v20.1
- Updated Portuguese language file.
- Updated Hungarian language file.
- Added Pause, Play, Stop, Next and Previous commands to the right click context menu of the Media Player internal command.
- The application's invisible main control window is now monitored to make sure it's not made visible again by 3rd party applications.
- Added new 'Windows Settings' internal command to open the Windows 10 UWP Windows Settings panel.
- The Most Active Programs History dialog now automatically adjusts font size to make up for very large process names.
- Added new 'Show decimal place for processes' option to the settings of the CPU Meter module. When enabled, any list of running processes - like the one shown in the Most Active Programs dialog - will display a decimal place in the percentage of CPU usage for that process (e.g.; 1.3% instead of just 1%, or 1.8% instead of just 2%).
- Added several new internal commands for accessing Windows 10 settings dialogs: Windows Settings, Apps, System, Network and Internet, Devices, Gaming, Time and Language, Accounts, Personalization, Ease of Access, Phone, Privacy, Windows Update, Search Settings and Power Options. These new Internal Commands are all grouped under 'Internal Commands - Settings' in the insert new item right click context menus.
- Sunrise and sunset times are now correctly calculated for the MSN weather feed, which allows choosing whether to display a moon or a sun icon with nearly 100% accuracy.
- An icon pointing to Explorer.exe in the dock now only displays a running indicator if there are Explorer windows open.
- The dock can now be docked to and undocked from any screen edge and monitor by simply dragging it (users can press the ALT key while left clicking to make it easier). When docked it will show some initial resistance to being undocked by 'shaking' when about to detach. When docking or undocking by dragging, the Detach event sounds to give the user some audio feedback. To dock an horizontal dock drag it so the top edge touches the top screen edge or the bottom edge touches the bottom screen edge. To dock an horizontal dock to the side of the screen so it changes orientation, slowly drag it until the mouse pointer nearly touches the desired screen edge. To prevent the dock from accidentally docking when moving it from one monitor to another, the auto-docking mechanism is speed sensitive: move across monitors rapidly to prevent the auto-docking mechanism from kicking in. The auto-docking/snap-to feature can be disabled in the 'More Options' dialog of the Behavior tab of Preferences.
- The width of checkboxes in the User Interface is now automatically cropped so that clicking on a blank space right after the setting description no longer toggles the setting.
- Added 'Disable simulated ALT key press when forcing windows to the foreground' setting to the More Options dialog in the General tab of Preferences. This should be checked only if having trouble with ALT TAB or the ALT key getting stuck.
- The Winstep Update Manager will now report hidden updates if the user performs a manual check for updates.
- Increased the transparency of the non-lit LCD digits for better readability in full screen alarms/clock/sleep time
- Under Windows 10 viewing the Change Log could freeze the application for a long time or even crash it with an out of memory error.
- The 'snap mouse pointer to default button' feature only worked when using the 'Standard User Interface' mode.
- Disabling or Enabling icon reflections in the dock via the right click context menu would cause icons of UWP apps to show as question marks.
- Disabling the "Do not launch multiple sessions on the same application" setting would still require the user to double click on an icon to launch another session if the 'Combine dock icons with running applications' setting was also enabled.
- The sub-menu drop down delay setting in the Behavior tab of Preferences had no effect.
- On modern systems running more than 256 simultaneous processes, the CPU hog list might not accurately reflect the applications using the most of the CPU at the time. This was fixed in the Winstep service by doubling the limit to 512 simultaneous processes.
- Themes with no name on the INI configuration file would appear on Theme right click context menus as blank entries. They now appear labeled as 'Untitled'.
- Certain SYSTEM processes were not being enumerated properly and/or always returned 0% CPU and RAM usage.
- METAR weather information retrival is now automatically disabled if the application crashes when using a 3rd party DLL to access NOAA's website via HTTPS.
- The MSN weather feed was not reporting the correct observation time for locations outside the GMT timezone.
- The first forecast day of the MSN weather feed sometimes pointed to the previous day, which caused the 5 day forecast to be out by one day (e.g.; the forecast for Fri would appear on the Sat slot).
v19.2
Nexus v19.2 complete change log:
- Under Windows 10 with Dark Mode enabled for the UI, the color of the section category text in Preferences is always kept bright even if the currently selected Windows accent color is darker.
