What, and still no further eulogising?! Bah, ingrates!

The devil is in the details, as they say, and I have been drowning in details these past few days... so many things to tweak and change.

Something I noticed that also seems to be behind the troubles Windows itself has been having with white UWP app icons after the May update, is that the PIDLs (Pointer to Item ID List, think of PIDLs like paths to files, but in this case to virtual file system objects like My Computer, Control Panel, etc) of UWP apps seem to have changed in some cases.

Strangely enough the original PIDL can still be used to run the UWP app, but if you try to use it to get an icon/image you get the dreaded blank page icon. I have a Windows shortcut to ChatGPT on my Desktop showing a blank icon precisely because of this - but you can still click on it to launch ChatGPT.

Winstep applications normally store BOTH the PIDL and the AppUserModelID (e.g. Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App) for UWP apps, so what I did to work around the changed PIDLs is reconstructing the PIDL from the AppUserModelID at startup whenever the latter is available.

It (still!) just amazes me no end how Microsoft are carelessly changing - and breaking! - things lately with every new Windows update. It's like they have no idea what they are doing. For instance, now when I drag a shortcut from an Explorer window, the background of the icon being dragged is now white and fully opaque - and that is when I can actually see the icon! Apparently a known Explorer bug.

After the latest Windows update I am now also having problems connecting my S23 phone to my PC via USB! Sigh.

Had another serious issue when trying to make outlook.com/hotmail.com accounts work with the Email Checker. Did not succeed, although it should have been possible by enabling 2FA and using app passwords, it DID work with Gmail but, as is usual with Microsoft these days, with them nothing actually works as it should.

Anyway, I have a personal email account that I have been using for the past 25 years that originally belonged to my ISP (netcabo.pt) but was latter migrated by them to Microsoft. Because the email address does not end in outlook.com or hotmail.com, Outlook has trouble recognizing it as an account migrated to Outlook.com (no issues whatsoever accessing it via webmail, however).

When Microsoft deprecated username/password and POP3 access recently, the only way to access my account through the Outlook 2021 client was by creating an account alias ending in @outlook.com, and making that alias my Primary address.

When trying to get the Email Checker to work with Outlook.com so I could post the solution (as I did with Gmail) I kept switching which account was primary (the alias or my original netcabo.pt address) in a vain attempt at getting it to work.

These changes made Outlook 2021 stop connecting to Exchange, of course. When I tried to fix it by making the outlook.com alias my primary address again, I suddenly found out that Microsoft limits the number of times you can change what your primary address is!!!! Does it say anywhere that you only have x number of tries?! Do you get a warning that you are changing your primary account too many times? NO to both questions!

So suddenly my primary account was stuck to my netcabo.pt address which prevented me to access my personal email account via Outlook 2021 - and to add insult to injury, the message I got was not "try again tomorrow" but "try again next week". NEXT WEEK!!! This is completely INSANE!

I had to wait a full week to get things working again, and in the mean time my attempts at trying to restore access without the ability to change the primary account only made things worse, eventually forcing me to having to delete my old Outlook profile, create a new one and reconstruct all my email accounts in the new profile, etc...

All this is just plain infuriating and frustrating! No wonder so many users are fleeing to Linux! I would too, if I could.

lol

It's an echo chamber... it's just you and me in here.

Microsoft got rid of there quality department, didn't they?. Now its case of shoving it out on users, and fixing it as they go along. What was the point, in them fiddling around with stuff that was fine as it was.

Like you said, new users may download your software, and may encounter an issue, which they blame on the application, rather than the OS. I'm surprised UWP is still a thing. Microsoft has ruined the email client, forcing that horrendous outlook on us. Don't even mention copilot and all the other crap.

I'm stuck in my ways now, and couldn't be bothered to change OS. I tried Apple years ago, and hated it. Stick with Windows, so i can customise it. Just sad Microsoft decided to screw up my docks, with there changes.

Why does it *still* amaze you Jorge? They haven't a clue! And haven't had one for a long time now.


Come to the light side, Lu... err, Jorge - it is your destiny! Good to see that. There's money to be made here too. A lot of developers make more in donations than they could earn commercially with their apps. Yep, Linux rules! It's long become the best range of OSes (albeit sadly far too many!) there is. None better than Ubuntu and Fedora - the upstreams respectively of Ubuntu Server etc. and RHEL, the most widely used server and supercomputer OSes out there.

