Winstep Nexus Changelog

What's new in Winstep Nexus 23.11

Dec 8, 2023

Added partial Danish translation.
Updated Spanish language file.
Updated Czech language file, updated language name to Èeština.
Updated Portuguese (Brazil) language file.
Updated Portuguese language file.
Added new 'Reset Reserved Screen Areas" Internal Command. This will reset any areas reserved for the NextSTART taskbar and WorkShelf shelves, docks, etc - useful when Windows gets confused about areas of the screen that should not be covered by maximized windows. It will also reset any multi-monitor and per-monitor tasklists.
The 'Renew Now' button will now also appear on the About tab of Preferences if the user's upgrade subscription has expired and he is running a version that no longer works with his current license key.
Added all the Windows 10/11 Start button right click menu options to the contexct menu of a 'Start Menu' internal command.
Added new 'Use Legacy Mode' setting, disabled by default, to the CPU Module settings dialog.
If running on Windows 8 or above and 'Use Legacy Mode' is NOT enabled, the total CPU usage percentage displayed on the CPU Meter is now the same as that displayed on the Task Manager of Windows 8 onwards.
System Interrupts is now also included in the list of processes and their CPU usage.
Added "Check Service Communication" option to the Troubleshooting Options dialog. Verifies that the Winstep service required to perform actions that require admin privileges (such as installing a theme font) is operating properly.
All Windows Settings internal commands now have individual icons instead of all sharing the same icon.
Added new 'Settings' tab type, displaying all the Windows 10 and 11 Settings categories.
Under Windows 10 and 11 the default shelf now has a Settings tab instead of a Quick Launch tab.
Changed the wording of the uninstall survey.
Added support for per-monitor tasklists: docks, shelves, drawers and even grid-stacks showing a list of running applications can now show windows open on all monitors or only windows open on the current monitor.
Added global setting 'When using multiple monitors, show running applications on..." to the Tasks tab in Preferences with the following three options: "All tasklists", "Main tasklist and tasklist where window is open" and "Tasklist where window is open".
Double clicking a folder in a Shelf tab or Drawer set to open folders as Grid Stacks will now open that folder in Explorer.
Added ".webp" to the list of default thumbnail file types.
Windows 11: The Search dialog (invoked via the Search internal command) should now pop up next to the mouse pointer.
Text in the balloon tooltip of Wanda and the Lookup IP Address internal command can now be copied to the Windows clipboard by left clicking the balloon tooltip itself (just not the close button).
Live preview thumbnails (for running applications) now fade out when clicked on.
Added new 'Media Mute' internal command, toggles the mute state of audio being played.
'Check Internet Connection' in the Troubleshooting Options dialog box now also checks to see if HTTPS connections have been silently disabled due to previous crashes (caused by Acronis Active Protection injecting code into 3rd party processes) and offers the option to re-enable them if so.
GEO IP feature that retrieves current location based on IP address is now performed through secure HTTPS connections as required by the GEO IP data provider.
Added 'Allow Multiple Instances' setting to the Item Properties dialog of 'Run Program' item types. Allows launching multiple instances of the same application without having to press SHIFT or double-click even if 'Do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' is active.
Added work-around to display correct "Legacy" total CPU Usage under Windows 11 22H2 onwards (Microsoft introduced a bug in this Windows release that broke all CPU usage reporting tools, including Windows own Task Manager under the Details tab, and to this date has not fixed it yet).
Added system-wide fix for incorrect CPU usage reporting on Windows 11 22H2 systems to the CPU Meter settings dialog. This will fix incorrect per process CPU usage both in the Winstep application as well as 3rd party applications (such as the Details tab of Windows own Task Manager). This is accomplished by setting the REG_DWORD value SerializeTimerExpiration to 2 (off) under the key "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerKernel" (note that changing this value requires a reboot for the new setting to take effect). Technical information about SerializeTimerExpiration can be found in page 160 of Windows Internals, Part 2, 7th Edition. WARNING: this value should NOT be set to OFF on systems that support Modern Standby (issue powercfg /AVAILABLESLEEPSTATES on CMD and make sure "S0 Low Power Idle" is NOT supported, this said the Winstep application should automatically disable the option to change this setting on systems that do support Modern Standby).
Added new 'All Events' setting to the battery monitor module. Provided logging is turned on, this makes the module log power events such as monitor turning off, monitor dimming, monitor turning on, system shutting down, system entering or coming back from low power states, even when not on battery.
Added 'Troubleshoot License Key Issues' button to the Troubleshooting Options dialog box.
Improved handling of multi-monitor profiles and changes in screen resolution.
The currently selected item was not updating itself correctly when creating a new shelf or drawer in the 'Dock and Shelf Management' tab of Preferences.
The icon cache was not being destroyed as it should when modifying a shelf or drawer via the Shelf Properties dialog.
Several misc.issues when editing and modifying shelf tabs via the Shelf Properties dialog.
Wanda would stop swiming on the desktop after returning from sleep or hibernation.
The 'Send to WorkShelf' dialog would crash the application when selecting a Grid Stack, a Drawer or a Shelf with no Regular tabs.
Only Grid Stacks and Drawers with Regular tabs are now shown in the 'Send to WorkShelf' dialog.
The CPU utilization percentage of the current CPU hog process in balloon tooltips was not respecting the 'Show decimal place for processes' setting.
Windows 11: automatic theme colorization with the dominant color of the current wallpaper was not picking changes to static wallpapers (i.e. non slideshow) made by the user via the Windows 11 Background Personalization panel.
Minimize animation now goes to the proper dock if using any of the per-monitor tasklist options.
Fixed 20 year old bug that could prevent some right click context menu actions on files and folders from being displayed (for instance, Properties was not being displayed for folder items under Windows 11).
Application would freeze under certain conditions when opening the Event Actions dialog of the Battery module.
Issue that could sometimes prevent folders from being launched in Explorer after changing an item type to Folder in the Item Properties dialog.
Windows would display an error message when trying to launch a folder marked as "Program" in the Item Properties dialog if the 'Run as Administrator' setting was enabled for that item. This setting is now disregarded if trying to launch a folder in Explorer.
Trying to restore a minimized window via its live preview thumbnail while the window was being displayed on the screen was failing most of the time.
Fixed bad mailto URI in the CPU and RAM usage warning dialogs (used ampersand character instead of question mark to separate subject line).
If the 'Hide after launching an application' setting was enabled, shelves and drawers were collapsing before completing the launch animation.
If the 'Hide after launching an application' setting was enabled, an accidental double click on a Grid Stack item could cause a shelf or drawer to literally disappear from the screen.
Opening the settings dialog of a module and pressing OK after restoring or auto-arranging desktop module positions would under certain circunstances move that module to previous screen position.
Mousing over the Hide/Show icon of a vertical shelf or drawer was not displaying the mouseover image.

New in Winstep Nexus 22.7 (Jul 28, 2022)

New in Winstep Nexus 20.10 (Oct 28, 2020)

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).
Albany Airport, Australia had the wrong METAR code and was showing the conditions for Albury, Australia.
The 'Repeat every (x) years' option for alarms was not working properly.
Dropping a folder into the left panel of the Media Player Settings dialog would create a playlist with the name of that folder and all the mp3 files in it, but it would miss the very first file.
Version 2004 of Windows 10 changed the default initial dimensions of system tray pop ups which now caused them to appear off screen.