- Current multi-monitor configuration/profile is now saved on exit.
- Folder items set to open as menus can now be double clicked to open in an Explorer window instead.
- All the weather feeds now support HTTPS connections.
- Added new 'Light Mode' to the User Interface to match the new Windows 10 Light mode.
- When adding an URL item a default replacement icon is now used if the system does not have a usable class icon defined for HTML documents.
- By default screen edge bump activations are limited to the width of the dock to help prevent accidental activations. Added new 'Activate along entire screen edge' option to the Edge Bump Settings dialog to disable this behavior.
- Updated Windows 10 style User Interface icons.
- Added new 'Say the Time' option to the action taken when clicking on the clock module.
- The 'Winstep Multi Media Player' helper application (WsMMPlay.exe) is now also shutdown when the application exits, just in case it needs to be updated or removed.
- Sticky Notes UWP app in Windows 10 is now handled properly in the list of running applications and when pinning it to the dock
- The routine responsible for peeking window thumbnails could be interrupted, which could potentially crash the application with an array locked error and leave most windows only partially visible or not visible at all, which could only be fixed by a Windows restart.
- Asus GPU Tweak II is no longer affected by AeroPeek emulation as it does not restore properly afterwards.
- The selected text effect for floating labels set in the Label Settings dialog was not being applied, the label always used the Outline effect.
- NOAA's weather feed had stopped working because the web site now enforced HTTPS access and no longer supported HTTP access.
- Fixed issue where METAR current weather conditions could show only a single 'Possible' word if no weather phenonema was present.
- Under Windows 10 the sndPlaySound Windows API call used to play event sounds was leaking memory and an handle every time it was called (for instance, every time the hide/show sound was played). Fixed by adding the SND_SYSTEM flag which makes the sound be played by the system instead of from inside the application's own process space.
- Kb, Mb and Gb units shown throughout the application are now properly displayed as KB, MB and GB to prevent them from being confused with Kbits, Mbits and Gigabits.
- In Windows 10 it is no longer possible to capture the content of layered windows which resulted in all black thumbnails for icons of running applications.
- The next activation date of alarms set to go off yearly was not being correctly calculated
Nexus Ultimate v19.2 complete change log:
- Under Windows 10 with Dark Mode enabled for the UI, the color of the section category text in Preferences is always kept bright even if the currently selected Windows accent color is darker.
- Current multi-monitor configuration/profile is now saved on exit.
- A dock set to always be behind other windows now remains above other windows while a sub-dock or grid stack is open.
- Folder items set to open as menus can now be double clicked to open in an Explorer window instead.
- All weather feeds now support HTTPS connections.
- Grid Stacks can now be optionally set to a fixed width and/or fixed height in the Appearance tab of the Grid Stack Properties panel.
- Added new 'Light Mode' to the User Interface to match the new Windows 10 Light mode.
- When adding an URL item a default replacement icon is now used if the system does not have a usable class icon defined for HTML documents.
- By default screen edge bump activations are limited to the width of the dock to help prevent accidental activations. Added new 'Activate along entire screen edge' option to the Edge Bump Settings dialog to disable this behavior.
- Updated Windows 10 style User Interface icons.
- Added new 'Say the Time' option to the action taken when clicking on the clock module.
- The 'Winstep Multi Media Player' helper application (WsMMPlay.exe) is now also shutdown when the application exits, just in case it needs to be updated or removed.
- Sticky Notes UWP app in Windows 10 is now handled properly in the list of running applications and when pinning it to the dock
- Left clicking on a UWP app in a Shelf, Drawer or Grid Stack would always launch a new instance regardless of the current 'Do not launch multiple sessions' setting.
- Under Windows 10 the sndPlaySound Windows API call used to play event sounds was leaking memory and an handle every time it was called (for instance, every time the hide/show sound was played). Fixed by adding the SND_SYSTEM flag which makes the sound be played by the system instead of from inside the application's own process space.
v18.8 [Sep 11, 2018]
- New Arabic language file.
- Updated the Hungarian language file.
- Updated Portuguese language file.