LOL! Damn - and there was I thinking there were thousands clinging to every one of your posts! Well,, at least that means there are two intelligent people here.

Well, if you absolutely don' want to change to a good OS (speak Linux), have a look at these two articles - there's tons of stuff there that lets you get rid of a shedload of a sh*tload of Windows shite, including UWP apps and games, Copilot, Copilot+ Recall, Edge, and more! - viewtopic.php?p=46592#p46592 and viewtopic.php?p=46882#p46882

Third and final beta, this should be a very, very, quick beta so you have only 1 or 2 days to try it out and catch any outstanding bugs before the official release. If you find ANYTHING, please let me know ASAP.

This beta is already FULLY PER-MONITOR DPI COMPATIBLE. So, if you have a multi-monitor system where the monitors have different DPIs, this beta is specifically for you.

Here are the links to the betas:

WARNING: These are updates and MUST be installed ON TOP of an EXISTING Nexus Ultimate v25.2 or Winstep Xtreme v25.2 installation (OR LATER). Please make sure your license keys will still work with the new betas.

To install the betas, download the relevant file for you from the links below then EXIT all running Winstep applications before running Setup.

Winstep Xtreme v25.6 BETA 3:

https://www.winstep.net/xtreme-beta.zip

Nexus Ultimate v25.6 BETA 3:

https://www.winstep.net/ultimate-beta.zip


WorkShelf v25.6 Beta 3 complete change log:


New Features:

* Added *per-monitor* DPI compatibility, allowing Winstep applications to work properly on multi-monitor systems where scaling/DPI settings are not the same for all monitors.

* Multi-monitor profiles now also take into account the DPI setting of monitors, while still retaining compatibility with older monitor profiles.

* Removed calls to the dead Weather.com and Yahoo weather feeds.

* "System" and "[System Process]" are now translated.

* System Interrupts CPU usage is now retrieved by the Winstep Helper service.

* CPU Utility value is now only retrieved if 'Use Legacy Mode' is NOT checked.

* Clicking a Buy Now or Renew Now button now also copies the URL to the clipboard.

* Pressing CTRL while right clicking an item opens that item's Properties dialog.

* Pressing SHIFT while right clicking an item always shows all options in the right click context menu.

* Added new 'Activate All' internal command. Activates all enabled docks, shelves, drawers and desktop modules and brings them to the foreground.

* "Registry" and "Memory Compression" are now correctly identified in the list of processes instead of appearing as "[System Process]".

* Improved the appearance of many of the common controls for the Dark Mode (Gray), Dark Mode (Black) and Winstep GUI modes so they better match the Windows 10 and Windows 11 look.

* For Dark Mode (Gray) changed the color of the scrolling text at the bottom of the About screen when renewal has elapsed from dark red to a color more legible on the gray background.

* All dialog boxes with a Cancel button as well as information dialogs that have a single OK button will now close automatically when you press the ESC key.

* Manual Backup Settings now automatically adds a timestamp to the backup filename.

* If getting weather info using the weather.com code fails, the weather module now automatically tries again using the location name.

* Decreased processor usage by caching fonts in memory.

* Further decreased processor usage by merging the enumeration of running UWP apps with the enumeration of running Win32 apps.

* Increased resilience to bad virtual shell item pointers, which should no longer result in Access Violation errors.

* The balloon tooltip for themes in a shelf's Themes tab now also displays the name of the theme author.

* The list of running processes is now compiled independently by the Winstep service, which stops doing it if there are no requests from the main Winstep application for over 1 minute.

* Changed battery module charging animation to display current charge level, unless this value is not reported by the battery in which case the old animation is used.

* Selecting all the text in the password field for an existing account in the Email Checker module settings panel and then begin typing over it to replace the old password with a new password now also enables the show/hide password symbol.

* Changed the "unknow icon" image - if you prefer the old one go to the Icon Samples folder and replace Unknown.png with Question-mark.png.

* List of running tasks is no longer polled every 5 seconds to detect UWP apps being cloaked and uncloaked, the application now relies on "push" system events.

* Added a "Open New Instance" tasklist middle mouse click action, now the new default (previously it was "Close"), so that middle clicking on a running task icon launches a new instance of that application, just like Windows does.

* Clicking a shortcut with the middle mouse button now launches a new instance of that application regardless of the current 'Do not launch multiple instances' setting (same as pressing the SHIFT key when left clicking but more convenient).

* You can now also customize the tasklist/running list icon of Windows Apps.

