Jorge, I noticed something good actually in this update. I work with themes regularly so any changes become noticeable. It may have been unintentional on your part, but I noticed the 'crispness' of some graphics in what I have already created improved within Winstep. I am older sure, but I am not imagining it or senile(yet).

Glad to hear it, although I honestly can’t think of anything I changed in this update that would make theme graphics look crisper. Which graphics in particular seem sharper to you? Perhaps that might give me a clue.

I re-read the massive of work you did and I think I have isolated it. Your tightening of the code and the display-change path and the reduction of fallback resolutions.
The entire theme other than the Menu is noticeable in improved definition.

ADDITION:
That machine uses a Radeon card, quite different to nVidia, so I decided to look at the logs after the time of doing your update - It said the GPU Scaling, Anti-aliasing stable, it reset RGB to 4:4:4 and Integer scaling is now on. So it stabilized something or it wouldn't have turned the Integer scaling on, which is probably where the extra crisp display is coming from.

Hi Jorge, I believe I found another minor bug. The Disable Magnify Effect when dragging and dropping items into the dock does not seem to be working. When I drag and drop programs from Start Menu to the dock, the magnify effect still occurs. I'm using latest Nexus Ultimate beta and Windows 11. Let me know if you need more info. Thanks!

I don't think we might be using the same terminology... there is no "Disable Magnify Effect" setting?

Actual settings that need to be enabled/disabled and detailed steps to reproduce please.

The setting lives under Dock Properties>>Effects>>Mousover Effect>>Magnify>>Effect Settings.

See Screenshot.

OMG I did not even remember that setting existed lol

Fixed, thanks.

LOL! No problem! Thanks for fixing it!

So, by the looks of it v26.8 is going to turn into v26.9.

I don't want to rush and risk introducing new last minute bugs, or release it without first making sure everything is working as expected (the list of fixes is now at least as long as my arm)... I want this to be the most rock solid version ever, and I think this has already been made self evident by the amount of work I have been putting in (and some things are extremely difficult to track, if you have been following the sage of the multi-monitor profiles and the random excessive CPU usage when idle).

The former I think I might have finally already nailed, the latter, alas... still working on it. Lots of issues like are preventing me from finding an actual culprit, like the Windows Debugger, Process Explorer and Process Monitor being worthless for this and the Windows Performance Analyzer not being able to read old format PDB symbol files (!).

Anyway, one thing I cannot definitely fix is what I am not made aware of, and with such a huge and complex application there are bound to be cases like that (take the example above, that option was added such a long time ago that I did not even remember it existed lol)

Somewhat amusingly, none of the 3 things I listed in the very first post of this topic actually had any work put into them. No worries, I'll ger to them.

One thing that does worry me is knowing for a fact that the warez scene has been keeping tabs on Winstep software, even the public betas. Usually their cracks are not 100% effective because there is always some trick I implemented and hid that they did not track down and patch - something that is made clear by the thousands of visits to the "buynow-legit.asp" pages users are directed to when the software detects it has been patched.

This said, nothing is unbreakable and I do not want to add anti-piracy protection stuff that would actually inconvenience legit users (and I think I have succeeded in this endeavor so far).

Regardless of their excuses (and I know them all by heart) a working crack does affect sales in a meaningful way. I know because I actually SEE what happens to sales when a new crack is released. As a small mISV, every single sale lost to a cracked version really matters, especially now that I have a ravenous two and a half year old toddler trying to eat everything he can put his hands (and mouth) on.

Ah, if only the China market thing had actually worked out!! LOL

@JORGE - These days, almost every second piece of software has been cracked. even subscription software that makes calls to the home server to work.
In my main field, there is a company called UAD where their VST3 products go through a unique conversion process. Their installed files needed to run the plugins are a series of files that not only do not install into the VST directories, they are unrecognizable by any windows application, even their own if you double-click it. They have done some kind of fancy encryption that no warez person has been able to successfully crack to date. Add to that iLok verification which a lot of people dislike, so almost a double layer of encryption.

I think you have every right as a sole proprietor to protect your hard work. Do whatever you need to so you ensure that.

New Betas of v26.8 (Beta 9) are out:

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

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

Nexus free beta:
https://www.winstep.net/nexus-beta.zip

This is a beta and MUST be installed ON TOP of a full v26.6 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.

###

This beta adds the global "Keep sub-menu theme when detached" setting to NextSTART, as well as the equivalent "MenuRetainThemeWhenDetached" setting for NextSTART skins.

It also hardens multi-monitor profiles even further, creating application specific monitor profiles so that, for instance, the profiles of Nexus do not overwrite the profiles of Nexus Ultimate, automatic migration of old profile structure and data, and hopefully finally fixing the few remaining issues that were still occurring when returning from sleep or hibernation.

Other fixes include painting issues when using the mouse wheel to scroll a shelf during a drag & drop operation, "disable magnify effect when drag & dropping items into the dock" not working as intended, not closing pop up objects such as Grid Stacks when switching to a different tab during a drag & drop operation, and (still to be confirmed) fixed temporary Grid Stacks displaying a corrupted opening animation on secondary monitors using a different DPI scaling setting from the primary monitor.

I love alpha and beta versions.
The Dock works very well with version 26.8

Ok, I finally have some news about the intermittent high CPU usage in WorkShelf/Ultimate when idle under Windows 11.

I had the AI analyze and compare two full trace runs - one captured during the abnormal >1% CPU usage phase, and another during normal <0.3% behavior. After more than an hour digging through both traces, even the AI couldn’t reach a definitive conclusion.

What is clear is that the code isn’t at fault, exactly as I suspected. I could optimize every instruction until I turned blue, and this underlying issue would still show up.

Preliminary analysis of normal and high-CPU traces shows that the problem is not one badly written or runaway section of WorkShelf code. During the abnormal state, **the same ordinary routines** suddenly consume roughly ***four times*** as much CPU across the board.

This means either those routines are being executed about four times more often than normal, or each execution is taking about four times as long because of an external condition.

Completely terminating and restarting WorkShelf does not restore normal CPU usage: the newly started process immediately exhibits the same problem. This means the condition causing it exists outside the previous WorkShelf process and survives its termination.

So, optimizing individual routines might reduce CPU usage slightly, but it would not eliminate the underlying external condition that suddenly causes the same code to require four times as much CPU.

I am now going to test the timers to determine whether Windows is invoking them more frequently (!!!) or whether the underlying Windows GUI calls have become more CPU-expensive (and this would be my guess, although why, I have no idea).

Hi Jorge, here's another minor issue. I have a dedicated dock for system tray that auto hides. I noticed that the mouse over icon labels for this system tray dock do not update. For example, if I increase the speaker volume from 20 to 30, the mouse over icon label will still show 20. Same with the battery - as the battery percent decreases, the mouse over icon label will not update to the new percentage. I'm using Windows 11, latest Nexus Ultimate Beta. Please let me know if I'm not being clear enough, or if you need additional information.

Very strange, I cannot reproduce it here. If I increase or decrease the volume while the mouse over icon label is on screen, the label updates to show the new volume.

Even tried creating a dock specific to the tray.

What about the icon itself, does it update if you mute the volume?

And if you restart the application?