- The balloon tooltip of the 'Check for Updates' internal command now displays the last check for updates date as 'yesterday at' or 'today at' instead of the full date if the last check for updates occured less than 48 hours ago.
- The 'Task Manager' internal command now also appears in the 'System' category.
- Added support for multiple Shelves. Just like docks, each Shelf can have its own theme and settings.
- Added true high DPI support to Shelves. Previously only font sizes and icon sizes were affected, now the whole Shelf properly scales up on high-DPI systems.
- Added ability to scale Shelves up to 200% via a slider in the Appearence tab of the Shelf Properties dialog.
- Added new 'Scale' sub-menu to the 'Appearance and Sounds' sub-menu of the Shelf's main context menu.
- Number of icon rows shown at once on a Shelf is not collapsed can now go up to 99. The Shelf will only display as many icon rows as will fit on the screen.
- Updated the 'Send to WorkShelf' dialog so it can now handle multiple shelves.
- You can now disable voices independently of sounds and vice-versa.
- Added new 'Lock/Unlock Shelf Theme' option to the 'Appearance and Sounds' sub-menu of the Shelf's main context menu.
- Added support for vertical Shelves and options to dock them on left and right screen edges.
- Added 'Create New Shelf' and 'Duplicate Shelf' options to the 'Dock and Shelf Management' sub-menu of the Shelf's main context menu.
- 'Make Shelf tab from Dock' now prompts the user for a Shelf the new tab should be added to if there is more than one Shelf.
- 'In-Shelf Docks' were renamed to 'Sub-Docks'.
- Added new 'Tone' colorization method to colorize black and white (monochrome) background bitmaps.
- Added new 'Colorize with Windows Accent Color' option (Windows 10 only).
- Added new 'Now Playing' right click context menu option to the Media Player internal command, allowing a song in the currently selected playlist to be selected and immediately played.
- Added 'Repeat every days/months/years' setting to the alarms.
- Added new 'Drawers' object, a sort of single tabbed Shelf which will automatically extend by default to show all its items when open.
- Added 'Create New Drawer' option to the 'Dock and Shelf Management' right-click context menu and to the 'Dock & Shelves' tab in Preferences.
- Resizing a Shelf or Drawer by pulling on the tab header is now performed with a smooth animation.
- Colorization settings in the MOdules tab of Preferences for Desktop modules that are not skinned by the current theme (i.e.; display the iconic form) are now disabled.
- Hovering over a Shelf tab with a truncated name due to lack of space now pops up a tooltip with the full title of the tab.
- Added 'Check Integrity of Dock and Shelves' button to the Troubleshooting Options dialog in the Advanced tab of Preferences. This option checks the internal data structures for errors and offers to fix them automatically if it finds any.
- Adjusted the position of dock icon labels for docks not using the magnify effect so the label does not 'sit on the edge' of the dock background bitmap.
- It's now possible to pass arguments to UWP Apps by defining the argument in the Item Properties dialog
- The 'Task Manager' internal command was not working on Windows 10.
- Canceling a theme change in Preferences after applying it was not restoring the proper theme for docks with individual themes.
- A correct minimum Shelf width is now properly enforced when resizing the Shelf.
- Removing an item from the Shelf with auto-hide enabled resulted in the Shelf collapsing while the delete animation was still playing and then popping up as if expanded (but without being truly expanded).
- On certain themes smooth scrolling the Shelf would not display correctly if the Shelf was docked to the top or inverted when docked to the bottom.
- On certain legacy themes (OpenSTEP, for instance) the left and right mini-tab symbols were not displayed if the Shelf was docked to the top of the screen.
- Fixed issues related to being able to horizontally resize the Shelf beyond the minimum Shelf width.
- A dock set to auto-hide for maximized applications when always on top could fail to activate when the maximized application was no longer maximized if the dock was also set to display running applications.
- Fixed many misc.issues related to Shelves.
- Fixed 'Respect space reserved by other docks, toolbars and screen objects' not respecting the space reserved by toolbars perpendicular to the dock or Shelf.
- Changes made to the contents of docks while the Shelf Properties dialog was open would be lost when the dialog was closed.
