While what you say is true, there is also another point to look it from.

Imagine you have a library in your house. You start with a couple of books and as years go by you buy more and just put them in the library, on "somewhat" specific selves for each category. The end result will be a library where you will be able to get any (or almost any) information you want, but since you didn't correctly categorize it, it will be difficult for anyone else to find that information.

I believe that this is the feeling most new users get from winstep/nexus settings. New options kept been added, but if at some point the settings are not "cleaned"/"sorted"/"remade" they will not be so friendly to new users.

Especially the down arrow in the themes page (and a similar arrow somewhere else) gives a feeling of "there was not enough space and I HAD to put those options somewhere".

This does not affect old users so much, since they are very familiar with the program.

And in a nutshell that is exactly what happened. That arrow (first there and now in other places) was and is a life-saver.

Preferences have very real space constraint: first the panels and dialogs all have to fit at a screen resolution of 800x600 minus the space used by the Windows taskbar (even if that screen resolution is no longer as common as it once was, there are still *many* users running laptops/notebooks with a maximum vertical resolution of 768 pixels).

Because that is an absolute in terms of how large a settings panel can be, there are only two other possible solutions: either Preferences starts featuring a vertical scroll bar or you decrease the font size used in order to be able to fit more stuff into the available space.

In the first case there will be many options below the visible threshold, which makes it a lot easier to miss them, in my opinion (I personally don't like this option much either). The second case has obvious implications for users that do not have perfect eyesight, especially now that much larger screen resolutions are also becoming more common but still 'shrunk into' comparatively small monitor sizes.

The other option is doing what I am doing now.

And here you go:



Looks good?

I see your point re: that FMs no longer command a market as large as it once was, but it still seems a fairly healthy one going by how many there are. As for the case of the FM I've been using (and still am using to some extent), there were other factors at play, such as both developers being in full time employment by the time it reached V2, although they did get to a V3 eventually and it is still on sale, oddly enough. However....

Bummer, you're absolutely right Jorge, I didn't look at those aspects. File management (and a lot of other things) really has an enormous battle against the OS now, esp. for more advanced stuff for the power user. Sure, for the average user File Explorer may be adequate these days (although something as simple as copying files is a major PITA)but for me it just doesn't cut the mustard at all. So yes, all in all I can see your points and have to accept, alas, that File Viewer will have to remain 'that most mythical of all beasts'.

Sadly, I already have a pretty good idea just how bad it is Jorge. Just looking at customisation sites (what sites!?) and the pitifully few customisation apps still around, I have to say ghost towns seems a pretty accurate description. I've seen more life in a cemetery round midnight! As for WC, it's dire! Even the amount of new WB skins seems pathetic to say the least, and if you're looking for Winstep themes you won't find them unless you use the search function. There are no direct links, as I hope you are aware.

In the light of that, wouldn't a dedicated sub-site on your site, exclusively for Winstep themes, make sense? Or is bandwidth/cost thereof a problem? If so, I may possibly be able to help out there - email me if that might be of interest.

Funny isn't it, at one time everybody wanted a dock that could do x, y and z, but it seemed that few wanted to support one. Remember IconDock? TC abandoned that just after I registered, though I don't resent that. (At least it was easy to hack into it - if you knew how, and I did and I did - and customise its appearance completely.)(I might even run it again on the XP32 sys!) Then there was NextView/HD.... Whatever happened to TD I wonder? And so on.

Indeed, those pricing levels are a sick joke, practically like sweets (and they are sometimes dearer!). And yes, that sends out totally the wrong message to potential new customers. 'Got to be crap....' is what most would make of that. SD are a much reduced company I note, and I would suppose the only thing that's still keeping them half afloat must be the games side. But, that's what greed can do.... Also, as a result the apps, i.e., e.g., WB, seem to have been improved only marginally compared to as far back as the early-ish days of UIS2, when I last used OD and WB. In the case of WB I think that is particularly pathetic in light of MS practically giving SD carte blanche to get into the innards of the OS for WB from Win7 on, in effect giving them a monopoly on customising the Win GUI. Disastrous move on the part of MS, at least for the Win user.

And I'm sure glad you did and it did. As for Brad, I've always had a rather dim view of his character. However, he's certainly shown to have made some bad business decisions and that definitely looks to have been the worst.