Fixes:

* A shelf dragged to a new docked position could sometimes revert to the previous position after restarting the application.

* If the system short date format included anything other than the actual date (e.g. added day of the week as in "ddd dd/mm/yyyy") the weather module would always show N/A.

* Latitude and Longitude values could be lost when restoring settings between cultures with different decimal separators.

* Wanda would still swim on the desktop when running a full screen game. Now it just pauses when a full screen game or application is detected on the same monitor.

* Removed the 512 running processes limit in the Winstep service.

* MSN Weather feed was returning zero for the timezone of all countries, which many times meant a Sun was displayed by the weather module when it should be a Moon and vice-versa. When that happens the weather module now uses the default timezone list.

* UWP apps dragged from the list of running applications in a dock or the Tasks tab in a Shelf would have the wrong item type when dropped.

* Fixed misc control size and text cropping issues with non-English languages on high DPI monitors.

* Icons of UWP apps showed as blank paper icons after the April preview / May 2025 Windows 11 update.

* Selection bar might not appear where you expected it when adding tasks to the Task Customization and Task Exclusion lists if running the application on a high DPI monitor.

* An icon could remain in a "flashed" state after dragging a file over it.


NextSTART v25.6 Beta 3 complete change log:


New Features:

* Added *per-monitor* DPI compatibility, allowing Winstep applications to work properly on multi-monitor systems where scaling/DPI settings are not the same for all monitors.

* Multi-monitor profiles now also take into account the DPI setting of monitors, while still retaining compatibility with older monitor profiles.

* Clicking a Buy Now or Renew Now button now also copies the URL to the clipboard.

* Added new 'Activate All' internal command. Shows all enabled docks, shelves, drawers and desktop modules and brings them to the foreground.

* Hotspot button tooltips are now horizontally centered on the button.

* Improved the appearance of many of the common controls for the Dark Mode (Gray), Dark Mode (Black) and Winstep GUI modes so they better match the Windows 10 and Windows 11 look.

* For Dark Mode (Gray) changed the color of the scrolling text at the bottom of the About screen when renewal has elapsed from dark red to a color more legible on the gray background.

* All dialog boxes with a Cancel button as well as information dialogs that have a single OK button will now close automatically when you press the ESC key.

* Manual Backup Settings now automatically adds a timestamp to the backup filename.

* Replaced the "hotspot" image in the Hotspots Wizard dialog.

* Changed the "unknow icon" image - if you prefer the old one go to the Icon Samples folder and replace Unknown.png with Question-mark.png.

* List of running tasks is no longer polled every 5 seconds to detect UWP apps being cloaked and uncloaked, the application now relies on "push" system events.

* Added a "Open New Instance" tasklist middle mouse click action, now the new default (previously it was "Close"), so that middle clicking on a task button in the taskbar launches a new instance of that application, just like Windows does.

* You can now also customize the tasklist/running list icon of Windows Apps.

* Arguments for UWP apps can now be passed via drag & drop.

Fixes:

* Power Saving was not engaging for 'Activate on full screen application'

* Icons of internal commands were only being refreshed to update status on the primary taskbar

* Changes in colorization (for instance, wallpaper hot-track) were only affecting the primary taskbar

* The live preview thumbnails might not appear properly on a taskist detached from a startbar set to appear on all monitors.

* Hotspot buttons on the desktop were not being scaled according to monitor DPI.

* The correct icon for a particular hotspot wasn't always being displayed in the Hotspots tab of Preferences.

* The icon for an hotspot in the Hotspot tab of Preferences could sometimes appear blank.

* Icons of UWP apps showed as blank paper icons after the April preview / May 2025 Windows 11 update.

* Selection bar might not appear where you expected it when adding tasks to the Task Customization and Task Exclusion lists if running the application on a high DPI monitor.

* Fixed misc.issues with management of UWP apps.


Nexus Ultimate v25.6 beta 3 complete change log:

New Features:

* Added *per-monitor* DPI compatibility, allowing Winstep applications to work properly on multi-monitor systems where scaling/DPI settings are not the same for all monitors.

* Multi-monitor profiles now also take into account the DPI setting of monitors, while still retaining compatibility with older monitor profiles.

* Removed calls to the dead Weather.com and Yahoo weather feeds.

* "System" and "[System Process]" are now also translated.

* System Interrupts CPU usage is now retrieved by the Winstep Helper service.

* CPU Utility value is now only retrieved if 'Use Legacy Mode' is NOT checked.

* Clicking a Buy Now or Renew Now button now also copies the URL to the clipboard.

* Pressing CTRL while right clicking an item opens that item's Properties dialog

* Pressing SHIFT while right clicking an item always shows all options in the right click context menu.

* Added new 'Activate All' internal command. Activates all enabled docks, shelves, drawers and desktop modules and brings them to the foreground.

* "Registry" and "Memory Compression" are now correctly identified in the list of processes instead of appearing as "[System Process]".

* Added "Bring Nexus Ultimate Forward" internal command which previously only existed under Winstep Xtreme.

* Improved the appearance of many of the common controls for the Dark Mode (Gray), Dark Mode (Black) and Winstep GUI modes so they better match the Windows 10 and Windows 11 look.

* For Dark Mode (Gray) changed the color of the scrolling text at the bottom of the About screen when renewal has elapsed from dark red to a color more legible on the gray background.

* All dialog boxes with a Cancel button as well as information dialogs that have a single OK button will now close automatically when you press the ESC key.

* Manual Backup Settings now automatically adds a timestamp to the backup filename.

* If getting weather info using the weather.com code fails, the weather module now automatically tries again using the location name.

* Decreased processor usage by caching fonts in memory.

* Further decreased processor usage by merging the enumeration of running UWP apps with the enumeration of running Win32 apps.

* Increased resilience to bad virtual shell item pointers, which should no longer result in Access Violation errors.

* The balloon tooltip for themes in a shelf's Themes tab now also displays the name of the theme author.

* The list of running processes is now compiled independently by the Winstep service, which stops compiling it if there are no requests from the main Winstep application for more than 1 minute.

* Changed battery module charging animation to display current charge level, unless this value is not reported by the battery in which case the old animation is used.

* Selecting all the text in the password field for an existing account in the Email Checker module settings panel and then begin typing over it to replace the old password with a new password now also enables the show/hide password symbol.

* Changed the "unknow icon" image - if you prefer the old one go to the Icon Samples folder and replace Unknown.png with Question-mark.png.

* List of running tasks is no longer polled every 5 seconds to detect UWP apps being cloaked and uncloaked, the application now relies on "push" system events.

* Added a "Open New Instance" tasklist middle mouse click action, now the new default (previously it was "Close"), so that middle clicking on a running task icon launches a new instance of that application, just like Windows does.

* Clicking a shortcut with the middle mouse button now launches a new instance of that application regardless of the current 'Do not launch multiple instances' setting (same as pressing the SHIFT key when left clicking but more convenient).

* You can now also customize the tasklist/running list icon of Windows Apps.

Fixes:

* A shelf dragged to a new docked position could sometimes revert to the previous position after restarting the application.

* If the system short date format included anything other than the actual date (e.g. added day of the week as in "ddd dd/mm/yyyy") the weather module would always show N/A.

* Latitude and Longitude values could be lost when restoring settings between cultures with different decimal separators.

* Removed the 512 running processes limit in the Winstep service.

* MSN Weather feed was returning zero for the timezone of all countries, which many times meant a Sun was displayed by the weather module when it should be a Moon and vice-versa. When that happens the weather module now uses the default timezone list.

* UWP apps dragged from the list of running applications in a dock or the Tasks tab in a Shelf would have the wrong item type when dropped.

* Fixed misc control size and text cropping issues with non-English languages on high DPI monitors.

* Icons of UWP apps showed as blank paper icons after the April preview / May 2025 Windows 11 update.

* Selection bar might not appear where you expected it when adding tasks to the Task Customization and Task Exclusion lists if running the application on a high DPI monitor.

* An icon could remain in a "flashed" state after dragging a file over it.

Jorge, I might have asked this before, but if I did, it was YEARS ago. Out of curiosity, why doesn't the installer detect if Winstep is running and ask if I want to exit? Why do I have to manually exit Winstep before running the installer?

The Winstep Update Manager already does that, and updates are normally installed through that.

Ok, now that v25.6 has been officially released and this topic is about to go the way of the dodo, I just want to vent a bit (again!) about what a nightmare it was adding per monitor DPI support to the Winstep applications!

I don't think there ever was a single release that made so many extensive changes to so much of the code... Adding per-monitor DPI support to the shelves, drawers, docks, menus, etc, was actually the easiest (not saying it was easy!) part.