New in Winstep Nexus 19.2 (Mar 1, 2019)

Fixed weather module displaying N/A for some locations:
Some locations close to airports use a METAR code to obtain current weather conditions. METAR information is reported directly to NOAA by airports around the world and is thus updated more frequently as well as being more detailed.
Recently NOOA's website started enforcing HTTPS connections instead of regular HTTP connections, which caused the connection to the NOAA server to fail, but in such a way that it did not trigger the fail safe mechanism designed to automatically retrieve current weather conditions from another weather provider such as Weather.com.
This release fixes this issue and also adds HTTPS support to all the other backup weather feeds (Weather.com, MSN and Yahoo).
New Light Mode User Interface style:
Microsoft is adding a new light mode in the upcoming April Windows 10 update. We've proactively added a new matching 'Light Mode' to Winstep applications, which affects not only the User Interface panels but also context menus, balloon tooltips and thumbnail/live preview backgrounds.
Ability to set the size of Grid Stacks:
The size of a Grid Stack is automatically determined by default based on content and screen space available. Added new options to the Appearance tab of Grid Stack Property panels to set a fixed width and/or height.
Improved handling of multi monitor profiles:
The current multi monitor profile is now saved automatically when the application exits, which should prevent wrong settings from being applied after a display change.
Multi monitor profiles are especially useful for users with laptops and a second monitor, who need two different profiles for when at home or on the road.
Further improved handling of UWP apps:
Winstep applications are unique in their category because they're able to handle UWP apps in Windows 10 like normal Win32 applications. This is never-the-less made more difficult by Microsoft's propensity to break their own rules when it comes to UWP apps.
An example of this is Sticky Notes, which is owned by a Win32 Explorer window despite being a UWP app. This was causing Sticky Notes not to be handled properly by the Winstep application (especially if you tried pinning it to the dock or the NextSTART taskbar) until we fixed it in this release.
Also fixed in v19.2 is the fact that left clicking 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.
Bad activation date for annual alarms:
A bug calculating the next activation date for annual alarms could cause them to skip one year. This has been fixed, but if you have any anual alarms set you might want to double-check their current activation dates - to fix it just edit the alarm and press OK.
Multiple User Interface tweaks:
Changed some of the icons used in the User Interface to better match the overal style of Windows 10 and made sure section headers in the User Interface are always bright enough to be seen against Dark Mode panel backgrounds even if the currently system Accent color isn't.
Fixed icon label text effect settings:
The text effect setting (Normal, Outline, Shadow, Sharp, Emboss) used for dock icon labels in the new Icon Label Settings dialog was not being properly applied.

New in Winstep Nexus 18.12 (Dec 17, 2018)

Updated Portuguese language file.
In the Shelf/Drawer Transparency dialog, the user can now also specify that the tab text and control icons remain opaque. This allows making the Shelf or Drawer background fully transparent while still being able to switch to different tabs, collapse it, etc...
Floating label settings have now been moved to their own independent dialog, with immediate preview of changes.
Type of text effect applied to floating labels can now be specified (Normal, Outline, Shadow, Sharp, Emboss).
Opacity of the text effect applied to floating labels can now be specified.
The luminosity of the background color used in the label preview box can be changed with the mouse scroll wheel.
Improved sharpness of icon label text in Shelves and Drawers.
Moved the menu scaling setting to the Appearance tab of Docks, Shelves and Drawers Properties dialog.
'Pin to Dock' right click menu option has been moved to the top of the menu.
Sub-docks attached to Shelves and Drawers are now properly named in context menus and in the Item Properties dialog as 'Sub-Docks'.
The right click context menu of a sub-dock attached to a Shelf or Drawer now more suitably says 'Delete sub-dock' instead of 'Remove from Shelf'.
Themes can now also specify the running indicator image by including a 'NxIndicator.png/.tif/.ico' bitmap file in the theme folder. The theme will only use that indicator bitmap, however, if the user has left the running indicator selection as 'Default' instead of specifically choosing an indicator from the list of available indicator bitmaps.
you can now specify 'No Label' for icon labels in Shelves and Drawers, at which point not even a floating label on mouseover is displayed.
The entire contents of sub-docks can now be copied by dragging & dropping a sub-dock icon while pressing the CTRL key.
Right clicking on a Folder item set to open as a menu and selecting Open from the context menu that pops up now opens the folder in Explorer.
The Browse for Folder feature now uses a more flexible version of the dialog.
Added new 'Grid Stacks'. Grid Stacks can be added as icons to docks, shelves and drawers. Like Shelf tabs, a Grid Stack can be one of many different types (Regular, Folder, Desktop, Recent, etc...). Like sub-docks, Grid Stacks are only kept open temporarily, until the user clicks somewhere else. The size of Grid Stacks is calculated automatically. Grid Stacks, like sub-docks, can be nested inside each other to as many levels as the user wants. Each Grid Stack has individual settings that can be accessed by right clicking the icon and selecting 'Grid Stack Properties'. To add a new Grid Stack, right click, select 'Add New Item', then Grid Stack then select the type of Grid Stack you want.
Added 'Convert to Grid Stack' option to the context menu of folders in docks and Regular Shelf tabs or Drawers.
Added 'Convert to Folder' to the context menu of folder type Grid Stacks.
Added 'change Folder' to the context menu of folder type Grid Stacks, to make it quicker to change the folder a 'folder type' Grid Stack is pointing to.
Added 'Downloads' (shows the contents of the Downloads folder) new tab type to Shelves, Drawers and Grid Stacks.
Replaced the old 'RAS Connections' tab type with new 'Connections' tab, showing all the available network connections on the sytem.
The user now always gets a confirmation dialog When deleting a sub-dock or Grid Stack regardless of the current delete confirmation settings.
Improved the icon caching mechanism.
Contents of Grid Stacks are now cached in memory after opening the Grid Stack for the first time.
The colors of the icon grid in Shelves and Grid Stacks are now calculated automatically when the original theme did not support them or the theme author did not set them correctly.
Added new 'Open folders in Grid Stacks' setting to Folder type tabs in a Shelf or Folder type Drawers and Grid Stacks. Opens all folders as a temporary Grid Stack when clicking on them - note that folders can still be opened in Explorer by right clicking and selecting Open or in a menu by right clicking and selecting 'Browse'.
Added 'Open as Grid Stack' option to the right click context menu of folders.
Deleting a 'Regular' type tab in the Contents tab of a Shelf Properties dialog now prompts for confirmation.
Changed the default Capture Delay of the Capture Desktop internal command from none to 5 seconds.
Added 'Ascending/Descending' settings to the Sort By options of tabs that can be sorted.
Opening Network related tabs (such as Network Connections) no longer blocks the application while Windows discovers all the network objects.
Grid Stacks can be detached by dragging them away from the original position. Detached Grid Stacks stay open until the user explicitily closes them.
Some previous per-dock/shelf settings are now global (i.e.; they apply to all docks and shelves): switch shelf mini-tabs, shift icons to insert, open sub-docks on mouseover, no final boing animation effect, close sub-docks on launch, no icon reflection on vertical sub-docks.
Added new 'Detach' sound event, played when a Grid Stack is detached.
Improved keyboard navigation of Shelves, Drawers and Grid Stacks.
Added new 'Quick Search Filter' to Shelves, Drawers and Grid Stacks. Simply start typing to start filtering content: a search box pops up so you can see what you are typing and know that content is currently being filtered. The ESC key can be used to terminate the filter and backspace to delete characters.
The Quick Search filter and be disabled in the More Options dialog of the Behavior tab of Shelves, Drawers and Grid Stacks. The color of the Quick Search filter can be customized in the same place.
A Shelf set to hide the tabs can now always be activated by screen edge bump or swipe.
A Shelf or Drawer docked to a screen edge and inverted can now also be expanded by pulling the bottom edge.
Pressing ESC on a Shelf/Drawer now collapses the Shelf Drawer. Pressing Enter when the Shelf/Drawer is collapsed expands it.
Some Shelf themes no longer appear as if the top of the Shelf body has been 'cropped' when the tabs are set to be left, centered, or right justified.
Windows shortcuts (.lnk files) to folders and now also be opened as Grid Stacks and browsed via menus.
Added automatic multi-monitor profiles, allowing different objects to be at different positions and enabled/disabled for each monitor configuration. Multi MOnitor Profiles can be disabled in the General tab of Preferences.
Thumbnail extraction should now be much faster as it now uses the local Windows thumbnail cache when available.
Added new 'Reset Icon Cache' option to the Dock and Shelf Management sub-menu in the main right click context menu of Shelves, Drawers and Grid Stacks. It purges and rebuilds the internal icon cache
Fixed some lingering issues with pinning some Windows Store Apps to the dock.
Dragging a floating Drawer across the screen when collapsed by dragging it by the tab, would make it randomly jump all over, sometimes even going off screen.
When using a Dock and Shelf Management option to create a tab in a Shelf from a Drawer or a Dock, the application was asking the user to select a Shelf even if there was only one Shelf created.
Text greater than 10.pt with the outline and shadow effects was being rendered at a smaller size than it should.
The balloon tooltip was not displaying file information if the filename was enclosed in quotes.
The Media Player icon in Shelves and Drawers was not accepting dropped audio files or folders.
Selecting 'Run As Administrator' from a context menu and then replying 'No' to the UAC prompt would result in a second UAC prompt appearing on a 64 bit system.
When deleting alarms in the Alarm Manager the alarm selection could jump to a different alarm than the next one on the list.
Fixed potential data loss issue where a sub-dock could be deleted when dragging it into a new position in the main dock.
An in-Shelf sub-dock could become 'stuck' and not open again until the application was restarted if a Shelf or Drawer was closed with a sub-dock still open.
Fixed issue that could cause the wrong item to be deleted when moving an item from one Shelf or Drawer to another.
Clicking on a Language Bar IC in a sub-dock to open the Language Bar menu was closing the sub-dock.
The 'Run As' and 'Open Folder in a Menu' item attributes where not being carried over when moving or copying items via drag & drop.
Clicking on a folder menu for the second time now closes the menu instead of closing it and immediately opening it again.
Fixed issue displaying the icon of and the launching of some files with a filename containing non-ANSI characters.
Fixed issue with drag & drop of some files with a filename containing non-ANSI characters.
Text in the Shareware Reminder dialog was getting cropped at the end on high DPI systems.
When removing an item from a Shelf the confirmation prompt mentioned a Drawer instead.
Fixed minor memory leak when closing Shelfs, Drawers or Grid Stacks showing folders in the user's hard drive.
Fixed potential corruption if changing the contents of docks while also changing the contents of Shelves via the Contents tab of a Shelf Properties dialog.
Fixed access violation error that could happen when deleting the last file in a folder type tab and also an associated visual glitch where the icon disappeared only to re-appear immediately.
Sort By Date was only taking the date into consideration and ignoring the time.
When opening a 'Network' tab type in a Shelf or Grid Stack for the second time, items with exactly the same name would show identical icons.
Monochrome 1bit icons (i.e.; color bitmap) could crash the application.
Animated icons were not being properly colorized when icon colorization was applied.
Fixed issue where the blur region of a fully expanded Shelf could be displayed for a collapsed Shelf.
The left mini-tab symbol was not being positioned properly for Shelves/Drawers docked to the right screen edge.
Under some circustances a tab would still show when the Shelf/Drawer was collapsed even if 'Hide Tabs' was enabled.
Fixed Power Options icon in a Windows Control Panel tab appearing as a Question Mark icon.
When opening or closing a sub-dock, any particle animation launch effect in the parent dock would be cut short.
Deleting or moving a Shelf tab while the Shelf Properties dialog was open could lead to corruption and/or content loss of one or more Regular tabs in that Shelf.
Changes made to the properties of a Shelf tab while the Shelf Properties dialog was open would be lost.
Fixed minimum Drawer size calculation which could allow the tab header to become cropped with certain themes.
'Disable menu scaling on high DPI settings' was no longer working properly after adding manual menu scaling in v18.10.
'Disable Shelf scaling on high DPI settings' was not properly scaling font size after v18.8.
Selecting 'No Effect' in the Effects Panel and then clicking on the Effect Settings button would crash the application.

