Don't let her annoy you. I don't think she really got offended. I think she is more the type of a person that feels offended when someone has reasonable arguments against her.

Back then I've purchsed OD for the full price, but meanwhile it's unusable abandonware. Also its performance never was any good. Just try animated dock icons with OD for example.
Two or 3 of them in higher resolutions already made OD unusable. I thought animated icons just can't be realized properly on top of the desktop for some reason. Until i've tried them in Nexus. Right now i have about 10 of them running all the time in my dock, in 192 to 256 pix resolution, and everything is still perfectly smooth.
THAT is a good performance.


I'm even willing to renew my Winstep Extreme license and i've done it already. Which is saying something, since i'm the probably the greatest opponent of the subscription model on earth.
But when a program is maintained so well, has so many great features and value for money, i think i can make an exception.
Well, at least as long as it's just an update subscription, no usage subscription. (which hopefully will never happen!)

Have to agree with you on that one.



I use a lot of tricks to get better and better performance. Some require a trade-off between memory usage and performance, others not (they just make the code much more complicated and difficult to maintain lol).

But for animated icons the real breakthrough came from something very simple: finding out that under GDI+ using PARGB bitmaps is actually 30 times faster than using ARGB bitmaps.

This was a tremendous 'free' performance boost because it affected every single drawing operation, especially if you take into consideration that having 'live' icon reflections mean reflections must be re-constructed every time the main icon changes.

I know the latest version of OD also supports icon reflections (even though Nexus was the first dock to bring those to Windows), but, unless I am mistaken, they are also pretty much static.



Give THIS a read and perhaps you will change your mind.

It explains why an upgrade subscription business model is actually MUCH BETTER for EVERYONE than a 'minor to major version' model, and why both are infinitely better than a 'free life time upgrades' model, even though, on the surface, this last model seems much more advantageous for the user.

Where the 'free life time upgrades' model hits the wall is clearly seen in this simple question: 'what good is that if the company goes out of business because of it or simply stops doing upgrades, because it's no longer economically viable to do so, and starts focusing on other - new - products'? Your 'free life time upgrades' will be worth absolutely NOTHING then.

It peeves me when some people say 'oh you have to pay every year for Winstep products'. NO YOU DO NOT. This is not software rental. You pay once and you get free upgrades for one year as a bonus.

After that, it's YOUR choice to keep on paying for another year of free upgrades - or not. You do not have to. The software will not stop working if you don't.

You just won't be able to enjoy new features that are added after your year of free upgrades runs out - and isn't this fair? You have every right to expect the company you work for to pay you every month for the work you do for them during that time. How would you feel if they said 'Hey, we already paid you once, now you have to work for us for free for the rest of your life'. That is nothing short of slavery. Why is this any different than that?

And there is the added bonus that the price of renewing your upgrade subscription is only a fraction of the original purchase price - you don't have to pay full price EVER AGAIN for that product, even if you only decide to renew 10 years from now.



It will never happen. I absolutely hate that business model.

Make no mistake, that is what Microsoft and their new 'Windows 10 for free' policy are aiming for.

The difference is, if I have an economic downturn and am unable to pay rent for program A, then only program A will stop working. With Windows, I would be unable to use ANY of the programs I have paid for, because they all depend on the OS to be able to run.

I'm curious to see how far MS is going to be able to take this before people start to rebel and/or switch to other OSs.

Just wanna throw my two cents in about the Tray Icons, I don't have issues with the current functionality within Winstep in how it works. When you Use Windows 10 Notifications Settings to show/hide those of your choice, Winstep reflects those exact changes.

You can customize the icon, but let's make a small note. That icon can change if the default system icon for whichever program is running changes also due to specific activity.

For instance, when you turn the volume up/down the little icon shows the level of difference with little lines. Each of those icons are represented by an individual icon which, if you've customized only one of them, will change when the default system version changes.

However, Winstep identifies this and after the first time this happens, the user can then go in and customize each of the icons associated with the system icons that represent the changes in activity.

Example:

But two things I notice in your screenshots are do you normally have all icons showing? Because if you have that switched on, and then are using a third party program to hide them all, it's going to conflict with Winsteps ability to mimic what's happening in the tray.

The switch is at the top in the Notifications Settings to turn hide/show system icons:



If you turn off the third party app, and only choose which icons you want to show, Winstep will reflect this exactly as you set it.



I normally do not have my taskbar showing and use a separate dock to show the system tray which auto hides because I don't need it except on occasion.

To show which windows are open, I use a separate dock 100% transparent to show only the icons of each that are open on the left.

I use WindowsManager to override window positions and size so that every window I open, opens in the exact same size and position every time I use it. So with the arrangement I have, everything shows perfectly and is aligned perfectly.

So the overall result is all that you see here. Hopefully you find your perfect nitch!

When I turn off All Animations, this also affects the appearing/disappearing of the icon in the task list. Because I use this as a separate dock, just by itself to show open/minimized windows and only the icon, it looks so much better without the animation.

But I am wondering if we could get a switch to turn off animations for just the task lists appearing / disappearing while able to keep other animations on, thus not having to use the global turn off switch?

Can you imagine how cluttered the UI would become if every possible animation option had an on/off switch? It's pretty cluttered as it is.

And then someone would ask me to be able to turn those animations on/off on a per dock base, and you can see where this is going...

But... But... it's just one more... I'll donate 10 bucks to you via paypal to do it for me so you can give me a special copy customized to my needs. lol

You could just create a tab in the main config screen for animations

create the list and have the switches on the right on or off

And then that whole tab will be super special fancy dedicated to our favorite option of all the options!

Exit and restart option?

Sometimes the right click option on anything seems to disappear. Mousing over the dock/s still works for those that are auto hidden and being able to click on an app but right clicking is gone. So I have to exit and restart winstep. An option to exit and restart automatically would be cool just to quickly reset everything. Perhaps as an option in the system tray icon.

Not sure if this has been mentioned. The ability to drag and drop a file to start an app will be very helpful. E.g. dragging a doc file to Microsoft Word icon in the dock to launch Word.

And what makes you think this isn't already there?

If you drag & drop a document into an application shortcut on the dock, the dock will attempt to open that document with that application.

This was implemented years ago.

Huh? I must be missing something then. Every time I try to drag a file to the shortcut on the dock, I get a "circle and slash" icon indicating it doesn't work. Oh dear. What am I missing in the setting?

Ah! I see the problem. The dock icons must be unlocked from dragging to allow that to happen. However, that's not ideal. If the dock icon dragging is unlocked, dragging a file to the dock will displace the icons' position (in an attempt to create a shortcut on the dock). Not exactly eye-candy. Is it possible to launch the shortcut by dragging a file even with the icon-drag function locked?

I can't wait to have the option to make themes. There are a few elements I am desperate to modify to my liking. : )

If you open the properties for the dock of interest, click Behaviour, then More Options, and UNCHECK "Shift Icons to make room for new entry..." option, they won't move around, but you can still drop files onto the dock or icon to launch an app.

And yes, make sure the global setting to prevent icons from being moved is turned OFF as well.

.::Icon Sort?::.

I'm constantly going into the customize Tray Icon list and having to redo icons and finding them is a bit tedious. Would it be possible to provide a sort option at the top like a heading for title or application name and sorting it a-z or z-a?