Getting the UI ready for monitors with different DPIs was the REAL bulk of the work. From a technical standpoint it was also quite an achievement considering the age and limitations of the development environment used to create the Winstep applications - this little miracle was mostly accomplished through extensive use of the Windows API, of course.

After building the "foundation" that would support these major changes, it was time for the sheer drudge work of going through each window and dialog, making sure they would behave properly when moved between monitors with different DPIs or spawned on monitors with a DPI different from the primary monitor. With some dialogs this was nearly automatic thanks to the pre-built foundation, but most of them had to be tweaked "by hand" in some way, shape or form: bitmaps had to be re-scaled, text drawn onto those bitmaps resized, etc...

Considering we are talking about literally HUNDREDS of windows/dialogs, this was a major undertaking. Then there was the phase of spotting the bugs and fixing them - whenever I thought I was scott free, new bugs would rear their ugly heads. It was many different things, most small but together it was death by a thousand cuts.

The monitor profiles had to be re-imagined so they could now take into account the DPI settings of each monitor while still remaining backwards compatible with the old monitor profiles, all coordinates had to be stored in pixels as otherwise objects would move in position and size if the DPI of a monitor was changed between sessions, the dialogs and screen objects had to react "on the fly" to changes in DPI settings of a particular monitor, the NextSTART systray had to be re-written from scratch (that actually ended up biting me in the ass, more on that later) in order to merge the three individual objects it was composed of (expand button, actual systray icons, clock button) into a single object, etc, etc, etc...

In the middle of all that I was also profiling and optimizing a bunch of code to try and determine what exactly was randomly causing "high" CPU usage on Windows 11 systems plus dealing with the blank page UWP icons issue - and once the latter was "fixed", I noticed that *some* shortcuts to UWP apps were STILL showing a blank page. Turns out that Microsoft apparently changed the "path" to those apps, and while the old path can still be used to launch that UWP app, it fails to generate a proper icon. This affects Windows itself too (some shortcuts to UWP apps I had on the desktop are now showing blank pages, and these issue has nothing to do with Winstep applications). Those "paths" were not supposed to change, yet, here we are... fortunately the App IDs remained the same.

Merging the NextSTART systray components into a single object (as mentioned above) also meant a lot of code changes to the NextSTART systray itself as well as the taskbar. Despite extensive testing - and I really mean extensive - because under Windows 11 I only have a single tray icon (the cog that gives access to the tray's Quick Access Panel) I never noticed that multi-row systrays (e.g. when you vertically resize the taskbar to more than one row of icons, or when your taskbar is vertical and your tray as many icons) were completely broken!

I only became aware of this fact AFTER the release when a user complained about it. Although a serious bug, most Winstep Xtreme users do not have multi-row trays (especially not if they are running Windows 11) so I decided to fix the issue and make a silent update rather than a re-release (i.e.; users who downloaded Xtreme from that point on would no longer run into that problem and users who had already ran into that issue could manually download the update file).

Ideally I would have liked to make a re-release of Xtreme, but many users get REALLY upset if they have to download a multiple megabyte update more than once in a very short term - and the issue - although serious - was not critical. Besides, anyone who ran into this would more likely than not get in touch with support, where I could then give them instructions on how to download the update that fixes the issue.

I have to admit the complete lack of forum feedback for this release did bother me quite a bit - an issue like this would probably have been much easier to catch BEFORE the official release if more users had been involved in the beta testing.

And by "death through a thousand cuts" I meant little bugs and issues all over the place like these (and others much worse, each requiring individual attention):

One of the problems about the beta was that it was just too short a period and too short notice, Jorge. Especially as much of Europe and elsewhere is in the grip of a severe heatwave and on top of it all we're in the northern hemisphere's holiday season. Holidays? Who needs them!

Personally, I haven't even been using Windows for almost a fortnight right now, though I'll get round to it around the coming weekend or so.

Unfortunately I really had to release v25.6 before the end of July, so I didn't have time for a public beta, and before that the per monitor DPI support was still incomplete, which did not lend itself to a public beta either.

Apparently the "only" issue so far was muti-row systray icons being completely broken (already fixed in the silent update) which, considering the sheer amount of changes made to the code, is nothing short of a little miracle (and a lot of hard work).

Oh I well appreciate that you wanted the 25.6 release out before the end of June, Jorge. Although, haven't we had release versions of a given month actually released in the following month before? Does it really matter that much?

Anyway, it all worked out alright in the end, so well done anyway.