New in Winstep Nexus 18.3 (Apr 1, 2018)

New in Winstep Nexus 18.1 (Jan 21, 2018)

New in Winstep Nexus 17.12 (Dec 29, 2017)

Updated the Portuguese language file.
Updated the Portuguese (Brazil) language file.
Updated the Farsi language file.
Updated the Chinese Simplified language file.
Updated Hungarian language file (inc.).
You can now drag & drop PNG, ICO and TIF files into folders in the dock as if they were normal files by pressing either SHIFT or CTRL while dragging. This allows you to move and copy those files as normal instead of them being used as icon replacement images.
Added new 'Take Picture' sound event, and default camera shutter sound file, played when the user clicks on the 'Capture Desktop' internal command.
Added new picture quality, delay, and sound settings to the 'Capture Desktop' internal command.
New 'Alarm Manager' internal command, opens the Alarm Manager window.
New 'Hide Dock' internal command, hides/collapses the dock.
You can now launch a new instance of an application appearing on the dock as running, but not pinned to it, either by pressing SHIFT while left clicking the icon or by double clicking the icon.
Added missing ex-Yugoslavia countries to the weather codes database. Automatic geo-location via IP address should now work with the new countries too.
Added many new Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia locations with associated weather codes.
Internet/URL shortcuts are now automatically resolved into internal 'URL' type items when dropped into the dock. This allows the source shortcuts (e.g.; shortcuts to Steam games or websites) to be later deleted from the file system without the entries in the dock stopping to work.
The Media Control internal commands Previous, Next, Play, Pause, Stop, Mute, Volume Up and Volume Down should now also work with media players other than WinAmp and Windows Media Player. Please note: some media players, such as VLC and Gom Player, must first be configured to accept global keys, i.e.; accept the keys even if the player window itself does not have the focus.
Environment variables such as %ALLUSERSPROFILE% are now automatically expanded when launching an item.
The first weather forecast icon now always shows the max temperature for that day, regardless of current time.
Window preview thumbnails now automatically scale up on high DPI systems.
Thumbnail images on balloon tooltips now now automatically scale up on high DPI systems.
Drag & drop file operations (i.e.; dropping files into folder icons) are now performed in the background, which makes the application remain responsive even when copying or moving multi-megabyte files.
Added more WHOIS servers to the Active Connections dialog, and WHOIS information is now properly retrieved from the root registar.
UWP (Universal Windows Apps) in Windows 10 are now labeled as such in the balloon information tooltips.
When dragging & dropping an executable file directly from an Explorer folder the name of the resulting shortcut is now automatically retrieved from the file description (e.g.; iexplore.exe now becomes 'Internet Explorer' instead of just 'iexplorer').
Windows 10 supports setting PNG files as the current desktop wallpaper, which was previously not supported on the panels in Preferences that displayed the current wallpaper as a background image (e.g.; Themes tab), resulting in a solid white background.
The balloon tooltip of the Capture Desktop internal command now displays a thumbnail of the last screenshot taken.
Clicking in the Themes tab in Preferences and very rapidly clicking on another tab before the Themes tab finished displaying completely could result in the Themes tab getting 'stuck'.
Fixed retrieval of current weather conditions for when Weather.com does not provide valid current conditions information.
The Email Checker module should now work properly with ISPs (looking at you AT&T) that do not follow the correct POP3 protocol (RFC 1939).
Midnight in 12 hour format was being displayed as '0 AM' instead of '12 AM' in the Alarm Manager and Alarm Reminder dialogs.
The ' Messages Unread' report of the Email Checker on an IMAP connection was not being translated into the currently selected language.
Information regarding the latest Email Checker connections was being incorrectly reported when opening the Email Checker Settings dialog from a context menu.
The application could freeze for several minutes after returning from Standby on Surface Pro laptops because of the 'Connected Standby/InstantGo' power saving feature used in those laptops.
Fixed glitchy resize of the available screen area which could happen when the dock was set to reserve screen space, the dock was forced to automatically reduce the user preset icon size in order to fit on the screen, and a new item was added to or removed from the dock.
System tray popups no longer appear at the left of the screen in Windows 10 and should now be correctly positioned next to the mouse pointer.
Fixed some issues which could cause the WHOIS right click context menu command to fail on the Active Connections dialog.
Microsoft broke drag & drop operations from the Windows Start Menu in one of the latest Windows 10 updates, which caused shortcuts dragged from the Start Menu not to be resolved properly. This resulted in dock items of 'virtual shell item' types with low resolution icons pointing to shortcut (.lnk) files instead of directly to the target files.
Immediately after a settings reset to factory default, the weather module tooltip would display 'Location not set'.
Improved weather module GeoLocation for when Maxmind returns a city name not in the Weather codes database but MSN returns a different city name for that same location, which already IS in the database.
Fixed issue which could cause a crash or data corruption while performing a WHOIS in the Active Connections dialog.
Fixed some potential timing issues with Windows systray pop ups under Windows 10.
Fixed some issues positioning the Windows clock calendar panel under Windows 10.
Fixed issue that could potentially freeze Explorer when clicking on a system tray icon under Windows 10.
Fixed issue under Windows 10 where the Windows clock calendar might not pop up if DPI scaling was not set to 100%.