Anybody with even some business experience/sense knows or at any rate should know the law of diminishing returns, etc. At the present rate and state of things one has to assume they'll go tits up sooner rather than later.

LOL! Same here Jorge. The way I see it, MS should have stopped at XP (apart from updates/improvements, esp. to XP64 which is dire in some respects) and instead of wasting time and effort on the fiasco that was Vista and than Win7 (which wasn't a fiasco and at least does have some improvements), not to mention then wasting even more time and effort on Win8 and 10, they should have abandoned the whole kludge (albeit a fairly well-working one) that NT had become and concentrated their resources on developing a new future-proof proper 64bit OS (with a fully transparent to the user (and developer) Win32/64 emulation layer, much as Apple did with MOSX, the emulation I mean) totally from the ground up. The amount of 16bit baggage that even Win10 still carries is just staggering, and the user apps amongst that are just the tip of the iceberg. Anyway, we could all be running a lean, mean OS today that totally empowered the user instead of dis-enfranchising him more and more and wasting a heap of resources in terms of disk space, RAM, etc. etc. Just because these days we can have oodles of cheap-ish RAM and fast multi-core CPUs etc. down't mean we need bloat ware.

Heck, just think, back in the 80s we already had an 'average user' desktop computer and OS that was fully 32bit, had PMT, true colour GFX cards, could access the full 32bit memory space, and even with the TCP/IP stack, installed in about 6MB! Yes, Meg. That was the Amiga. If Commodore (its owners) had not been as unwise and downright stupid really we all would probably be using some kind of Amiga descendent today and the PC (and likely 'The Dark Side') would be history. You can hardly imagine how tiny and efficient some very powerful apps were on the Amiga. Take Lightwave 3D as an excellent example - it started on the Amiga). Hell, the whole of the pilot and 1st series of 'Babylon 5' CGI etc. was produced entirely on Amigas ('Seaquest DSV' also, among others), using networked farms of cheap Amiga 500s and A1200s for the final renders. (By the time of series 2 of B5 LW3D had been ported to the Alpha - and Genlock support added to the Alpha - giving a massive speed boost. Granted, the Amiga GUI was almost as ugly as the Mac's in those days, but there were ways and means of totally transforming it even in those days - there even was a pretty compprehensive 3rd party icon set based on/copying OPENSTEP ones. If a modern, multi-user etc. Amiga OS 64bit descendent were around today, I'm pretty sure it would barely fill up half a CD and install in well less than a Gig.

Something like that we could have had from MS by now.... (Instead of them trying to **** with users and developers!)

Of course there aren't. Brad's intention when storing themes for non-SD applications at Wincustomize was NEVER to promote those applications, but the other way around (siphon in users from other applications into SD applications). He says so himself (in a brief moment of full disclosure) in a post at WC I have stored here somewhere.

Ethical? Not really given what he was saying at the time. But it makes 100% sense business wise - and that is what Brad is, a business man. Not many people are able to build a company like SD from the ground up (and do it twice! Once with OS/2, again with Windows).



At one point (many years ago) it was indeed bandwidth/cost. But now bandwidth is cheap and Winstep has its own dedicated server with a TON of free bandwidth to go around, so that is definitely not a problem.

At one point I did hire someone to do the database/themes repository, but unfortunately the project ended up being abandoned for several reasons. Also, given author rights, etc, the themes repository would have to essentially start empty.



Tony Chow? Yeah, I remember the bastard lol. He has the credit of making the first true dock for Windows (which is what got me into this mess, eheh), but he completely gave up on it soon after. At the time he was asking users to send him their NeXT icon collections. I did, he used it, but never even bothered replying with a simple 'Thank you'.

I do resent him. And so should you.



Thibaud Dijan? Last I heard (many years ago) he got married and had a baby. Guess he felt the need to get a 'real job' to feed his family (not easy to make a living as a shareware author).

Brad seemed to dislike him a lot, I remember him specifically stating that he would never allow a HVD themes section on Wincustomize (yeah, Thibaud could be an arrogant little pr*ck at times lol).



You know, that's a very common, but also very wrong, misconception. 'Starting over' with a clean slate is actually a TERRIBLE mistake, and we have history to prove it:

Remember Netscape? At one time it was the dominant Windows browser... until someone there thought it was a good idea to re-write it from scratch.

