Its getting older, my excuse



yes

Just on another note. Have you a theory why the old rocketdock works fine for me, where as winstep doesn't?.

Eh? Did I miss something? What doesn't work with Winstep that works with the old RocketDock?

regarding the high cpu

Is that still a problem with v25.7 ?

Its better than it was, just wondered if there was prime difference in rocketdock.

I'm running 3 instances of rocketdock. Why because only way i have everything i want in the dock. With workshelf i could have subdocks etc which allowed be the flexibility.

Sub-docks and Grid Stacks, etc...

Anyway, whatever is or was causing excessive CPU usage in Windows 11 (and I haven't noticed that happening anymore with v25.7 but I haven't been paying too much attention either) is undoubtedly related to some change Microsoft made to Windows 11.

Take the same exact version of the Winstep application, same exact configuration, but run it under Windows 10 and the difference in CPU usage is (was?) an order of magnitude.

Frantically looking for the cause allowed me to optimize a few problematic potential sources, but the problem is that I was never really able to pin point THE actual culprit.

Either way WorkShelf now seems to consistently use much less than 1% CPU on my i9 12900K system, while before it would very often go up to 1.7% and stay there for a while despite being idle (mysteriously dropping to much less than 1% for extended periods of time apparently whenever it felt like it).

Wait till you really get old!

Turns out C:\ProgramData being a hidden folder is not the only reason that lead me to choose C:\Public Documents\Winstep\ as a much more suitable folder to store Winstep themes, etc, back in the Windows Vista days.

Besides being hidden, C:\ProgramData\ is also a protected folder, so by default you need admin rights to write to it!!!! Kind of defeats the purpose, no?! Sigh!

Fortunately the installer allows me to set "users-modify" permissions for the actual Winstep folder under C:\ProgramData\ (and all sub-folders will automatically inherit those permissions).

Had I - and probably many other developers - known that decades later we would have a major ransomware problem and that the AV software answer to this - including MS's own Windows Defender - would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I would have chosen C:\ProgramData\ in the first place. Would have saved a lot of headaches for both me and users.

But, as they say, hindsight is 20/20 vision.

Anyway, in the right corner of the About tab you now have a new "Open Data Folder" button which takes users directly to the C:\ProgramData\Winstep\ folder when clicked on.

Nice one Jorge - that should help. Still, wouldn't surprise me if we get the odd shriek for help in this regard from the odd newb.

Used Chat-GPT to bring up-to-date (mostly) the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean and Japanese language files. Portuguese I did myself.

I hope I end up not regretting using AI for this, but some of those language files were really falling behind. From the languages I can actually understand, Chat-GPT translations are normally pretty good (an order of magnitude better than Google Translate, at least).

It was still a lot of work coercing the AI to do this. CoPilot would absolutely refuse to even analyze the INI files citing a bunch of BS reasons, ChatGPT would without a problem but then I would have to feed it the data in 190 line chunks or the AI would choke on it.

You also have to be really attentive at what the AI is doing (i.e. trust but ALWAYS verify), as a bunch of times I caught it pulling text out of its little digital furry butt, mixing files, etc...

Then there was that time where I felt like I was dealing with a 6 year old, as BassdudeNZ claimed, where the AI would keep talking about making the translation but would never actually do it lol. It was as if it was deliberately procrastinating and testing my patience - stopped when I threatened it with a good belt spanking though.

It was a pain, but having up-to-date translations - especially now where it seems users cannot be bothered to make themes, help with translations, etc - sure is worth it. And given the (lack of) quality of some of the user translations, those made by ChatGPT are probably of much higher quality anyway.

You can never trust any LLM output and always have to check and verify. Ask one to come up with a symphony in the style of Beethoven and you get Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star!

LOL

In other news, added a "Date Created" sort option to those tabs that can be sorted (e.g. folder type tabs) in Shelves, Drawers and Grid Stacks. Previously it only had Sort by "Date" which has now been renamed to "Date Modified".

Also improved the visual stability of docks when the insertion point moves as you drag items over them.

And one I know you will like, Nexter: added "draw clock hands" setting for the iconic analog clock style. Forces the analog clock to draw the hands (like before) instead of using bitmaps.

Anyway, with this part done I think the application is ready for a public beta.

While the beta out, I am actually considering adding a new disk drive module. Turns out I won't need multi-session modules for this type of module.

In terms of iconic modules I can use the arguments field to let the user select a drive letter for that instance of the module like it already happens with the CD Control IC (kind of a waste of work given how optical drives went the way of the dodo eheh). You would have one iconic module for each drive you want to monitor.

As for the desktop version of the Drive module, it would be a single background bitmap that grows dynamically to accommodate all the local drives you want to monitor (user selectable, of course). Something that can either grow vertically as you add more drives, or horizontally, depending on user preference (each drive would be a "section" inside the container bitmap). The actual drive info, graph, visual info, etc, would thus be drawn on top of that "container" bitmap. Since you can have two different styles, I'm thinking perhaps a dark version and a light version (a bit like the desktop calendar module, actually).

Now, in terms of information... Drive letter, Free/Used space, of course, bytes read and written per sec, and I am thinking that an (optional?) drive activity led might also be useful.

In terms of the iconic module free/used space could be represented by a pie chart with one slice (i.e. the drive icon would be a pie chart instead of a static representation of a drive, and on top of it we would add the drive letter and the activity led). Something like that. Or could be a static image of a drive with a bar on top of it, the bar level showing a visual representation of the free/used space.

Anyway, just throwing ideas around at this point. Anyone reading this feel free to chime in, now is the time to do it.

Below are some interesting design concepts for the iconic drive module suggested by CoPilot and ChatGPT (I actually like his recommendation, at least it's pretty original I would say):

The third example suggested by co-pilot in the image below is also interesting, perhaps for one of the style (the other being a pie chart). Would be the image of a drive (a bit like the new Mac drive icons or even Windows 11 drive icons in This PC, but with a steeper perspective so you can see more of the front, which holds the disk usage bar) but I would probably put the drive letter on the cover of the drive, perhaps even in perspective.

Ah, the colors of the pie chart (or the bar) could be theme-defined so they match the theme (and also defined by the user, of course).