New in Winstep Nexus 17.1.1081 (Jan 27, 2017)

Updated the Portuguese language file.
Added new 'Next Desktop Background' internal command. Switches to the next wallpaper when Windows is in slideshow mode.
Added a toggle z-order option (Always On Top or Normal Z-Order) to the right click context menu of a running application.
Users no longer have to go through the Setup wizard When installing updates via the Winstep Update Manager.
Added 'WsMMPlay.exe' applet to isolate the main application from buggy 3rd party software codecs and filters when playing MP3 files.
Added two new options to the Alarms Weekly schedule: 'Beginning date' and 'repeat every'. This allows creating alarms that only go off, for instance, every other Monday.
WHen using the wallpaper hot-track colorization option, when the wallpaper changes colors now make a smooth transition instead of an abrupt change.
Added setting to prevent the ESC key from closing Alarm Reminders, instead turning it into a snooze button. Useful for those who use clock alarms to wake up and unconsciously press ESC before immediately going back to sleep.
Issue that could cause some document thumbnail to be rendered with a black opaque background instead of transparent.
Changes made in the Email Checker module Settings Panel invoked via the right click context menu were being discarded.
The logo was not being painted correctly on the 'Version Information' dialog.
Fixed critical bug in which using an animated mouseover effect on a tab with thumbnail images (e.g; pictures, videos, folders, etc....) would result in a hard crash and application termination if the user moused over a thumbnail while it was still morphing from icon into thumbnail.
The MSI installer fix in v16.12 broke Shortcut resolution when launching applications, which in turn made it impossible to run shortcuts to 64 bit applications.
Icon labels in the dock were not being correctly positioned if the size of the icons in the dock was larger than the magnification size.
Fixed timing issue that could cause the Weather module to keep flashing forever.
When using 12-hour time, any alarm set to 12:00-12:59 AM would reset itself to 12:00-12:59 PM.
Performance Settings set via the Advanced dialog were being ignored.
Fixed potential issue where the result of a WhoIs request in the Active Connections panel could be reported without line breaks.
Fixed a problem obtaining the thumbnails of some running applications, caused by a method change in v16.12, which would render some thumbnails completely black. We still manage to get thumbnails we previously couldn't with the original method.
Fixed positioning issue that would freeze the application if a full screen alarm popped up while a window alarm was still on-screen.
Fixed module related issues where previous setting changes could become undone by clicking Ok on a module's settings panel.
If the 'Disable reflections when dock is vertical' setting was enabled, a vertical dock rotated into horizontal would not display icons reflections, and a vertical dock rotated from horizontal would keep the reflection bitmaps in memory instead of destroying them.
Alarms where not accepting dates in the dd.mm.yyyy format (i.e.; where the date separator was a '.' character).
Fixed issue that could cause icons to appear cropped at the top or bottom when playing the Bounce, Squish and Push animations on a magnifying dock.
Fixed potential issue where Nexus would crash with an Access Violation error when changing languages if the dock held a module not supported by the free version of Nexus.
Trying to open Active Connections from Net Meter Settings, Battery Information and Power Log from Battery Settings or the Alarm Manager from Clock Settings, would make the application unresponsive to mouse clicks if those dialogs were already open.

New in Winstep Nexus 16.12.1075 (Dec 9, 2016)

New in Winstep Nexus 16.09.1050 (Oct 7, 2016)

Nexus v16.9 complete change log:
Updated Brazilian language file.
Added a 'View Change Log' button to the Version Information dialog (which opens when you click the version number in the top right corner of the About tab in Preferences). Clicking the button opens another dialog which interfaces with the history files and makes it easier to see the additions and bug fixes in each release.
Added a 'Check Internet Connection' button to the Troubleshooting dialog in Preferences, to help diagnose Internet communication problems.
After more than a decade, NOAA discontinued the web site from where METAR information was retrieved. Updated URLs and parsing code so METAR information is now successfuly retrieved from www.aviationweather.gov.
Some applications (such as Firefox or UWP apps) were wrongly being identified as full screen when maximized on monitors without a taskbar or with a auto-hide taskbar. This caused screen edge bumps, etc, to be temporarily ignored (edge bumps are disabled so they do not activate accidentally when the user is playing a full screen game, for instance).
Fixed a couple of instances where the CD Control icon or drive icons in a Drives tab of the Shelf might not be properly updated after a media or drive change.
The 'Hide for maximized applications' setting was also triggering the dock to hide if you clicked on the Desktop.
Changes to the default Weather feed source URLs were not being applied until weather cache information became stale.
The Email Checker failed on IMAP servers that sent a CAPABILITY response just after login or didn't add OK to the STATUS command response.
Nexus Ultimate v16.9 complete change log:
Updated Brazilian language file.
Added a 'View Change Log' button to the Version Information dialog (which opens when you click the version number in the top right corner of the About tab in Preferences). Clicking the button opens another dialog which interfaces with the history files and makes it easier to see the additions and bug fixes in each release.
Added a 'Check Internet Connection' button to the Troubleshooting dialog in Preferences, to help diagnose Internet communication problems.
The Shelf icon cache is no longer destroyed when changing drive media or adding/removing drives.
After more than a decade, NOAA discontinued the web site from where METAR information was retrieved. Updated URLs and parsing code so METAR information is now successfuly retrieved from www.aviationweather.gov.
The Battery module 'Overlap information on battery icon' setting can now be independently set for vertical and horizontal styles.
Some applications (such as Firefox or UWP apps) were wrongly being identified as full screen when maximized on monitors without a taskbar or with a auto-hide taskbar. This caused screen edge bumps, etc, to be temporarily ignored (edge bumps are disabled so they do not activate accidentally when the user is playing a full screen game, for instance).
Fixed a couple of instances where the CD Control icon or drive icons in a Drives tab of the Shelf might not be properly updated after a media or drive change.
The 'Hide for maximized applications' setting was also triggering the dock to hide if you clicked on the Desktop.
Changes to the default Weather feed source URLs were not being applied until weather cache information became stale.
The Email Checker failed on IMAP servers that sent a CAPABILITY response just after login or didn't add OK to the STATUS command response.

New in Winstep Nexus 16.06.1043 (Aug 3, 2016)

Added new 'Fast Boot' option to the General tab of Preferences. When enabled it should help make the application boot faster forcing Windows to load it before most other applications. Since it does this by adding an entry to the RunOnce key, some security packages (such as WinPatrol) might start prompting the user.
Normalized the time remaining shown when downloading updates so it didn't jump all over the place.
Running Universal/Metro applications in Windows 10 now display the proper app icon instead of a general App icon.
Running Universal/Metro applications can now be pinned to the dock.
Multiple instances of running Universal/Metro applications can now be grouped together.
Shortcuts to Universal/Metro applications pinned to the dock now behave like other Win32 applications in terms of complying to the current 'Combine dock icons with running applications' and 'Do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' settings.
When pinning a running application to the dock, the new shortcut now uses the running application's customized icon (if any).
All User Interface bitmaps are now stored internally as high-resolution bitmaps so they always look good even on very high-DPI systems.
User Interface is now 100% compatible with the current Windows system colors and Stardock WindowBlinds themes.
Effect bitmaps have been moved to an external resource DLL to cut the size of updates by half.
Moved some User Interface images to an external resource DLL.
Text in the User Interface now uses Segoe UI instead of Tahoma on high DPI systems with Cleartype enabled.
Update Manager options are now grayed out if the user chooses not to check for updates, to make it clear that those options only have an effect if Check for updates is enabled.
The Item Properties dialog was sometimes showing a blank icon when changing the filename or icon path of an application.
The 'Colorize with dominant color of desktop background' feature was sometimes not working with the Windows 10 wallpaper slide-show feature.
The 'Lookup IP Address' internal command was failing to get the correct user's location if it only had latitude and longitude coordinates.
Fixed huge GDI/memory leak introduced in v16.2 that could eventually crash the application when icons on the left side of the dock representing running applications showed the number of open windows for that application. The original image/icon (without the overlapping number) was not getting destroyed as it should.
Fixed many misc.issues on the UI related to high DPI settings.
Nexus Ultimate v16.6 complete change log:
Added new 'Fast Boot' option to the General tab of Preferences. When enabled it should help make the application boot faster forcing Windows to load it before most other applications. Since it does this by adding an entry to the RunOnce key, some security packages (such as WinPatrol) might start prompting the user.
Normalized the time remaining shown when downloading updates so it didn't jump all over the place.
Running Universal/Metro applications in Windows 10 now display the proper app icon instead of a general App icon.
Running Universal/Metro applications can now be pinned to the docks.
Multiple instances of running Universal/Metro applications can now be grouped together.
Shortcuts to Universal/Metro applications pinned to docks now behave like other Win32 applications in terms of complying to the current 'Combine dock icons with running applications' and 'Do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' settings.
When pinning a running application to the dock, the new shortcut now uses the running application's customized icon (if any).
All User Interface bitmaps are now stored internally as high-resolution bitmaps so they always look good even on very high-DPI systems.
User Interface is now 100% compatible with the current Windows system colors and Stardock WindowBlinds themes.
Effect bitmaps have been moved to an external resource DLL to cut the size of updates by half.
Moved some User Interface images to an external resource DLL.
Text in the User Interface now uses Segoe UI instead of Tahoma on high DPI systems with Cleartype enabled.
The tree view menu in the System Tray Customization dialog now scales up properly on high DPI systems.
Update Manager options are now grayed out if the user chooses not to check for updates, to make it clear that those options only have an effect if Check for updates is enabled.
Differences in Shelf transparency from expanded to collapsed were not being properly applied during the Shelf collapse animation.
The 'Colorize with dominant color of desktop background' feature was sometimes not working with the Windows 10 wallpaper slide-show feature.
The 'Lookup IP Address' internal command was failing to get the correct user's location if it only had latitude and longitude coordinates.
Fixed huge GDI/memory leak introduced in v16.2 that could eventually crash the application when icons on the left side of the dock representing running applications showed the number of open windows for that application. The original image/icon (without the overlapping number) was not getting destroyed as it should.
Fixed many misc.issues on the UI related to high DPI settings.