- It was possible to restore from a backup with Dock and Shelf Properties dialogs still open, holding settings for docks and Shelves that no longer existed after the Restore.
v18.5 [Jun 3, 2018]
- Updated Greek language file.
- Updated Indonesian language file.
- Updated Chinese Simplified language file.
- Updated Portuguese language file.
- Updated Portuguese (Brazil) language file.
- You can now drag & drop multiple .m3u playlist files into the Audio Files listbox in the Audio tab of the Alarm Manager and the Media Player Settings dialog. The audio files in the playlist are automatically retrieved and added to the currently selected playlist in the Playlists listbox.
- You can now drag & drop multiple .m3u playlist files into the Playlists listbox in the Audio tab of the Alarm Manager and the Media Player settings dialog. This automatically creates equivalent playlists in the Playlists listbox.
- You can now drag & drop multiple folders into the Audio Files listbox in the Audio tab of the Alarm Manager and the Media Player Settings dialog. The audio files in the folders are automatically retrieved and added to the currently selected playlist in the Playlists listbox.
- You can now drag & drop multiple folders into the Playlists listbox in the Audio tab of the Alarm Manager and the Media Player settings dialog. This automatically creates playlists with the name of those folders in the Playlists listbox and adds to each of those playlists the audio files inside each of the respective folders.
- Removed 'Save' and 'Save As' buttons from the Audio tab of the Alarm Manager and the Media Player settings dialog. Playlists and their contents are now automatically saved. When clicking the New button, the application immediately asks for the name of the new playlist.
- Clicking on a Playlist in the Media Player Settings dialog now selects that playlist for playing.
- Clicking on the Media Player icon when the audio is paused now automatically restarts the audio without opening the media control bar.
- Increased the horizontal size of the Playlist and Audio list boxes and moved the control buttons to the bottom in the
Audio tab of the Alarm Manager and the Media Player settings dialog.
- The Media Player icon in the Media Player Settings dialog doesn't glow when playing audio if the 'Glow when playing' setting is disabled.
- Added another layer of redundancy to initial Weather module GEOIP localization by adding suport for Weather.com's Search API.
- Added new user definable URL for Weather.com's Search API to the Advanced dialog of the Weather Settings panel and also a warning not to change those values unless requested to do so.
- Volume slider in the Media Player Settings panel now affects the volume in real time if the Media Player is currently playing audio.
- The Media Player no longer resets the audio after pressing OK in the Media Player settings dialog, unless changes have been made to playlists or another audio file has been selected.
- Mouseover, Launch and Attention effects can now all be selected and set in the Effects panel without having to close the panel first.
- The Effects tab in the Dock and Shelf Properties dialogs now display a visual representation of the currently selected Mouseover, Launch and Attention effects. Different effects can be selected and visualized by clicking on the arrows or through the Effects panel, accessible by clicking on the icon itself.
- Moved the 'Edge Bump Settings' and 'Edge Swipe Settings' buttons in the dock and Shelf Behavior tabs to the Activation Setttings dialog.
- Added the 'Show Balloon Tooltip...' settings to the 'More Options' dialogs of the dock and Shelf Behavior tabs.
- Moved the 'Blur Settings' button from the Effects tab to the Appearance tab.
- Added 'Disable dock scaling on hight DPI settings' and 'Disable menu scaling on high DPI settings' options to the Appearance tab.
- Moved the 'Edge Bump Settings' and 'Edge Slide Settings' buttons from the Behavior tab to the Activation Settings dialog.
- Moved the 'Full Screen Exclusion List' button to the Activation Settings dialog.
- Moved the 'Auto-hide for maximized applications wehn always on top' from the Position to the Behavior tab.
- Removed the 'Bring dock forward...' settings from the Position tab since they are duplicated in the Activation Settings dialog.
- Added new 'Grab focus when activated' setting (enabled by default) to the Activation Settings dialog so users can make the dock NOT grab the focus when activated.
- Changed the timings of the 'Duration' setting for the Sonic Boom effect.
- The Unhandled Exception Manager now lists nested exceptions and offers more information for Access Violation errors.
- Added new 'Playlists' right click context menu option to the Media Player internal command, allowing an existing playlist to be selected and played without having to open the Media Player Settings panel.
