NICE !

Sadly and we've all been victim to it at least once, driver updates for Radeon/ATI and nVidia have randomly not done exactly as they should. fortunately they tend to fix them quickly if so. Windows updates are worse and are notorious for reactive instead of proactive.

I've already moved to other stuff, but I would still like to show the final result of the jumplist thingy:


The tooltip shows the full path (in case you have several apparently identical "Readme.txt" entries, for instance) as well as the date that document was accessed.

If it is a image file or a document that can generate a thumbnail, it will show you the thumbnail as in the above image.

You can also right click the file to get the full context menu for that document. "Remove from this list", the very first line in the menu, allows you to remove that particular entry from the Jumplist/Recents list, if you wish to do so for privacy reasons.


Ah, and if you click the Show Container option in the context menu, it will now not only open the folder containing that file in Explorer as it did before, as the relevant file will be automatically selected as well (this too is new to the next release).

Betas of v25.11 are out:

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

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

This is a beta and MUST be installed ON TOP of a full v25.9 or later installation. Do NOT uninstall anything first, just exit all running Winstep applications and run the beta setup file.

There is no need to backup your settings first, but it does not hurt if you do either.

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So, I need you guys to test if the new jumplists affect the speed at which right click context menus open in an *unreasonable* way (there might be a somewhat noticeable slow down when right clicking on applications that edit a TON of files - e.g. Notepad - as the jumplist for these type of applications are huge and literally hold hundreds of past entries).

However, I expect the added delay will not even be noticeable for most applications, especially now that nearly everyone has an SSD for their main drive. On the other hand, I am curious to know how it handles on a system where the main Windows drive is actually spinning rust (i.e. a old fashioned hard disk drive) so if anyone still has such a system, please let me know...

Also, test out the new "anti-glow" feature (even if you never noticed the halo around the transparent part of the dock when magnifying it) and please let me know which color works best for you, if black, if white. This feature can be found in Dock Properties -> Appearance tab -> Dock Transparency dialog.

Finally the "Treat offset area as an active dock zone" setting added to the Position tab of the Dock Properties dialog, requested by Lubierzca. This setting is only visible and only has an effect if the user specifies a positive offset from the screen edge when docked. Wonder if that works as Lubierzca envisioned it (not an option I would ever use though).

FYI, I still want to add the new Disk Monitor module before any official release, so more betas to come.

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WorkShelf/Nexus Ultimate Version 25.11

New Features:

* The popup delay of sub-docks, grid stacks , etc, set to open on mouseover is now more granular, from 0 to 1000 ms in 50 ms intervals.

* The 'Show Container' context menu option now opens the container folder in Explorer as before but with the target file pre-selected.

* The Weather module will now report the status line of the MSN server HTTP response if the connection fails (e.g. "400 Bad Request").

* Added "Treat offset area as an active dock zone' setting to the Position tab of the Dock Properties dialog. This setting is only visible and only has an effect if the user specifies a positive offset from the screen edge when docked. When enabled, it overrides the "Respect space reserved by other docks, toolbars, and screen objects" setting, rendering it inactive. Please note that enabling this setting makes it nearly impossible to click on anything other than the dock in the gap between the dock and the screen edge.

* Added support for the "Recent Files" feature of Windows Jumplists. The context menu of applications and running tasks now includes (if the application supports it) a 'Recent' sub-menu which displays a list of the latest files/documents opened by that application. For privacy reasons this behavior can be disabled by unchecking the "Show Recent Files in context menu" setting in the Tasks tab of Preferences. This setting is shared with NextSTART too. Specific entries in the list can also be removed by right clicking on them and selecting "Remove from list".

* Removed "utcnist.colorado.edu" from the list of available time servers as it shutdown on May 30, 2025, and replaced it with "time-c.nist.gov" located in Honolulu, Hawaii.

* Some displays may show a faint glow (halo) around transparent parts of docks. Because this behavior depends on hardware and drivers, a new "Halo Suppression Color" setting has been added to the Dock Transparency dialog. This allows users to choose either black or white for the transparent pixels - whichever option works best on their system.


Fixes:

* A low hard coded limit for the number of IP addresses on the system meant the application could crash if that number exceeded the limit while retrieving data for the network module (which is enabled by default).

* The "Snooze" button in alarm reminders was no longer working due to a recent change.

* A Recent Documents tab of a shelf, drawer or grid stack was not honoring "Sort by Creation Date".

* Fixed issues with the LCD Color color well in the Alarm Editor dialog.

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NextSTART Version 25.11

New Features:

* The 'Show Container' context menu option now opens the container folder in Explorer as before but with the target file pre-selected.

* Added support for the "Recent Files" feature of Windows Jumplists. The context menu of applications and running tasks now includes (if the application supports it) a 'Recent' sub-menu which displays a list of the latest files/documents opened by that application. For privacy reasons this behavior can be disabled by unchecking the "Show Recent Files in context menu" setting in the Tasklist Settings dialog of Preferences. This setting is shared with WorkShelf too. Specific entries in the list can also be removed by right clicking on them and selecting "Remove from list".

* Made some optimization changes to the Advanced Menu Settings dialog.


Fixes:

* Fixed some instances where the old NextSTART logo was still being used in the UI.