New in Winstep Nexus 16.05.1036 (May 29, 2016)

Nexus Ultimate v16.5 complete change log:
Updated Russian language file.
File format of screenshots taken by the 'Capture Desktop' internal command can now be set as either JPG or PNG.
Filled histogram colors used for the CPU, Net and RAM Meter icon modules are now a bit transparent so the background of the icon can still be seen.
URLs dragged from all browsers should now use the web page title for the item's label instead of the actual URL domain address.
Added new 'Overlap information on battery icon' option to the battery module, enabled by default. Controls whether the AC Power symbol, charge percentage and battery runtime values are drawn on top of the battery icon or next to it. This allows using customized multi-state battery images that wouldn't look good with battery information overlapping the battery image.
The 'Most Active Programs', 'Power Events Log' and 'Battery Information' dialogs now show a button on the taskbar.
Since it's global, also added the 'Do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' setting to the More Options dialog in the General tab of Preferences. Also renamed the dialog from 'Advanced Settings' to 'More Options' for consistency with the button that invokes it.
The Animation Speed slider in a dock Auto-Hide Settings dialog is now disabled if the auto-hide animation is set to No Animation.
Added new 'Auto Backup Settings' internal command. Intended to be used with the built-in Alarm Manager to make automatic scheduled backups, it makes a backup of the application's settings without prompting the user for a filename. It creates the filename based on the current date and time and stores the backup in the last used backup folder (or C:\Users\Public\Documents\WinStep\Backup\ by default).
The battery in the Battery Information dialog now displays the style and settings currently selected by the user and glows with the dominant color of the battery image.
The 'Colorize low and critical battery states' battery module setting now also properly colorizes customized multi-state battery images.
Added new alternative 'Hue Shift' colorization method which allows color information to be preserved and whites to remain white.
Changed the Hue shift colorization algorithm to one that is more accurate than Microsoft's solution. This can affect colorization of the Battery Monitor and Wanda fish modules.
The 'Edge Swipe Settings' buttons in the Behavior tab of the Shelf and Dock Properties panels are now grayed out if the user is using edge bumps instead of edge swipes to activate the dock/Shelf.
A theme validation is now performed when Restoring settings from a previous backup, so the user doesn't end up with a blank theme if the theme used at the time of the backup no longer exists.
Added 'Most Active Programs' button to the CPU module settings dialog, to make this feature more visible.
The Colorize settings are now also directly available in the Themes tab by sliding the UI with the arrow. This allows quick preview of colorization changes without having to constantly open and close the Colorization Settings dialog.
The Winstep Update Manager now uses the currently selected settings when you click the 'Check for Updates' button in the Advanced tab of Preferences.
Increased the interpolation quality used to render dock backgrounds.
The 'Minimize to dock' and 'Combine dock icons with running applications' settings are now only available when 'Show running applications in this dock' is selected.
Improved the color hot-track algorithm so it also takes into account the average background color when it can't calculate a proper dominant color.
A black or gray scale tint color now grayscales the bitmap for both the Tint and Hue shift colorizing modes.
Tweaked the vertical position of the text in the Shelf tabs when running under high-DPI settings.
Added a new 'Colorize text' option to the Color Settings, enabled by default. Text can now be optionally colorized as well. Disabling this option allows the user to colorize a theme but still be able to tweak text colors manually via the theme 'Fonts' dialog.
Replaced the Shelf and dock images used in the Docks & Shelves tab in Preferences so they can scale up properly on high DPI displays.
Added 'Flip Dock Background' option to the Appearence sub-menu of the dock's right-click context menu. Equivalent to toggling the 'Do not flip background for docks at the top of the screen' setting but with immediate effect.
Added 'Show Container' and 'Browse Container' options to the right-click context menu of the 'Restore Wallpaper' internal command. Allows you to open or browse the folder where the Windows wallpaper is stored.
Fixed malformed request to GeoIP location server that caused GeoIP location to stop working after 2016/03/17.
The 'Lookup IP address' internal command would fail if the GeoIP information was not already in the cache.
The 'Show full right click context menu options?' setting in the More Options dialog of the General tab in Preferences was not sticking.
The dock could crop the number of visible tray icons in grouped mode when changing the iconsize of the dock.
Pseudo-3D dock backgrounds like the Leopard theme no longer appear heavilly distorted at certain icon/icon reflection sizes.
The 'Capture Desktop Settings' dialog, when invoked from a right click context menu, was not saving the settings to the proper location.
The Shelf could auto-hide while a item delete confirmation dialog was still on screen if the user moved the mouse pointer over the Shelf.
If the auto-hide delay was too short, the Shelf could auto-hide while it was still performing unrelated animations such as shifting icons after deleting an item, etc...
Synchronization of the system clock with the Internet Time Servers failed if the regional settings for the SYSTEM account (used by the Winstep Helper Service) used a difference decimal point character than the user account under which the application run (e.g.; "123,4" instead of "123.
4" or vice-versa).
Some routines were still using bilinear instead of bicubic transformations for rescaling bitmaps, which caused the bitmaps to look blurrier than they should.
Nexus Ultimate would crash if a dock was set to auto-hide when selecting a new theme in the Dock Properties dialog and the user clicked outside the Dock Properties window (which would cause the dock to hide) and then on the themes list.
Certain dock backgrounds could cause visual glitches when mousing over near the position of a dock that was hidden into a screen edge.
A dock set to hide/collapse automatically after launching an application (or a sub-dock set to close automatically after launching an application) would fail to do so if the item being launched required admin privileges (i.e.; UAC prompt).
Always on top docks set to auto-hide for maximized applications will now only do so if they are not reserving screen space (maximized applications would not be overlapped by the dock in this case) and will only auto-hide for full screen applications.
The preview of the Destop Module Battery Monitor on the Modules tab of Preferences would show a disabled battery if the battery module was not currently in use.
Fixed some Shelf tab width issues that could occur if the tab font size was too large to fit.
Drag & Drop of URLs was not working with certain browsers (e.g.; Waterfox) that did not supply the ANSI UniformResourceLocator format. ANSI and Unicode formats are now correctly accepted.
Changing units of the weather module from C to F or vice-versa only became effective after the cached weather information became stale and the weather information was refreshed.
The 'Colorize animated fish style' and 'Hue' values for the Wanda module were not being saved under the free version of Nexus and Nexus Ultimate.
Sub-dock indicators were overlapping other icons and causing visual glitches if the icon spacing was less than 8 pixels.
The 'Popup delay' slider in the Activation Settings dialog of the Dock Properties Behavior tab appeared enabled even if 'Bring dock forward on mouseover' was not selected.
With very short auto-hide delays, or under certain circunstances when a dock was set to auto-hide for maximized applications, a dock could auto-hide in the middle of a resize/move animation, which would cause it to glitch.
Clicking an icon to open an in-Shelf sub-dock could cause a persistent blank white box to appear if in-shelf sub-docks were set to open on mouse over and the sub-dock had started playing the open animation just prior to the click.
The Winstep Update Manager always failed to download updates with a 'file size mimatch' error on East Asian systems.
A sub-dock opening animation would briefly flash the full glass blur region at the begining if the 'Aero Glass Blur' effect was enabled.
A dock would keep bouncing up and down if 'Auto hide for maximized applications' was enabled and the user tried to drag a shortcut from a maximized window into the dock.
The 'Colorize low and critical battery states' battery module setting was not 'sticking' between restarts of the application.
The 'Aero Glass' (non-Windows 10) balloon tooltip style was blurring the tooltip window background on Windows 10 systems.
Under certain circumstances, if a theme's original font style did not exist on the system, text width could be calculated as zero and cause visual glitches.
Winstep applications should now display the high-resolution icon in Explorer on high-DPI/large icon systems.
Docks should now be a bit less 'jittery' when inserting items into them via drag & drop.
A Shelf attached to the top screen edge with the tabs set to appear at the top of the Shelf, was not hiding the tabs properly when collapsed if the 'Hide tabs' setting was enabled.
The 'Auto Hide at Startup' option could sometimes fail to hide the dock, leaving it visible and in an unresponsive state until you activated it.
It was very easy (and very annoying!) to accidentally activate a dock at the bottom of the screen via an edge bump when going for the last option in a context menu. This could make the dock cover the menu(s). Edge bumps are now ignored if the mouse pointer is over a menu.
Getting the current wallpaper to use as the background in certain dialogs with result previews could sometimes fail under Windows 8.x and 10. This could cause changes in previews to overwrite instead of replacing each other (Dock Icon Spacing and Dock Transparency dialogs, for instance).
The 'Colorize with dominant color of desktop background' feature could stop working properly after going to the Themes tab in Preferences.
Shelf tab overlay bitmaps (used in the DarkTech theme, for instance) were not obeying the user specified transparency settings.
The Themes tab in Preferences, unlike the Themes tab in a dock Properties dialog, was unable to display RK Launcher Nexus themes.
Fixed slow memory leak in the Shelf that occured whenever an icon in the Global icon cache was changed or a Shelf tab was deleted.
'Colorize with the dominant color of the desktop background' now works properly with the Windows 7 wallpaper slideshow.
Fixed another memory leak that occured when switching tabs in the Shelf if one of the tabs contained Winstep modules.
The Battery Monitor Event Actions dialog would not properly display the background image if the Low Battery alarm was set to 'Do Nothing' and the Critical Battery alarm was set to something other than 'Do Nothing'.
Fixed some issues displaying and correctly applying RK Launcher dock backgrounds in the Themes tab of Preferences.
Closing Preferences could interfere with the Windows wallpaper slideshow feature if Windows changed the wallpaper while the Preferences window was still open.
The application crashed if a context menu got repainted while a thumbnail preview of a document in the menu was being shown.

New in Winstep Nexus 16.03.1030 (Mar 11, 2016)

Updated Spanish language file.
'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 target 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.
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).
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 *Biliner* 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.
Text on Windows 7-style Balloon tooltips was not being correctly centered vertically.

New in Winstep Nexus 16.02.1028 (Feb 12, 2016)

Updated the French language file
Updated Italian language file (incomplete)
Updated Spanish language file
Updated Indonesian language file
Updated Portuguese (Brazil) language file
Greatly increased the odds of getting the user's correct location for the weather module based on IP address
The current language is now automatically refreshed after a language pak update
Updated the list of Internet Time Servers used by the clock module
The Update Manager can now hide an update by selecting 'Never (Hide this Update)' from 'Remind me again in'. This enables the user to hide a particular update he is not interested in without having to deactivate Update Notification altogether
Windows can now be minimized to and restored from the dock
Calculating the Aero Glass blur effect is now about 4 times faster with no apparent loss of quality (Vista/7 only or 8/10 with AeroGlass installed)
Added backup Yahoo Weather feed to make up for the fact that the Google Weather feed is no longer available.Current available feeds are NOOA for current conditions plus Weather.com, MSN Weather and Yahoo Weather for current/forecast conditions
Updated the Net Statistics dialog which still showed the old UI
Icon shifting to make room for new items being dragged into the dock is now a bit smoother than before
Improved the smoothness of adding items to and re-arranging items in the dock
Changes to the dock's position now make it smoothly 'slide in' into the new screen location instead of instantly jumping into place
Added 'Auto-Detect Location' to the right click context menu of the Weather module, to update the user's current location based on his IP address
Clock settings panel now shows previews for both the analog and digital clock style
Added Alarms/Event Scheduling to the Clock Module.The free version of Nexus supports a single Alarm. Alarms can be created to display pop-up reminders, wake you up with music or run programs/internal commands at specific times, once or periodically. Alarm events can optionally wake the computer up if Sleeping or Hibernating.Users can build their own MP3/WMA playlists or use existing M3U playlists for musical alarms, which also feature Snooze and Easy-Wake (sound volume increases with time) abilities
Completely re-organized module's internal structures so it's much easier to add new modules in the future
Changed the default 'Attention' effect from 'Flash' to 'Sonic Boom'
Average CpU usage is now monitored and an alert displayed if Nexus consistently uses over 90% of one core for over 5 minutes
Weather information is now cached for an hour to prevent hammering the weather servers unnecessarily
If one of the weather feeds being used provides sunrise and sunset times, the weather module is now able to determine more accurately whether to display a Sun or Moon icon
Icons of currently running applications on the left side of the dock now also display the number of instances when the 'Combine dock icons with running applications' and 'Group similar windows into a single icon' settings are both enabled
Added a 'Check for Updates' button to the About tab in Preferences, just below the version number
Changed the 'Notify me of beta (test) versions' setting to be off by default.The user must explicitily enable this option if he wishes to be notified of public beta versions
Added new 'CD Control' internal command.Allows the user to know at a glance what type of media is currently inserted into a CD-ROM type drive, and opens/closes the CD tray when clicked on. Automatically replaces any existing 'Open CD-ROM' and 'Close CD-ROM' internal commands in use
Reorganized the Behavior tab of the Dock Properties panel and added 'Activation Settings' and 'Auto-Hide Settings' panels
You can now drag & drop .ico, .png, .tif, .dll and .exe files directly into the Icon Browser dialog as an alternative to browsing for a file
The Weather module information is now automatically updated immediately after returning from Sleep or Hibernation
Renamed 'Fast User Switching' internal command to 'Lock Computer'
Added a 'Capture Desktop Settings' configuration panel to the right click menu of the 'Capture Desktop' internal command
Moved the customized 'Explosion animation' settings to the Recycler Module Settings panel
Re-organized the Advanced Settings panel (Preferences -> General -> More Options)
Added new 'Fade in' mouseover, launch and attention effect.All icons are semi-transparent and fade-in to opaque when you mouse over them, then fade out to semi-transparent as you mouse away. Initial transparency can be modified by changing normal icon transparency, otherwise it's 50%
For security reasons the clock module now displays a warning dialog if the time difference between the system clock and the Time Server is larger than 15 hours, giving the user a choice to adjust the time anyway or otherwise cancelling the operation. Cancelling opens the Date and Time Windows dialog (so the user can manually change the date and time) as well as the Clock Module Settings Panel (so the user can alternatively disable automatic time synchronization)
Left clicking the dock's control icon now opens Nexus Preferences
Flash' and 'Jump' are now avaiable as Mouseover, Launch and Attention effects
Switched the names of the 'Bounce' and 'Jump' effects
Renamed the 'Fire' effect to 'Explode'
Effects can now be selected and configured from the new 'Effects Panel'.The new panel allows you to visualize effects before applying them
The Mouseover, Launch and Attention items of the main right click context menu of the dock now open the new Effects Panel instead of displaying a menu with the effect names
Added new 'Shake' mouseover, launch and attention effect.Eight other effects - Fire, Energize, Swirl, Ion Storm, Ignite, Bubble, Plasma and Wormhole - are also shown in the Effects panel but are exclusive to Nexus Ultimate/Winstep Xtreme
When the icon of an item is changed (either automatically when rendering document thumbnails or manually by the user via drag & drop or the Item Properties Editor) the old version now smoothly fades out while the new version fades into place
Added new settings to the Performance vs.Memory Usage panel. The new settings allow the user to control quality of the effects vs. speed vs. memory usage
To help troubleshooting, clicking the 'Test Voice' and 'Test Sounds' buttons in the Sound tab in Preferences now displays a warning dialog if the application has not detected a sound card in the system
Major re-organization of the Position and Behavior tabs in Preferences to fix a common complaint that some related settings were scattered throughout the UI, which made locating them and understanding their relation difficult.Related settings are now grouped together, even though this means some of them will now appear more than once at different places in the UI
If the Weather.com weather feed is down, the next resort is now the Yahoo feed, since it has sunrise and sunset times which the MSN feed does not. The MSN feed is now the last resort
Clicking the Net Meter module now opens the 'Active Connections' panel instead of the Net Statistics panel
Added new 'Lookup IP Address' internal command.Returns the public IP address as well as current location and latitude/longitude coordinates
Added 'Manage Alarms' button to the General tab of Preferences
Added new 'Enable double caching of icons (speed boost)' option to the Performance Settings dialog in the Advanced tab of Preferences. Disabled by default, enable it to boost the rendering speed of magnifying docks by a factor of 2 or more, at the cost of a little bit more memory usage
Speeded up the initial construction of the semi-transparent blur regions by up to 4 times and cut their memory usage also by 4, without no noticeable visual drawbacks (Vista/7 only)
Dock icon labels are now also affected by the system's high-DPI settings
The 'Most Active Programs History' dialog (accessible by right clicking the CPU Meter module) now also shows the second most active process and its CPU usage for each second of the last 5 minutes.The list can also be made to refresh automatically
The 'Bring mouse forward when mouse pointer bumps screen edge' setting makes the dock come on top of other windows when you bump the associated screen edge, regardless of it being docked or free floating. To help with annoying accidental activations, moving the mouse away from the dock after it comes forward now brings the window that previously had the focus to the foreground
Icons now 'glow' when dragging an .ICO, .PNG or .TIF image over a dock shortcut to give a visual cue to the user that dropping that image there will replace the target's shortcut icon
Improved User Interface integration with Windows 10 when running under this version of Windows
Live window preview thumbnails were not going away when the user moved the pointer off the dock
The 'Disable reflections when dock is vertical' option would not retain a disabled setting from session to session
Right clicking on a live preview thumbnail would show a context menu, but the menu would close itself automatically almost immediately after
No file context menu would open if you right-clicked a file of a 'Browse Container' or 'Browse' sub-menu
The Winstep Update Manager incorrectly listed 'Spanish' instead of 'Español' as the localized name for the Spanish language file, which caused it to always display the text in English for Spanish users and also made it impossible to automatically update Spanish language files
Fixed bug that could cause the Net Meter module not to show all existing network adapters
The Item Properties Editor panel was not automatically changing the icon when editing the path of Folder type items
Fixed several issues with the dock becoming wonky when dragging items over it
Menus displaying a list of voice and sound themes no longer display a question mark thumbnail
Themes without a thumbnail now display a generic theme icon thumbnail instead of a question mark icon
The attention effect was not activating for items pined to the dock when 'combine dock icons with running applications' was enabled
The attention effect didn't affect the correct task icon when 'combine dock icons with running applications' was enabled
On multi-monitor systems hiding or showing a dock would leave visible left-overs on the other monitor if the dock was attached to a common screen edge
Native Nexus 'Tiles' skinning mode themes with the 'Zoom tiles when magnifying' option were not being rendered properly when the dock magnified
The Winstep Update Manager was not able to distribute language packs for which the Winstep Update Manager itself did not have a language file
Fixed problem preventing updates to the Portuguese (Brasil) and Spanish language packs due to incorrect configuration names
The 'Always at the base of the icon' option for running indicators would not retain a disabled setting from session to session
The clock module no longer syncs the time with the Internet Time Servers every time the application starts regardless of the check interval
Changes made in the Clock Speech and Sound Settings dialog of the Clock Module Settings panel would still be effective even if the user later pressed Cancel in the Settings panel
Maximized Google Chrome windows were being interpreted as full screen windows, which caused the application to automatically stop reacting to edge bumps (necessary so edge bumps are not accidentally activated when playing a full screen game, for instance)
The 'Combine dock icons with running applications' setting always became enabled after a restart of the application
The Weather module was not being reset properly when reseting settings to default via Troubleshooting Options in Preferences
The 24 hour or AM/PM format was not being reset properly when reseting settings to default via Troubleshooting Options in Preferences
The digital clock module was displaying '12 AM' when it should display '12 PM'
Search internal command was broken in Windows 8.x
The contents of an open weather forecast sub-dock were not being updated when weather information was refreshed
Clicking the Action Center icon twice with re-open the Action Center window instead of closing it (Windows 10 only)
Changes to the custom module icons were sometimes not being saved
The Silent Period combo boxes were showing '12 AM' as '0 AM' and '12 PM' as '12 AM'
Fixed bug which would prevent some modules from using a customized bitmap without restarting the application if the bitmap had been updated but the filename remained the same
Running a link to a shortcut no longer automatically executes the target instead.This allows the user to specifically run customized shortcuts
The icon browser dialog was not displaying icons for known document file types
The new 'smoothly move into place' feature, combined with the 'new item' animation, was causing items added to the end of the dock to momentarily appear outside the same
Re-arranging tasklist items in the dock via drag & drop was broken
Fixed some problems with the 'remove item from dock' animation if the mouse pointer was at the end or begining of the dock and the dock was magnifying
Customizing the icon of a task item via drag & drop of an ICO or PNG image could apply the new icon to the wrong item under certain circumstances
Fixed problem where the mouseover effect would 'stick' to an icon and keep playing even though the mouse pointer was no longer over the dock
Removed limit of 99 entries for the number of task icons being customized, as well as for the window thumbnail and task exclusion lists.Although no warning was issued if the user went over this limit, the lists would become corrupted with some entries missing and others overwritten
Weather module icon now flashes to give some feedback to the user even when the weather information is retrieved from the cache
The Effect Settings buttons in the Dock Properties panel were configuring the wrong effect in Beta 2
The Outline and Shadow text styles were not being scaled up properly on high-DPI systems
Fixed a handful of high-DPI related glitches
Fixed bug in beta 2 that could cause the new CD Control internal command to block or report an error
The 'Most Active Programs' list was logging an empty entry if all processes were using less than 1% CPU
Fixed issue in which an item belonging to the same dock would not be deleted when dropped into the recycler module if the insertion point was before the module
The clock module tooltip was using the current system settings to display the time in 24 or 12 hour format. It now uses the setting specified for the clock module
The wrong icon could be displayed for a customized task items when selecting it from a DLL
if the 'Do not flip background for docks at the top of the screen' setting was enabled the top of the icons could go a bit beyond the top screen edge when magnifying on certain dock backgrounds

New in Winstep Nexus 15.9 (Feb 12, 2016)