It took them one or two years to finally have *something* that could be publicly released. By then the rest of the world had already moved on to other browsers and Netscape quickly faded into oblivion.

Worse than that (and this is what most people who aren't developers - and even some who are! - don't take into consideration): the new 'clean' version was now a buggy mess! You see, the stability of a product is the *cumulative* effect of all those bugs you have been fixing for years. That 'fat' around your tissues is also what keeps everything together and you alive!

When you start from scratch, you're going back to ground zero in terms of stability. It is *impossible* to write bug free code in the first try.

Now, this was a simple browser. Imagine what would happen to something as complex as Windows.

Also, don't forget that most of Windows popularity is due to that 'lets keep things backwards compatible for as long as possible' mentality that dominated Microsoft back then (alas, not anymore, which is why we have the current mess).

The abandonment of this school of thought was clearly signaled when Microsoft decided to kill classic VB (only the most popular programming language EVER!) and replace it with that incompatible, slow and bloated, .NET nightmare. As you can see, 'new' is not always synonym to 'best'.



Ah. The Amiga. So far ahead of its time.

Yep, Commodore made a huge mess of it. What a wasted opportunity.

Yep, looks good. And much simpler, too. 'Lo, and the programmer looked at it and saw that it was good. And it was good.'

Eheh. Again, a nearly meaningless addition to existing users (look how silent they are) because they already settled on their favorite effects, but a boon to new users (plus a bit more of 'wow' factor added to Preferences).

Effect names are meaningless, you need to see them in action. I know we already had the Effects Panel, but what I noticed in videos is that few users apparently used it - they would select an effect by name, apply, etc... They would select an effect almost by trial and error.

Now they can immediately see what an effect looks like - and they can also see them all in action simultaneously in the Effects Panel.

As for the new Delete Effect, there's 22 of them (11 in the free version of Nexus). 15 are based on already existing mouse over, etc, effects, but the remaining 7 are new.

There's even one called 'splatter' (as in 'head shot blood splatter'): perfect for the hit man killers among you.

Well, that much was obvious from the start. There was no need for WC when he started it, there were lots of thriving skins sites then - esp. Skinz.org and (I think that's what it was called) PCDesktops come to mind. (ISTR a Dutch or Flemish guy involved with the latter who gave Winstep and WS themes a good bit of exposure, and I think some themes too?)

Sure, a businessman first and foremost, but one who a) has made some very poor decisions, and b) appeared to have only one ethic - Brad and profit. Businessmen can and should have good ethics and still be successful. Yes, not a lot of people are able to build up any kind of business and make it thrive, even fewer who can have a business very nearly go bust and then raise more capital and support and rebuild it. However, he hardly rebuilt SD from the ground up. By the time OS/2 Warp 4 finally saw the public light of day (hey, I still have my beta CDs! ) it was already becoming clear that it would not survive in the consumer market at least, long before IBM announced its retirement.

Yes, that must have hit SD's bottom line, but they had ample time to migrate to Windows - porting from OS/2 to Win32 was not all that hard, certainly compared to the other way around, and they already had a limited version of OD for Win on sale well before OS/2 crashed out in terms of generating any revenue for SD, and lots of former OD for OS/2 users did migrate with SD. Nonetheless, SD did come fairly close to popping their collective clogs then. However, Brad had the good fortune and good sense to 'buy in' WB and creator Neil Banfield, and SD never looked back from that point on (until the next bankruptcy anyway), although that was by no means the only 'rescue' factor. The next time SD faced going belly up they had a pretty substantial cash injection, though I can't remember any details.


Yes, dedicated servers with oodles of bandwidth have become cheap (certainly from local providers here), so I'm glad you have that. So why not do it anyway, what's to lose? Winstep can only gain in the longer term. All skins sites started up with almost zero content and went on from there. I'd gladly contribute all my new efforts, exclusively.. I'd also offer the web code but alas can't remember my mysql etc - can barely remember basic html, if that. :/

Speaking of themes, I've been wondering why you haven't set up a theming forum, for discussion etc. specifically concerning theming and esp. theme creation?

LOL! Alright then, from now on I shall! Esp. for not thanking you. (Or anybody for registering, it seems.)



LOL! Yes, I do remember all that. And yes, he could be an arrogant so-and-ao, almost as much as Brad. (I still must have all the beta and release install archives somewhere - probably in 'Archives'. )



Yes, I remember the 'Nutscrape' disaster very well, but at least part of the cause of its demise was the free bundling of IE. And they went about it the wrong way in not keeping the existing version bang up to date. And just look what's become of the original's successor, FF. Great browser, good gfx engine (but bloated as hell) and (probably) the most used browser, perhaps after IE. But all in all, perhaps not the best example of a failed re-write from scratch.

Indeed. I basically agree. But MS had the resources to maintain a very long beta cycle to iron out any serious bugs. If they'd started straight after, say, the release of XP (while updating that and eventually in effect making it something like Win7) they could have had a long time to do it right and also have a very long beta cycle. It would have been perfectly alright to have a first release out by say 2015 or so. Hell, that actually might have been too much time for the teams of developers, giving them too much opportunity to f*** up royally. It could have been done right, and it should have been. (The user-transparent Win32 etc. emulation layer would even have ensured continued backward compatibility for years yet.)

Indeed, not by any means. And .NET seemed like a nightmare from the start. The abandonment of classic VB was unforgivable I think. Backwards compatibility is always a good philosophy and should have been adhered to here, just as it should be in a hypothetical new OS through an emulation layer.

And that is the point. There does come a point with many things when you have to come to the conclusion that starting over is not only the best but the only thing to do. And Windows reached that point long ago IMO. (I'm not including the server etc. versions, they obviously would have had to be updated etc. and maintained until the desktop OS had pretty much proven itself. But not a problem for MS, they have the resources.)

Granted, there is no real precedent for something like this. But with Win now long being the only commercial desktop OS and the dominant OS (I'm not counting 'The Dark Side' as that's a tiny minority sport, but not entirely dis-counting Linux), it would have been time to abandon the house because of its shaky, flaky, crumbling, and ancient foundations.


Indeed.

Yes, I find it quite disturbing how little comment there has been, and in general how little discussion there is.

And I'm quite excited by the way you've done it all and really delighted! And I'm probably about the longest WS user around here. (WS is still the little 'wunderkind' in my mind. )

LOL! Yeah, sounds about perfect. I particularly like the idea of the shattering glass effect also - I have the perfect sound file for that if you don't have one yet (From the original Next system sounds, converted to .wav - still have the lot here. Never got round to actually making a theme of them before now. Could make them into a sep. sound theme if you want it.) If you don't have it already, couldn't we have a proper 'nuke'effect for the del fx also? Think I might actually use that myself.

i haven't made any comments bc i barely ever use mouseover/attention/delete effects

Well, I don't use any effects myself, though I take an interest as a theme builder. And I might actually be tempted to use the smashing glass effect (if I can get the damn recycler anim to work!).

Fixed this.

If 'Combine dock icons with running applications' is enabled and you drag a document over an icon on the *left* side of the dock (i.e.; with a running indicator) then the live preview thumbnail pops up. You can then drag the document over the live preview thumbnail to bring that window to the foreground/restore it if currently minimized.

In other news, currently finishing adding the 'Show Minimized Applications Only' functionality. A bit complicated to implement given how many different options there are already for displaying running applications. Also not something I would ever use personally, and I guess it only makes some sense so you can have minimized applications on the dock and non-minimized applications on the Windows taskbar.

This said, RocketDock does this, others have asked me about it before, and I don't want it to be said that there are things RocketDock does that Nexus doesn't.

winstep wrote:




Thank you Jorge!

NOW they're adding a dark theme to classic Win32 applications... lol


Windows 10 Explorer Dark Theme in Redstone 5 Build

You can now drag & drop .m3u playlist and .mp3, etc, audio files directly into the Media Player icon:

If you drop a single audio file (.mp3, .wav, .mid, .wma), the Media Player will simply play that file.

If you drop a bunch of audio files at the same time, the Media Player will create a new 'Dropped Files' playlist and play those files.

If you drop a .m3u playlist file (or files), the Media Player will add that playlist to its own list of available playlists and play the audio files in it.

If you drop a folder (or folders) containing audio files, the Media Player will create a new playlist based on the name of that folder and play all the audio files within.

You can even drag & drop a combination of all the above at the same time, but the results (i.e.; what actually will end up getting played if you do a crazy thing like that) are undetermined.