Hey Jorge,

It has been a while since I last posted! Like...years! Anyway, I am kicking the tires of WinStep Extreme again, this time on my Surface Pro 4 running Windows 10 Pro.

It appears that due to the killer resolution of the SP4, some items are not scaling properly. For example, on the Nexus Dock, I had to make my icons 80 to look like I want them. One NextSTART, I had to make quick launch and tasklist icons 64, the largest they can go I think. But still they look a bit crammed together, and the SystemTray icons are still puny. And the start button is puny. I have attached a screenshot.

Am I missing a setting? Or something I can do to help with scaling? Thanks as always!

Monitors with Ultra-HD resolutions are becoming more common these days (just a handful of years ago I had to pay premium for three 30" monitors with a resolution of 2560x1600, now resolutions like those and higher are becoming common even on smaller sized displays).

And there lies the problem. Because the actual display size is so small for such a huge resolution, things become really tiny. Windows solution is to increase the DPI (Dots Per Inch).

For me, this is equivalent to giving something with one hand and taking it away with another: you get a display with double the resolution and then you halve that by increasing Windows DPI by 50%. Doh.

Anyway, considerations like this aside, Winstep applications only became fully high-DPI aware as recently as v15.9 - and a lot of work went into making them so. Unfortunately there are still some rough edges.

For instance, there is a setting (which can be turned off but is on by default, IIRC) to make your NextSTART menus automatically 'bigger' on high-DPI systems. But there is no such setting for the taskbar.

This, in part, is because you can change the size of taskbar items simply by increasing their icon size. As you pointed out, 64x64 is the maximum allowed size for Quick Launch icons - no real reason for this limit other than the fact that 64x64 were considered HUGE icon sizes back when the Quick Launch items on the Windows taskbar were 16x16 and average screen resolutions were things like 800x600 and 1024x768.

Likewise, you can change the size of tasklist icons and also the size of the system tray icons.

The reason they look a bit more 'cramped' is because while there is a setting to increase the size of the icons, there is no such setting to proportionally increase the spacing between icons.

Anyway, I'll re-visit high-DPI support in the next release. In the mean time feel free (you and others) to leave your suggestions regarding this issue here on this thread.

I think you will like to know that on the next release (v16.5) the NextSTART taskbar will, by default, automatically scale itself properly (so nothing will appear 'crammed together) on high-DPI systems. Just finished implementing that feature.

As usual there will be an option in Preferences to disable this automatic scaling (the same way you can currently disable it for menus).

I don't know of any other software company that has the author so involved with the user as Winstep.

Jorge, i have seen you go on for days trying to help someone figure out the solution to a problem. Won't find that at the competition.

Not kissing your ass or anything, just really appreciative of the work you do and the involvement you have.

Cheers.


(well, perhaps a wee bit of ass kissing lol)