Added a small quality of life improvement: when dropping shortcuts into the dock, shelf, etc, the shortcut is automatically resolved so the item in the dock, etc, points to the target file itself and not to the shortcut.

This is ideal in 99.9999% of the cases, but sometimes you actually want the dock/etc to run the shortcut and not the target file. Until now this implied manually adding an entry to the dock/etc by typing out the path to the shortcut .lnk file.

Now if you press the ALT key when dropping a shortcut, the shortcut is no longer automatically resolved.

Also, improved the handling of filenames with characters that fall outside the system's code page and therefore cannot be properly converted to ANSI.

Yes it works exactly as intended, thank you!

Ok, finally started working on the new Drive Monitor module.

As with all the modules, there are two styles. The first is the drive style.

There are basically three components to this: the drive cage, the free capacity bar, and the activity led.

The drive activity led is optional, if disabled it will remain black. Otherwise is green for reads, red for writes and yellow for mixed (or the same color for both reads and writes, haven't decided yet).

The capacity bar is blue when the drive is not too full, and becomes red when over 90% capacity.

On the top part of the drive cage you will be able to see an embossed version of the corresponding drive letter.

As for the drive cage itself, this is where that hue, saturation, luminance and colorization routines I came up with to customize the Nexus logo in v25.9 comes in handy. You will be able to use those settings to customize the color of the drive cage, from cream to copper to whatever. I think these values will be a theme setting too, so the color of the drive cage can match whatever theme the skinner is working on.



The other style is the pie graph style. You will be able to specify the graph color (blue by default) as well as the background (white by default).

I take it these are the desktop mods? Really, you ought to shoot those "AI"s - even scaled down, these somehow look clumsy. Like something a 4-yr old kid drew. The pie looks and is all wrong, for a start. The blue part represents the solid part of the pie - so why is there a "fringe" left behind around the "empty" part?! LOL! It really is laughable. And what about data?

These are the *iconic* modules.

The drives can't have too much detail since they will be scaled down to 48x48 icons or so. What you are seeing there is a HUGE "source bitmap" that is then reduced to a 256x256 pixel image, which is the size of the bitmap the application actually uses. It will look better with the drive letter "embossed" on top, like this:

OK, that explains a lot, at any rate for the drive representation. So at those reductions in size it certainly looks a whole lot better, given the 256 px size is unlikely to be used even at 4K res. (Maybe at 8K.) There's one thing though - the size/% usage indication. In the image, only the blue (available, I take it?) part is shown in the first post, the rest is left blank it looks like? And how/where are the values shown, as well as the disk activity values?

As for the disk activity LED, just one colour surely would be best? (And don't call me Shirley! )

And please, forget about the Pie one - it's just too ghastly and all wrong. An "AI" mind fart, methinks.

The usage bar in the icon is like the bar in the Windows "This PC"/"My Computer" panel: it fills up to the right, in this case inside the drive "slot". Like the bar(s) in the My Computer window, it remains blue until there is less than 10% available space, at which point it turns red.



There is only so much information you can place in a small icon, and this bar already gives you a good idea of free space just by looking at it. The drive letter is also part of the icon - unfortunately I was unable to give the letter that "perspective" look as in the AI generated images, GDI+ only supports affine transforms, so true perspective (like vanishing point compression) isn’t natively supported.

Actual free space percentage as well as volume label is given when you mouse over the icon.

Activity values (read/writes per second) cannot be displayed in a small icon, there is simply no room for it... that info is reserved for the desktop version of the module.



... and if you hover long enough you get even more information in the balloon tooltip:





LOL Lesley Nielsen at its best. And yes, I now also think a single color is best.



No can do. It was user choice and besides I buried too much work into making the code that generates that actual 3D pie lol

Anyway, this is all work in progress... things can still change.

And that's fixed too, applying a vanishing-point skew formula by directly manipulating the pixels.

So, what I do is draw the drive letter as normal, but to a 90x90 pixel blank bitmap instead of directly to the drive icon. The bitmap holds the front facing drive letter, and is used as the source bitmap for a final bitmap that will contain the warped version of that letter, according to the perspective rules.

This is done by manipulating individual pixels so it is relatively slow (relative being the key word here). This final bitmap containing the letter in perspective can then be pasted on top of the drive icon.

However, because it is relatively slow doing it this way, rather than doing this every time I need to create or refresh a drive icon, I am going to use this routine to paste all the 26 skewed drive letters into a larger bitmap, in a 6x30 grid, and save this bitmap.

I'll then use this bitmap as a source bitmap for the skewed letters. Instead of drawing the text, then skewing it etc, I simply retrieve the correct 90x90 cell from the larger bitmap containing the letter I want and paste that into the icon. Should be an order of magnitude faster than manipulating the pixels directly every time I need to do or refresh a drive icon.

There is another advantage: since the drive icon can have its color changed via hue, sat and lum sliders, I can apply the same formula all at once to the big sheet of letters. Since these bitmaps are cached in memory, I only need to do this once (i.e. only when the user changes the hue, sat or lum values).

I'm still working on fine tuning how much perspective should be added to the letters, but you can see the current results now. Looks pretty similar to the original drive bitmap created by the AI, and certainly much better than the front faced drive letters.

The original:

My version: