support for tabbed docks, multiple docks, and an infinite number of nested sub-docks.

How many XWD specific skins are there? What is so special about the XWD skinning format that the author had to come up with its own format? Just asking, really. You're sure you're running v10.4? I did some work on that for v10.4, and when you drag the item over the dock for the first time the icons should now shift smoothly to make room. Unfortunately they still do 'jump' a bit when you then switch insertion points, is that what you meant? Hard to fix with the current dock magnification algorithm, but I'll give it a try as soon as I have a bit more time to work on that.

You mean something like this? Nexus Ultimate allows you to create as many docks and nested sub-docks (so you can categorize your items) as you want, features a tabbed dock (Shelf), etc...! Nexus is compatible with skin formats for all relevant 3rd party docks (RocketDock, Yz Dock, MobyDock, RK Launcher, ObjectDock). This said, I have no idea if XWD have their own proprietary skin format, but, if they do, so does Winstep - in fact, Winstep's skinning format allows the use of complex dock overlays and other niceties for truly amazing dock backgrounds. I haven't started pushing this format yet because I'm still working on the new Winstep Skin Builder application. In what respect? In terms of the magnify animation? You are aware that you can change the magnification span (how many icons at once are affected) and smoothness in Nexus Preferences -> Effects -> Effect Settings, right? One thing you should try is set the dock's mouseover animation to Bounce and then set the Effect Magnitude (again, by clicking on the Effect Settings button) to large. I love it!

Nexus Preferences -> Advanced -> Misc.Advanced -> Disable 'Show Balloon tooltips on mouseover...'

The right-click context menu of systray applets is not 'mine' to handle - it's generated by the applications themselves. Actually, I seem to remember this being a problem with the Windows taskbar itself too? Anyway, this said, I see one of two *probable* solutions although I haven't tried them: 1. Try setting the Windows taskbar to Always On Top. 2. Do NOT set the dock to Always On Top.

And if you restart Nexus, same thing?

If you are getting the forecast, that could be a temporary glitch with the NOOA/METAR servers, which usually provide the current weather conditions (forecast itself is always provided by Weather.com, and, when there is no METAR code for that specific location, may also provide current conditions). What does it say on the forecast tooltip?

Thanks for letting me know! I was under the impression that you were telling the firewall to let Nexus through and that the command wasn't sticking. Anyway, yes, the Weather module needs an Internet connection to retrieve weather information.

You're not using the magnify effect, are you? If you were, it would use the icon size specified for max magnification (128x128 pixels by default). You're also missing the 48x48 icon format in your shiira icon, otherwise that would be the image used instead of the 32x32 version - you can blame Windows for this, as it will do the same thing.

Zexe, you still didn't comment on the performance enhancements... Did you try disabling system tray icon groupping already to see if you can indeed notice the increased performance in comparison to v10.3 (it should be really noticeable on very large docks)?

You'll have to change the skin itself, then.

Nothing. I felt tempted to add that feature to this release, but, if you think carefully, that change makes much more sense if I also modify the task management abilities of the dock to be more like those of the Windows 7 taskbar. Doing that would take too long, so this feature will have to wait for a future release...

Try decreasing the spacing between icons from the default 8 pixels - it also controls vertical distance from background edges.

I would say that is a bug with the PC Tools firewall.

Thanks! Please let me know if you find any further issues with v10.4 - you can find a complete list of changes, additions and fixes in the history file located at C:\Program Files\Winstep\.

Ooops! Fixed, thanks! That link to v10.4 is still a pre-release - the update manager will notify you when the official version comes out.

Hey Zexe! Could you please download and install Nexus 10.4 from HERE? Would like to know what you think of the performance enhancements before releasing the official version - docks should magnify much faster now, test it out by un-groupping your dock tray icons.

Yes, it does, and you're right. But I have to solve the issue anyway. Nope. The splash screen is there mainly so users get some instant feedback when they launch Nexus manually. To put it into perspective, the time taken to display it is a drop of water in the Atlantic ocean.

Well, lets see: dock magnification for tiled backgrounds is up to *5* times faster, and for single bitmap backgrounds up to *3* times faster (not a guess, actually measured). Not bad, heh? This should take care of any 'slugishness' issues with very large docks. Of course, if you turn on *all* the effects at the same time, then I can't garantee anything (for instance, the blurring of semi-transparent dock backgrounds in Vista/Win7 can cause the dock to magnify a bit slower the first two or three times you do it, as the background bitmap needs to be scanned for semi-transparent regions before blurring can be applied. These 'semi-transparent' regions are then cached, therefore subsequent dock magnifies have virtually no speed penalties). The slight 'shaking' that could sometimes occur due to rounding errors when the dock is magnifying is also gone. I decided to modify and simplify the magnification algorithm not only to make it faster but also to see if I can make inserting new dock items (i.e.; when you drag an item over the dock before dropping into it, and the dock opens a space for it) a lot smoother. Currently working on that. Something else I'm going to tackle next has to do with boot speed of Nexus: a common complain I kept receiving on Uninstall surveys was that Nexus was increasing the boot time of Windows, or taking a long time to initialize on its own. Not everybody was suffering from this, however, which puzzled me. If finally hit me why this is, and it's tied to another user's complain about Winstep Xtreme taking a long time to initialize (we're talking 5 to 10 *minutes* here!!) because his source control system left him with 10,000+ files on the Recycle Bin. When Nexus initializes, it needs to know if the Recycle Bin is empty or full (and how many files are in it and the space taken by them on disk if not) in order to display the correct Recycle Bin icon and info. It does this by calling SHQueryRecycleBin, the only Windows API call that returns this information. There is one MAJOR problem with this, however: Windows does not cache the information about the Recycle Bin - instead, SHQueryRecycleBin gets to work and enumerates *every single file* on each hard drive's Recycle Bin folder. If the Recycle Bin is nearly empty, this is quite fast... but when it isn't, it can be VERY slow, as disk accesses are slow by nature. Nexus will also 'freeze' until SHQueryRecycleBin returns. When SHQueryRecycleBin enumerates the contents of the Recycle Bin folders, disk heads start moving all over the place - this is because deleted files are 'marked' as deleted and left at their original physical location on the drive. In practice, this means deleted files are spread all over the disk's surface. When Windows is booting, it becomes very busy loading drivers, system files, applications, etc..., from the disk. If, while Windows is booting, SHQueryRecycleBin is also enumerating deleted files (as it happens when NX initializes) then you get something called 'disk trashing', where the physical heads of the disk are moving all over the place all the time because two very disk intensive operations are happening simultaneously. This would explain why NX could noticeably increase Windows boot time. Unfortunately most of that time is wasted with the disk heads travelling back and forth on the surface of the disk, trying to get all the data at once (random access times are the achiles heel of mechanical hard drives). I have a pretty good idea on how to solve the problem: first the call to SHQueryRecycleBin needs to be delayed, by, say, 30 seconds or more, so it (hopefully) only happens once Windows has finished booting. Second, it needs to be concorrent so NX does not hang waiting for SHQueryRecycleBin to complete. I'm thinking about implementing some multi-thread code for the later, and another idea is using an independent applet to do this, with communication between NX and the applet being done via Windows messages. Plenty of info for you now?

You can solve the issue in one of two ways: 1. Set the Windows taskbar to auto-hide. That will prevent it from reserving screen space. 2. Set Nexus NOT to respect reserved screen space when docked: Nexus Preferences -> Behavior -> Advanced -> 'Respect space reserved by other docks...'

Thanks for standing up for me, Zexe. This said, he is right - it should be optional. As for updates... working on the dock magnification algorithm and some other stuff with lots of 'speed up' potential.

Not currently, sorry... But come on, it's such a tiny splash screen...! ;-)