Updated the Portuguese language file.
Updated the French language file.
Updated the Indonesian language file.
Added new 'Action Center' internal command (Windows 10 only).
Added 'Show folder in a menu' setting to folder type items in the Item Properties Editor, so shortcuts to folders can be browsed in a menu when clicked on an individual base.
The dock Auto-Hide delay has been extended from 100 ms to 5,000 ms in 100 ms intervals.
The Dock no longer auto-hides while the mouse pointer remains at the edge bump location.
Edge bump delay now ranges from 0 to 2,000ms in 100 ms intervals.
Added new 'Smoke' mouseover effect.
Changed the hue of the live preview thumbnail glass background, to better fit with the Windows original.
When installing a full setup version over an existing version, the user is no longer prompted to overwrite the default theme files.
Reduced the font size used to display the theme's author in the Theme Preview window.
Pressing CTRL while left clicking a shortcut now cycles through all the windows belonging to that same application when 'do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' is enabled.
Pressing CTRL+SHIFT while clicking a shortcut causes the application to launch with Admin rights.
Clicking the clock module now opens the Windows calendar instead of showing the Regional Settings dialog.
Increased the maximum width of menus by 100 pixels.
Added 'Language Bar' internal command, which emulates the functionality of the Windows Language Bar. It changes dynamically, showing the active keyboard layout in the current foreground window, and allows switching to other keyboard layouts through a menu displaying all available language and keyboard layouts.
Double clicking a shortcut now launches a new session when 'Do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' is enabled.
Added 'Always at the base of the icon' setting to the running indicator offset dialog. This forces the running indicator to always be shown below the icon independently of the current dock orientation.
By default the running indicator is now 'Always at the base of the icon' and the indicator offset set to 30%.
Renamed the 'WinstepXtreme.exe' multi-function helper application to 'Winstep.exe' to avoid confusing users of Nexus and Nexus Ultimate.
Added an optional new style to some UI elements (windows live preview thumbnail backgrounds, menu document thumbnail backgrounds, ballon tooltip background and the 'working' splash screen) to better fit with the default Windows 8 and Windows 10 look. Enabled by default on Windows 10 and 8.
Added option in the More Options dialog of the General Preferences tab to enable the new Windows 10 style even when not running under Windows 10 or 8.
Added 'Colorize with the dominant color of the desktop background'/'Wallpaper hot-track' setting to the colorization options of the dock, which automatically colorizes it to 'blend in' with the current desktop wallpaper.
The Explosion animation displayed when items are deleted can now be customized in the More Options dialog of General Preferences. User must specify a multi-frame PNG or TIF animation strip (animated icon).
Moved the icon reflection and icon drop shaddow context menu options from the Effects menu to the Appearance and Sounds menu.
Changed the appearance of the Aero style balloon tooltip.
Improved the appearance of the Aero Style 'busy' splash screen.
Added a 'Edge Bump Settings' button to the General tab of Preferences.
Added ability to activate docks and the Shelf via 'edge swipes' instead of 'edge bumps.
Added a new dialog to control edge swipe timings.
Added a new setting to limit the distance the mouse pointer can travel during the activation delay for screen edge bumps. If the pointer moves behind this threashold while waiting to trigger an edge bump, the bump is discarded/ignored. This should help reduce accidental edge bump activations.
Docks are now moved up in the z-order when mousing over them (if 'pop up on mouseover' is enabled) instead of removing focus from the currently active window. This provides a smoother experience since the active window does not change state.
Added a 'Edge Swipe Settings' button the the General tab of Preferences and Dock Behavior panels.
Dock icons can now be combined with running application icons in the dock so there is no duplication of icons.
By default clicking on a grouped running application icon now shows live window preview thumbnails instead of the group menu.
Added option to show the group menu when clicking on the icon of grouped running applications instead of showing the live preview thumbnails.
Added support for RK Launcher's Theme.conf skins.
Themes tab in Preferences now opens immediately instead of waiting for theme files to be retrieved.
Animation speed in the General tab of Preferences can now be set in 50 ms intervals.
Added a default running indicator bitmap.
The Windows hidden notification icons window is now monitored when open and automatically repositioned if it suddenly'jumps' to another location on the screen (as happened if the mouse pointer hovered over an invalid notification icon).
Added option not to show icon reflections on vertical docks.
Added warning for Windows 8/10 users regarding the Glass Blur effect requiring the AeroGlass 3rd party utility.
Added full support for high-DPI displays.
Added option to automatically scale menus up on high DPI displays or not.
The Weather Module now automatically tries to retrieve the user's current location based on IP address when running for the first time.
Added 'Get My Location' button to the Weather Module Preferences screen, which tries to get the user's current location (country, state, city, etc...) based on his IP address.
Google killed their weather API, but weather forecasts for locations that do not have a Weather.com code (i.e.; only have a METAR code) can now be retrieved via MSN Weather.
Changed defaults to: show running indicator on docks, running indicator offset at 30%, do not launch multiple instances and don't show icon reflections on vertical docks. When running under Windows 10: dock icon label background, outline and colorize according to dominant color of dock background are on, dock control icon color is Black Metal, UI base color is gray.
Size of the UI font is now automatically reduced from point 10 to point 9 whenever a language other than English is selected to try and make up for the fact that translations from English are usually longer than the original text.
Optimized the UI to try and prevent unchecked translations from over-running the available space.

New in Winstep Nexus 15.7 (Jul 28, 2015)

Added Romanian language file.
On Windows 8/10 Glass Blur settings are now enabled to allow for 3rd party glass blur applications but the blur feature itself is disabled by default.
Added new internal command 'Task View' to invoke the Virtual Desktop Manager (Windows 10 only).
Windows 10 Metro Apps in the list of running applications now display a customized icon instead of the default system icon.
The size of mouseover window preview thumbnails can now range between 64 to 512 pixels.
Improved the way the dock behaves when the user presses 'Show Desktop'.
The Tip of the Day is no longer displayed when being run for the first time.
The default dock now has a 'Show Tip of the Day' icon.
The Check for Updates dialog no longer pops up when being run for the first time, and a check for updates is performed immediately in the background.
Added new 'Restore Wallpaper' internal command to restore any Windows wallpaper changed when switching to a Winstep theme.
Added a 'Restore Wallpaper' internal command icon to the default dock.
The balloon tooltip of dock items with thumbnails now also displays the thumbnail.
Added new 'Busy' animation to replace the hourglass animation.
An Always on Bottom dock is no longer allowed to come forward on mouseover even if 'pop up dock on mouseover' is enabled.
The Update Manager Window showing new versions available now appears in the taskbar and can be minimized.
The Theme Browser now displays the name of the theme author, where available.
Enabling both the Rain Drop effect and the 'Hide Dock at Startup' setting would cause several glitches until the dock was activated for the first time, such as the rain drop audio immediately playing, animated icon reflections being visible and dock activation animation not playing properly for the first time.
The application would crash if the user answered No to any of the confirmation dialogs in the Troubleshooting Options dialog.
Updated the URL used for displaying 'Detailed Weather conditions' for Weather.com, which was no longer correct.
A hidden dock would pop up (but inactive) immediately after exiting a full screen application when using the fade hide animation.
On Windows 10 the Winstep service would silently crash when trying to install new fonts and would become unavailable until the next reboot. This caused, among other things, the application to hang for a couple of minutes when running for the first time as it tried to install the default theme fonts.
Under Windows 10 the tasklist no longer displays multiple windows for each Metro app or for Metro apps that are no longer visible.
Windows 10 apps would always display a black thumbnail in the list of running applications, so we now display an icon instead.
Under a clean Windows 10 installation the dock now tries to add a default shortcut to Internet Explorer instead if the default browser is a Windows App.
Removed 'Start Flip3D' internal command from Windows 8.x onward since it is no longer available.
Under Windows 8 and Windows 10 the Windows Start Button did nothing when clicked on after restoring the visibility of the Windows taskbar.
Image thumbnails no longer pop on and off when browsing a network folder on a menu.
Fixed the 'Peek Desktop' internal command which wasn't working properly (Windows 7).
Thumbnails in Delete File Confirmation dialog are now displayed with the correct aspect ratio.
When pinning an application to the dock in which the executable does not have a Version Info block, the executable filename is used instead.
Auto-Complete was not working properly on several configuration dialogs.
Icons of URL shortcuts were not being resolved properly.
Tooltips of pictures or running application preview thumbnails appearing at the very top of the screen would not be visible.
A tooltip would not display for the first picture preview thumbnail on a menu.
If a picture or running application thumbnail could not change position when switching then the previous thumbnail was not being erased and the thumbnail appeared instantly instead of fading in.
The application would sometimes crash when executing certain shell functions (such as 'Set as Desktop Background' for an image item) from a context menu.
Fixed issue with the Winstep Update Manager which could cause it to mis-report the size of the file download so far and even terminate with a 'Download may be corrupt' error.