Now that v25.6 is out of the way, it's that time of the year again...

For next release there are two major things I want to tackle:

1. Multi-session modules under Nexus Ultimate and Winstep Xtreme, so you can have clocks showing different time-zones, weather modules showing the weather in different locations, etc... This also opens the way to new module types that only make sense if multi-session modules are possible (e.g. drive meters, etc)

This feature will be a ton of work and will require a lot of code re-writing, but after the amount of work that adding per-monitor DPI scaling support to Winstep applications involved, I am not scared anymore

2. Bring back basic system icon functionality to the tray under Windows 11, instead of a single sad little cog icon.

Microsoft under Windows 11 made sure 3rd party applications can no longer access the tray icons in the Explorer process with their XMAL Islands mania, so what needs to be done is come up with functional replacements for at least the main system icons.

I am thinking volume control, battery, and network.

3. Restore WIN + D functionality. I don't use it, so I keep forgetting about this (although you can achieve the same thing by setting the dock to always on top).

One more thing that the developers at Microsoft did not care to maintain backwards compatibility with.

Phew, that's a real shedload of a sh*tload of work ahead then - kudos for taking it on Jorge! Hope you're not working in the current heat though and having all-day siestas and lots of fluids. Water's best in these conditions. Experienced 50+ degrees myself a few times when I was young - we'll get there in Europe soon enough thanks to what we did to the climate!

Bah, temperatures are quite normal for this time of the year, people have short memories... I've experienced much worse DECADES ago (like 40C + days).

Anyway, this said, good thing I have the AC running in the office lol

One of the TV channels here - I forget which one - pronounced parts of southern Portugal basking in 46C Monday. Lucky if it wasn't that bad your way.

Ooh yeah, AC - nice, could use that here. That said, alas, AC further contributes to the climate catastrophe of course so not so good. Anyway, the stated aim of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5% above pre-industrial average by 2050 will already be surpassed within the next 3 or so years! We are well and truly totally f***ed. But, it serves the incredibly stupid human race right. Only pity is that it affects all other life forms just as badly or worse.

Already added the Audio icon and the battery icons, working on adding the network now (not difficult at all since most of the code is already there for the Net Meter in WorkShelf - only need to copy the low level part of that to NextSTART).

Also, the actual images for these icons already exist - and have for a long time - in the C:\Users\Public\Documents\\Winstep\Icons\Systray folder thanks to Danillo and his high resolution tray icons.

These are obviously not the real thing, but they mimic the real thing pretty well and are not static, they reflect the current state of volume, battery and network in real time, just like the real tray icons do. As for what happens when you click on them, well, Microsoft has basically crippled the real icons by making them all pop up the same Quick Settings Panel, and there isn't much the right click menus give you in terms of options either. So pretty easy to copy that functionality too - and probably extend that a bit.

Ok, battery, net and volume fully functional "clone" tray icons are done, including the right click context menu options:

So, I was testing the functionality of the new Windows tray icon "clones" and when I enabled Wi-fi rather than Ethernet I got asked by Windows if I wanted to turn on the location services.

The Wi-fi "clone" tray icon is perfectly cable of getting the current connections SSID as well as signal strength (and we have wi-fi icons to visually demonstrate that like in the old Windows 7), but as it turns out Windows now requires that location services be enabled first because of some lame "privacy" excuse.

Once you turn location services on, you can cherry pick which UWP apps get this "privilege", but for desktop apps it is "all or nothing" (and there is another switch in Windows Settings just for them).

Since trying to get signal strength immediately makes Windows pop up a scary dialog asking if you want to turn on location services on behalf of your application unless you have already turned that on (disabled in Windows by default), I decided not to enable that feature by default either. Imagine users running Nexus for the first time and immediately getting *that* on their faces. Ugh.

After looking at the real wifi tray icon in the Windows 11 taskbar, turns out it no longer displays signal strength either, neither visually nor in the tooltip. So, perhaps I also simply won't offer the option to show signal strength - it would be hard having to explain to users that they have to go to Windows settings to enable location services first and why that is necessary.

In Windows 24H2 Microsoft changed how WIN+D (Show Desktop) worked internally, which caused docks, modules, etc, to be hidden even if set to be visible when pressing WIN+D.

This affected not only Winstep applications as well as other applications that relied on the old behavior (e.g. Rainmeter, etc)...

WIN+D is now back to working as normal in Windows 11 24H2 with docks, etc, remaining visible again when you press WIN+D provided the option to have them remain visible is enabled.

I guess Microsoft really need a fitting motto :

"Microsoft excels - Total Cock-ups A Speciality"

Another cool little addition: in the taskbar or running apps lists, when mousing over the live preview thumbnails if you pause for a moment you get a "aero peek" preview of the window (i.e. all other windows fade from view and only that window is visible).

There is an undocumented Windows API for this since Windows 7, DwmpActivateLivePreview, but I never got it to work, so I made my own version of peek windows. Not being the Windows DWM with its low level access, that version is nowhere near as fast or as smooth as the real thing, of course.

