They're using the free version which only allows them to have one dock.



I think it's partly also because there is so much going on everywhere at the same time these days, it scatters users, too much bling bling and distractions. And yeah, 20 years ago we were all still pioneers, so the stuff we did was new and exciting. It's much harder to engage users and keep them engaged these days.

I still remember when you and John were both running multi-user NT4 and I was still running single-user Win98. Fun times keeping up with the differences between those two versions of Windows lol



I never actually made a theme for the new modules, so I never tested it. I'll have to do with before the official release.



You're talking about the actual numeric battery percentage? The battery module gets its value DIRECTLY from the battery driver/device, and updates the value every 3 seconds or so.



When you change an icon by dropping into it a ICO, PNG or TIF image, instead of right clicking, item properties, etc...

Ok, I'm about to go all in to add (sub)dock support to NextSTART.

The idea didn't generate much excitement when I first suggested it, but I think it's only because people with auto-hiding docks haven't realized yet how much more convenient it would be to pop up dock(s) via QL hotspot buttons in the NextSTART taskbar than it is with an edge bump.

Also, the taskbar is always visible and takes very little space on the screen. Instead of categorizing applications via sub-docks on the main dock (which would be a two step process - bump screen edge to show main dock, click to open sub-dock) you could categorize those sub-docks into QL buttons in the taskbar instead (one click and you're done, with almost zero risk of accidental activations).

Yes, exactly - and they don't really understand the proper function of a dock, a quick means of launching the most frequently used apps/utils. Must look really messy, too.

Oh indeed - one of the worst things being social media (or rather, anti-social media!), keeping a lot of people completely hooked and pre-occupied, watching their 'friends' 250 photos of the exact same thing that they just uploaded, having to comment how great it looks even though it's total crap and done badly etc., and so on! Ugh! Gawd I hate it how some people have to have their ****ing dumbphones right in front of their nose so they don't miss the latest tweet etc. even when in company. It's very bad manners, and I take offence when folks do that in my company - switch the damn thing off and put it away dammit! I do.

All that certainly makes it much harder to grab users' attention and keep them engaged and focused.

Ah yes, those were the days eh Jorge!? And once we were able to do proper themes, remember how they used to come along like cars running off a production line? NT4 was like a breeze of fresh air in the Windows world, one could actually use the blessed thing! It came just at the right time too - OS/2 was about to completely implode on the desktop market, having had the rug pulled from under its feet by 'I Blame Microsoft', NeXT was becoming Apple (Jobs having bailed the latter out and sold his soul to the Dark Side), the Amiga was well into its death throes, and it was even becoming apparent that trouble lay ahead for the big workstations, i.e., DEC Alpha, SGI and Sun.

But, they were fun days in the (then) Nextstart world.

Good plan. Mind you, it could be just us stumbling about slightly in the dark doing these themes and getting something wrong.

I thought it would. All the same, sometimes the numerical values can vary by quite a lot. Maybe it's just down to that 3 sec or so delay?

Yes, I got that, but what do you mean re: losing....?

Sounds like a great idea actually, even though I never use the taskbar myself, only tasklist and sys tray.But then I don't use auto-hiding docks either.

Ah! Well, that rapid glow effect, as used right now, lets you know when what you are about to drop is going to change the icon image.

With the changes, it will let you know instead that what you are about to drop (normally a document) will be opened by the application the icon under the pointer belongs to (OR that you are about to change the icon image).

In other words, you won't have an effect *dedicated* just to letting you know that you are about to customize an icon's image via drag & drop.

Ah, right. No big loss/deal. Far more useful this way. It's one effect that certainly is extremely practical and takes out any uncertainty about what you're doing, especially for new/-ish users I would think, so definitely a good thing.

Thanks! Also just added:

1. When the Media Player is paused, the icon keeps flashing a pause symbol on top of the icon.

2. The label and the balloon tooltip now display which song is currently being played as well as the name of the playlist.

3. Like when you press the Stop button in the Media Control Bar, the bar now also fades out when you press the Pause button.

I had a few reservations about this last one, but I don't see anyone pausing a song and then wanting to click on the other media buttons, so the bar staying visible was more of a nuisance than anything else. Please let me know if you think I'm wrong.

There is one problem with this though: you can't go from the Media Control Bar to the Media Player Settings panel without having the audio playing at the same time. On the other hand, when you press the 'Play' button in this panel to check out a particular song in the playlists, if the Media Player is currently playing it now pauses (so you can hear the song you're checking out) until you click the 'Stop' button.

So, I started adding this with a specific plan, which was a bit convoluted to say the least: NextSTART knows nothing about docks, so docks created in NextSTART would be stored inside and handled by WorkShelf, but in a hidden form. Basically I wanted it to look as if the docks really belonged to NextSTART even though they were handled entirely by WorkShelf.

You would create a new dock in NextSTART which, in turn, would create an empty and hidden new dock in WorkShelf, which you could then populate via drag & drop. This NextSTART dock list would be kept internally separate from other WorkShelf docks. Whenever NextSTART needed to access a specific dock, it would pass WorkShelf its unique identifier. Keeping things synchronized (a restore of old WorkShelf settings would erase the contents of all your NextSTART docks) would, of course, be a bit of a nightmare, but doable.

In the mean time I decided (because it was long due) to finally add an easy way to name each dock (the name is always 'Nexus' by default) - you can do it already, but it's done by renaming the Nexus control icon, which, of course, required you to have the dock's control icon visible on the dock.

So I added a 'Dock Name' field to the Contents tab of each Dock Properties dialog.

Then I replied to BenevolentDeity's question in the other thread, who asked me if it was possible to have sub-docks display their contents on a menu when clicked on.

And it is, provided you are running Winstep Xtreme: you create the menu in NextSTART, associate it to an hotspot, and then use WorkShelf's ability to invoke/run NextSTART hotspots. I was even going to jest that I was actually working on the opposite functionality (access WorkShelf docks from NextSTART) and that was the exact second that it dawned on me that I was complicating things unnecessarily.

How does WorkShelf access NextSTART hotspots? It does not create them, it simply shows a list of hotspots that already exist in NextSTART and you select one of them.

So why not do exactly the same with the NextSTART docks?! You create a new dock item in NextSTART, and NextSTART gives you a list of docks available in WorkShelf to associate with it - docks that can now be uniquely identified by - ta-da! - the dock name!

So, instead of first creating a new dock and then populating it from inside NextSTART, you do the opposite: you create a new dock inside WorkShelf, and THEN tell NextSTART to show that dock.

If you don't want those docks to pop up when you run WorkShelf, just disable them - NextSTART can still make them pop up.

What do you guys think?

First things first, Jorge. I am really sorry for not being able to answer sooner, you made some important changes with this new release. Even more so you included a lot of the things that I was asking, like changes to IC Media Player, ability to change the drag and drop to open image files behaviour with modifier keys and more, the drag and hover files that brings open apps to front for combined view (and so on, but lets keep this short).
I really want to provide feedback, just that at the moment I am in a middle of... well many things that demand my attention. Anyway, I managed to skim through the posts and have a quick look at the new things and here it goes:

winstep wrote:





What you say makes a lot of sense, no point in having the Control Bar open while paused. As for the settings option, why not include that in the context sensitive right click menu?


Regarding bugs:

I have noticed something weird: when you change the effects for mouse over (loving the new layout and I think that clicking on the effect icon to get the old list of all effects is intuitive), so when changing the effects for mouse over on the shelf and only shelf (it seems to be ok for docks) by clicking the left/right arrows on the preview icon, followed by clicking the apply button, the effect that is actually applied is the one after the effect shown in the preview (example: selecting the water effect actually applies the teleport efect), but only as long as the shelf proprieties is open, after clicking the ok button and closing the window, everything is ok ( the effect shown in preview is applied ( water effect in the example above).


Regarding your previous post with docks visible for NextStart, it does sound like a solid idea: to use them the same way like you use buttons.


Nothing else pops to mind right now. I will try to do some more testing and see what I can come up with.

Sorry to hear that, Vlad. Hope everything turns out ok.



Way ahead of you, eheh.



Fixed, thank you very much!

Think we have another 'bug' candidate in the beta Jorge. The setting in Dock Properties -> Position for offset from screen edge for docks when docked, regardless of where you pull the slider, always shows '0'.

Regarding the bug that I mentioned yesterday, I have also noticed this: when you change the effect for the other settings in the shelf (meaning attention, launch, etc) by means of clicking the left/right arrows on the effect followed by clicking apply button, the other effects are working ok, but until you click the ok button and close the window, the "on hover" effect is wrong (meaning the effect that is applied to the on mouse hover is the one after the one that is selected)

Thanks Ric, fixed.

Took too much code out when I was re-organizing that tab lol



Thanks, Vlad. My previous fix fixed that too, it was related.

Wow, that was quick!

This may not be specifically related to the current beta as I think I may have seen it prior to that. Some apps in a dock, when launched, will initially correctly show the running apps indicator, but within a few seconds the indicator disappears. Most persistent offender here is the Opera browser.

Opera is on the tasklist exclusion list btw., but it still happens when I remove it from the list.