- Speeded up a bit the rendering of animated icons on magnifying docks with icon reflections by not rebuilding the reflections when the icon is magnified (since the reflections would never be seen anyway).
v18.3.0.116 [Apr 4, 2018]
-Speed! We've done it again: Intel takes it away, Winstep gives it back: The fixes for the Intel MeltDown and Spectre vulnerabilities had a 10-15% cost in overall performance for all desktop users (and 35% or more for servers in data centres with heavy I/O loads).
-With a combination of extensive code profiling and optimization, plus a new compiler switch to remove integer overflow checks, the overall performance of Winstep applications has been increased by 10-15%, which nicely makes up for the performance hit caused by the Intel vulnerabilities.
-Performance variations in the 10-15% range are hard to spot in real-world usage, but despite this, you should definitely notice a decrease in CPU usage when moving the mouse over magnifying docks, etc...
-Heads up Home Theater users: added full keyboard support to docks.
v17.12.107 [Feb 1, 2017]
- New Moon Phases module.
- Shelf smooth scrolling.
- Parent dock magnification and independent sub-dock settings.
- More Alarm Manager options.
- Multi-monitor Reserve Screen Space.
- Added protection against problematic 3rd party MP3 codecs and audio filters.
- Improvements to the update process.
- Many other performance and stability improvements.
v16.6.1161 [Jun 28, 2016]
Universal (UWP) Windows 10 Apps are now handled like normal Windows applications.
UWP/Universal apps are alien to Windows. They are so different that Winstep applications previously showed a 'generic' box app icon for any running UWP apps.
With v16.6, running UWP apps now show the proper icon, can be pinned to the dock, are properly grouped together, can display a customized icon, and will even show a running indicator when pinned to the dock if the App is running.
In other words, UWP apps are now handled like any other Win32 applications, which makes Nexus the first (and so far the only) dock able to pull this off. Enable Fast Boot and Nexus will be there already waiting for you as soon as you see the Windows Desktop. Yes, the difference is that dramatic. Colors on the User Interface of Winstep applications were, until now, hard-coded. Since many Winstep users also run the popular Stardock WindowBlinds skinning application, this could lead to some unexpected results where the Preference dialogs of Winstep applications would only be partially skinned, sometimes with pretty horrific results. In the previous release we got the wallpaper hot-track colorization feature working with the Windows 7 wallpaper slide-show. But we goofed up, sort of. Only after the release did we become aware via user feedback that the feature was still having trouble on some Windows 10 systems. All fixed now.
v16.3 [Mar 12, 2016]
Updated Spanish language file.
Added 'Lock Size of Desktop Modules' setting, enabled by default, to the Theme Options dialog. With that setting enabled, current desktop module scaling is preserved when switching themes. If the setting is disabled, the scaling of desktop modules is associated to a particular theme, e.g.; this allows you to have desktop modules automatically scaled to 150% whenever you switch to theme A and 100% when you switch to theme B.
'Double caching of icons' performance setting is now enabled by default.
The CD Control internal command was displaying an error message on some systems.
Lauching items pointing to shortcuts (.lnk files) of a 64 bit application resulted in a 'File not found' error.
Dropping a shortcut file (.lnk file) into a folder item in the dock now copies/moves the shortcut as it should instead of the original file.
A dock brought to the foreground via an edge bump would auto-hide as soon as the mouse pointer left it even if a sub-dock was currently open.
Double clicking the icon of a running application on the dock would open a second instance of that application.
Mousing over the running application icon of a task that had just closed could result in a 'Access Violation' error.
An always-on-top dock set to hide automatically for maximized windows was not hidding for full screen windows (e.g.; watching a video full screen on Youtube).
Wallpaper color-hot track is now correctly previewed when trying new themes and wallpapers in the Themes tab.
Fixed the 'Stop' image in the Troubleshooting dialog so it properly scales up on high-DPI systems and displays a flat-image icon on Windows 10 systems.
Decreased the luminance value of the smaller and thinner language identifier text in the Language Bar icon so it's a bit more visible.
The CD Control internal command was unable to eject media on computers that did not support loading media via software.
The 'Auto-Hide after a short delay' setting in the Behavior tab of the Shelf Properties dialog was not doing anything.
It is now possible to change an item's icon by drag & dropping an .ICO, .PNG or .TIF file into the icon even if the dock is locked.
The result of a drag & drop operation (i.e.; Copy, Move or Link) is now accurately and immediately reflected even when the dock is locked. As before, pressing the SHIFT key forces a move, and pressing the CTRL key forces a copy. Locked docks do not allow items to be moved/re-arranged within the dock, but they still allow a) customizing dock item icons via drag & drop of image files, b) launching a document with a particular application by dropping that document into the application's icon in the dock and c) copying and moving files into drive folders in the dock.
Locked docks were not accurately reflecting which item was being affected by the file being dropped (i.e.; with unlocked docks, dropping an item before the middle half of a dock icon would insert that item before the icon, dropping it after the middle half would insert the item after the icon. Since locked docks do not allow the insertion of items, this would not accurately reflect which dock item was being targeted by the drag & drop operation).
The Shelf was still shifting icons in a 'Regular' tab type to make room for dropped items even if the Shelf was locked.
If the 'Enable double caching of icons' performance setting was enabled, non-magnified icons on the dock could appear slightly blurred because they were being drawn with the High Quality *Bilinear* interpolation mode instead of High Quality *Bicubic*.
The systray icons of a handful of applications (such as KVirc and Agnitum Outpost Pro) were not playing well with the system tray handling of Winstep applications because they reported a pre-Vista notify icon structure to the system but actually expected mouse click messages to be passed using the post NOTIFYICON_VERSION_4 format.
Drag & dropping a program (executable) from an Explorer window into the Shelf's Quick Launch tab was showing a 'Move File' visual indication instead of the correct shortcut (Link) visual cue.
Fixed the 'Opaque on mouseover' desktop module feature which was not working properly and improved the smoothness of the fading in and out animation.
Text on Windows 7-style Balloon tooltips was not being correctly centered vertically.
Scaling of desktop modules is no longer reset when you switch to a different theme, unless the new 'Lock size of Desktop Modules' setting is disabled.
Fixed bug that could cause the Shelf to display a tab of blank icons if a Modal settings window was opened when the Shelf needed to refresh the contents of a tab.
v16.12.99 [Dec 9, 2016]
- New high-quality English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish Voice Packs.
- Winstep Update Manager improvements.
- When changing the currently selected language in Preferences, if a voice pack in the selected language exists, it will be automatically selected as well.
v15.9.0.76 [Oct 9, 2015]
May include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.
v15.7 [Jul 28, 2015]
Full compatibility with Windows 10.
Improved first run experience.
New 'Task View' internal command to invoke Windows 10 Virtual Desktop Manager.
New 'Restore Wallpaper' internal command to restore previous Windows wallpaper.
Improved handling of Quick Launch items.
Always on Bottom docks no longer pop up on mouseover.
v10.9 [Oct 14, 2010]
The v10.9 release is a major release. Feature highlights:
* Added new Squish, Spin, Sonic Boom, Heal, Fire, Magic, Flare, Wind and Water mouseover effects to docks and the Shelf:
* New particle mouseover animations can be colorized for thousands of different variations
* Each mouseover effect now has its own independent settings, such as magnitude, duration and color
* Added new Fire, Flare, Heal, Explosion and Magic menu opening animations:
* Added 'Do Not Launch Multiple Sessions' setting to the Misc.Advanced dialog so clicking on a shortcut of a running application brings that application forward instead of launching a new instance
* Added window thumbnails, with peek ability, that pop up when mousing over icons of running programs in the docks:
* Sub-docks can now be set to open parallel to the parent dock, instead of perpendicular.
* Sub-docks can now be set to open automatically on mouse over.
* Icon reflections can be optionally disabled on vertical docks and sub.docks to make them more compact.
* Dock can now be prevented from comming forward by accident when bumping the screen edge by enabling the new 'Disable edge activation' setting
* Explosion Animation, shown when an item is deleted, can now be disabled
* Balloon tooltip now display thumbnails of document and video files
* Dock alignment can now be set by dragging the dock horizontally or vertically
* Color of item labels can now be changed
* Added support for Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Korean and Norwegian languages
* Much more!
