Btw, have you guys tried already the new colorization option (shift Hue instead of Tinting)? Most of the time the effect is far superior to what you get by simply tinting the theme (which loses color information and also colorizes Whites).

One thing that gets a bit on my nerves, though, is that you can't immediately preview the changes when trying different tint colors on the Themes tab. You have to keep opening and closing that Color Options dialog, which adds insult to the injury by also blocking the view to the theme preview.

The thought of optionally using that 'shift UI up and down' trick for this, which is also used on the Edit Alarm dialog, has already crossed my mind.

Something else you might want to play with, and the reason why I made some changes to the customization settings of the battery module in this version, so you could use this:



The above is something I saw when first implementing the battery module and that I kind of fell in love with. Love that cute cartoon look, so I ended up purchasing the rights to use that image.

To customize your battery so it looks like this, here is what you need to do:

1. Download the multiple-state PNG strip from HERE.

2. Unzip the PNG file.

3. Open the Dock Properties panel of any dock (doing it this way so the instructions are valid for both Nexus Ultimate and Winstep Xtreme) and go to the 'Content' tab.

4. Select the Battery Monitor Module.

5. Change the Style to Vertical.

6. Click the Change Icon button.

7. Make sure the Vertical icon style is selected in the Change Icon dialog.

8. Browse to the cartoon-battery.png file you extracted above (optionally if you still have the containing folder open, just drag & drop the PNG strip to the icon preview panel)

9. Press OK to close the dialog and click on the 'Battery Monitor Settings' button.

10. Unselect the 'Overlap information on battery icon' setting.

I'd thought about that, auto-increasing row count. Might open a can of worms for you, though. Not only because of having to wrangle the old code, but also it seems to me that when the NextStart taskbar is opened up to multiple rows, attached modules and systray icons get a little funky looking with big spaces, etc.

Thanks for the updates. I've made adjustments and everything looks good.

Talking to myself here, but ended up implementing this. Much better for when you want to fiddle with colorization. Old 'Colorize Settings' button remains available too, but now you can press a down arrow to access the colorization settings directly and preview them in real time. When you're done you press the up arrow and you're back to the normal Themes tab buttons.

In other news it seems nobody liked the alternate cartoon battery style much. Only one download of the PNG strip file lol

Like the added color hue methodology. Gives more style options and works well.

Anytime one can preview changes quickly, it's a plus. After digging around, I found the link to the theme editor you're developing. I *really* like being able to see theme changes quickly.

Hadn't seen the 'toon battery yet. Just activated it. Certainly adds personality to the battery monitor! What's funny is that while it cycles through the charging animation, you see all the faces go through their moods. Nice diversion.

One note about the alternate battery info overlay (where it shows up sideways to the left of the battery... on high dpi (SP4) I couldn't tell it was a number... just looked like... something, not sure what. Zooming in w/ the magnifier I could see the number and percentage symbol. Just fyi.

Dude, I don't know how you've managed to maintain such a high level of production *and* be so active in your forums for all these years. Amazing. Kudos.

Hmmm, not sure I understand what the problem is. Is it the size of the font or the actual font used (Arial)?

I just tried it here on a Windows 10 VM with high dpi and the battery charge percentage seems visible enough on a 48x48 pixel icon. Do you think the digital font used for the horizontal battery style would be better/more visible than Arial, is that it?

It's both the high dpi effect and the size of the icons I'm using (48px). Remember that the Surface Pro 4 is a 12" screen... so everything starts out minuscule to start with. If I mirror to my 27" monitor it's no problem. I wouldn't worry about it, Jorge. I use the visualization of the battery state as my cue anyway, not the number display, and have alerts set for low battery.

I PROMISE as soon as I can get to my laptop I will try that animated battery icon. Looks great.

I've been using the Beta for a week now on two computers. They get used heavily because I work in an I.T. position for the past 20 years.

So far, I have not turned up a single bug or issue.

Great job as always and thanks.

Ditto. No issues apparent for me. Using the beta all the time under heavy load. Of course, if there's a particular feature you'd like tested, just say the word.

Thanks guys.

Unfortunately the bugs are there, well hidden, but there. Just got alerted to another one, and fixed it in the nick of time (was just about to release v16.5 officially): The 'Hide at startup' option could *sometimes* (see the problem?) fail to hide the dock, leaving it in an unresponsive state (until you activated it again) because it thought it was hidden.

While fixing this issue by running a backup of the user's settings, I came across (and fixed) another issue which was not technically a bug but was annoying as hell (lol).

His dock was docked at the bottom, so when the right click context menus opened, the bottom of the menus would usually be leveled with the bottom of the screen. This made it really easy to accidentally activate the dock via an edge bump when moving the cursor to one of the options at the bottom of a menu, which would make the dock cover the menus. Pretty annoying and would have driven me crazy if that was my setup.

Winstep software has hundreds of features, which can sometimes interact with each other in unexpected ways, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code - I'm not NASA, so bugs will sometimes slip through.

The good thing is that I try to fix them as soon as I'm made aware of them - and, of course, provided I can reproduce them here so I can find the cause.

Yes, the difficult to consistently reproduce bug class.

Again, your efforts are much appreciated.

I'll buy the next round.

So, as you know I've been meaning to release the official 16.5 version for quite some days now, but alas, there was always some little extra issue that needed fixing or something else that could be improved further.

Eventually I get to the point where I am satisfied with the new release, and that's when the boring work starts: writing the announcement pages, taking screenshots to demonstrate the new features, etc...

Once that is done I always do a final test: a clean install of the applications on a Windows 10 VM looking for obvious problems. At this phase I usually run through a lot of different settings to see if they are working properly.

I never fail to catch a last minute problem like this, and this time was no exception: on a clean install, the system tray was not visible the first time you run Winstep Xtreme. This was indirectly because of the new taskbar high-DPI support. Quickly fixed.

Since you needed a clean install to spot this, not the type of thing a beta tester already running Winstep Xtreme would notice.

Then I started playing with the new colorization settings and spotted another issue with the 'Colorize with dominant color of the desktop background' feature, which I also fixed.

Even though I do not use it myself, because I tend to keep things the same for a very long time (same wallpaper, same theme, etc...), I actually like that feature a lot. Especially now that you can use the new Hue shift colorization method with it, which colorizes themes in a much more subtle way.

The best way to see it in action is to use that feature with the Windows wallpaper slideshow set to rotate wallpapers every minute. As the wallpaper changes, so does the colorization of the current theme, in order to match it. All automatically.

It was while I was admiring this that another idea occurred to me: text colors are not colorized (nor could they with the old tint colorization method) but, if you use the new Hue shift method, it can actually be done as well, since this method preserves the luminance and saturation of the original colors (so you don't run the risk of the text becoming invisible against the background as it could happen using the old tint method).

And thus the new release gets postponed again a day or so, while I implement this. Since colorization was something I worked a lot on in this release, I might as well make it as perfect as I can.

What I am not sure is if I should make this optional (i.e.; add a 'Colorize text' option) or simply colorize the text regardless and be done with it?

Ah, and something else: currently you need to enable colorization independently on both NextSTART and WorkShelf. I think this is probably a bit stupid, since - unless disabled - changing a theme in WorkShelf also changes it in NextSTART and vice-versa. I think colorization should be a part of this theme integration as well, if you enable it for WorkShelf logically you should also want it automatically enabled in NextSTART... or not?

Oh, yes. I use a program that changes my wallpaper every 30 seconds and I can't wait for this. Thanks.

The 'Colorize with dominant color of the desktop background' option is already there (was implemented in v15.9).

What it does not currently do is colorize the text as well.