Well, turns out the reason DwmpActivateLivePreview wasn't working was because it cannot be called from a 32 bit application in a 64 bit version of Windows.

So, I ended up doing a small 64 bit helper application in C++ that does the actual window peeking for the main application - and it works just fine!

Fast and smooth enough as is here in Win 10, but kudos anyway, cool!

I don't like the "flat" Windows 10/11 icon style, personally I think the pinnacle of Windows was Windows 7 with its photo realistic icons, and I know many people think so too... even Apple has basically brought back Aero with their "new" "Liquid Glass".

Although I did many changes to the UI since Windows 10 came out (new icons, dark mode, etc) to make it blend in more with the modern versions of Windows (within the limitations of the Windows Common Controls) the dock icons themselves (e.g. how the default dock looks) have been pretty much neglected.

This gives the default dock - the first thing you see when you install Nexus, and you know what they say about first impressions - an "outdated" look. And this is something I hear a lot from comments in the uninstall survey, despite Nexus being completely skinnable and you being able to change the icons at will (EDIT: as an example, looking through the latest uninstall surveys, one of them stated "do not like those 90s icons").

So, for this release in the past few days I have been making some modern Windows 11 style icons to replace the old Windows 7 based icons.

However, I understand there might be some users who might like the old icons better and I am all for user choice, so rather than replacing the old icons with the new ones, I'm going to add the new Windows 11 style icons to the existing collection (C:\Users\Public\Documents\WinStep\Icons\Samples\) and remove only those icons that are not currently actively used for internal commands, etc... (of course, from newer installations, if you already have them, you will keep them).

In addition, I am going to add a new setting to the "More Options" dialog box in the General tab of Preferences to use the new icons or keep on using the old (just like there is an option there to 'Use Windows 10 style' there will now be a 'Use Windows 11 style icons', which shall be enabled by default.

If this option is selected, internal commands and certain iconic modules will use the new Windows 11 style icons. If not, they will use the old Win7 icons. What's more, the change is dynamic, i.e.; it will affect current shortcuts and modules (e.g. say you have a Alarm Manager IC on the dock using the new Win 11 style icon, unselect 'Use Windows 11 style icons" and it will automatically go back to using the old Win7 version (unless you customized the icon used for that IC, of course).

Furthermore, being external icons rather than hard coded to the application, the default icons for Internal Commands are basically just suggestions, in that you can not only change them for a particular IC shortcut to anything you want via the Item Properties dialog, as you can actually modify the default icons inside the C:\Users\Public\Documents\WinStep\Icons\Samples\.

As I am making the new Windows 11 icons I test how they look at smaller sizes in the dock. After a while I started noticing an excessive use of GDI handles in Task Manager.

As I delve deeper, I noticed that right click context menus were leaking GDI handles but not all, only those that previewed my new Windows 11 icons at the top of the menu as a thumbnail.

So, to cut a long story short, I wasted over an hour looking for the leak only to come to the conclusion that it wasn't the Winstep application that was leaking but rather some 3rd party context menu shell extensions that are shown in the menu when you have the Winstep application set to display the full context menu options. If the context menu showed only private application options, it did not leak.

If these 3rd party context menu shell extensions are not properly implemented, they leak. No wonder Explorer leaks more than a sinking ship!

P.S. And between you and me not calling the IContextMenu and IContextMenu2 Release methods was not helping either (my excuse is that it was 20 year old code. I do now - leaks less, but still leaks (here it's like 25 GDI handles every time the full right click context menu is shown). Not a biggie, but not perfect either.

I was wondering recently why Nexus still runs in 32-bit, as I know it was made long time ago when 32-bit systems were common, but is there a plan to migrate Nexus to 64-bit version, and if not - why? I can see that it still reads some older icons when running open/save dialog from nexus context menu, making the experience less consistent. Obviously it's a minor inconvenience sure, yet I'm surprised it still runs in 32-bit. Logically speaking it may bring some stability improvements no? Especially on ARM devices, afair it does work in emulation, but was crashing randomly quite often, I wonder if moving to 64-bit could fix that or at least reduce it.

Because the development platform came out at a time where there was still no 64 bit version of Windows, everything was 32 bit and we had just recently moved up from 16 bit lol

For the same reason, there are no plans to port it to 64 bit, nor would there be any real advantages in doing so (it would not be faster and it would consume a lot more memory since each pointer would no longer be 32 bits - 2 bytes - but 64 bit - 4 bytes).



You mean the non-Nexus skinned context sub-menus? Those are owner drawn menus, and since they are drawn by whatever application is providing that menu, Nexus cannot just fetch the contents and place them in a Nexus skinned menu.

Other than that, Nexus uses MS Common Controls for Save/Load dialogs.



Don't be. Most applications are still 32 bit, yet we moved to 64 bit how many years ago?



No. If anything, it would do the opposite. Porting code from 32 bit to 64 bit - assuming it was possible which in this case is not - is not always a trivial task. You would probably introduce a ton of bugs in code that was previously working fine in the 32 bit world.



You mean v25.6 (latest version) is crashing quite often or a previous version was?