Man, you've been busy! ...trying it now....

Jon,

Are the buttons supposed to have the aero-look if aero is enabled? Mine currently have a black to white gradient with Aero enabled. I will mention that I am running Windows 7 Build 7100 x64.

Hi Jon,

I had noticed that once last week the icon corruption did occur again using ver 3.04. At the time i was just working normally, but i think the machine was getting hammered at the time as i had lot of stuff running. I have put this new version on now so ill see how that goes

Hi,

I don't know if this bug is new or if it's carried from previous versions since I didn't test any previous versions.

Problem: Clicking on the window of any program in the secondary monitor causes it to appear on the main taskbar momentarily (1/2 seconds) yet its window remains in place. This only happens in the taskbar.

I tried with version 3.0.4 and it works fine. It happens with any program. After some further testing I gathered that it happens with most programs but with some, like WinRAR, Windows Explorer, Notepad, etc it still happens but only by a fraction of a second, you can barely notice it.

About the rest I can't really comment since I'm not using Windows 7.

Oh, and Re: CPU usage I no longer get freezes. About the lag issue though, I'll have to give it more time (yet so far so good *knocks on wood*)

P.S.: I noticed something else, although it's not related to the beta (it occurs in 3.0.4 as well) I decided to use this post to ask about it.
When a window on the secondary monitor loses focus it has a slight delay to depress its task at the taskbar. I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself correctly nor if it's normal behaviour!

I can confirm this. Happens on all programs I've tried so far including Word, Internet Explorer, Aptana Studio.

CPU usage does seem improved too!

Two other tiny things. The flashing taskbar notifications seem to have a slight black border at the top. See attached screenshot (DF is on top, Windows is on bottom). Also, would it be possible to delay the tooltip above the thumbnail preview from appearing for a second and delay the thumbnail from appearing for about half a second so it matches the behaviour of the main taskbar?

Yep, I'm using Vista.

I'm actually running the beta in a separate folder, so yes, it's using the latest DLL.

Flashing notifications?! Did I miss a memo...?

I say it because mine don't flash. And I'm using the latest beta version

I have not noticed the flash either. I am using Win7 x64 Build 7100. I use Live Messenger all day long. I have also noticed that I am not getting it with Outlook 2007.

Just a quick question; how should I be running betas?

I have the latest stable version installed using the installer. I downloaded the zip, extracted it, closed the stable version and ran the beta version straight from the folder. Is this the correct way to to it or should I be overwriting the files in program files?

Thanks,

Jason

For now I can only speak for Windows Live Messenger.

The betas are very stable, so you can shut DF down and copy the zip file contents right to your install directory.

Hi everyone, I'm happy to be a BETA monkey! I downloaded the latest BETA at the top of this thread, and installed by shutting down DF and copying all files to the DF folder in "Program Files (x86)" Everything started right backup no problem. I did notice right away that the DF Taskbar fonts seem funky-chunky, see the attached screenshot. Thanks for the 3.0.5 work, John, its looking and acting fantastic so far.

~jim

Same thing here Jon, although mine are not nearly as bad.....

Also, Jon, were you aware of this?

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/archive/2009/05/18/windows-7-managed-code-apis.aspx

Installed the new beta yesterday, i have come across the attached error twice today, while just working normally. It seems to disable the multimon taskbar. If you ok the error and then go to the app you can just turn it back on again.

I'm on XPsp2, running 3 monitors

Cheers
Luke

Hi Jon,

Nothing was changed fonts and color wise. the font is at the Window 7 standard of 100%. I was running 3.0.4 right before the upgrade and the fonts were ok. I'm going to poke around and see if anything looks amiss.

Regards,
~jim

I confirm; the taskbar on 2nd monitor doesn't "flash" the task when you get a window that is flashing itself. For now I can just keep ones I need to be flashy on the primary monitor.

There are other "7" effects that don't work, of course, the green 0-100% fill-bar...

Jon,

I did some playing around last night, and if I change that transparency to another value, just before the task bar reloads all the fonts on the DF Taskbar icons on my machine look identical to jshope's screen capture- but that lasts between 500 ms to 2000 ms (max) every time I tried it, and *usually* lasts right at 500 ms (I only noticed it lasting over a second once, hence the 2000 ms reference, but that could easily have been my system in the middle of a CPU intensive process that I did not know about).

Also, not sure if this helps, but back in the seven forums thread, another user posted some extracted icons from the taskbar - just in case it helps....

http://www.sevenforums.com/software/6087-ultramon-replacement-8.html#post100886

TBH: I am betting they used a simple icon extractor program, but I can ask good ole grimmy and see if he'll let us in on his lil' secret....

I know that I have extracted several myself for use elsewhere, and I used the http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3011-libraries-icons-change.html tutorial, specifically step 6, to make reference to the actual icons in one particular DLL set of icons, but I am guessing that it is pretty much the same thing.

I'll ask him in a few minutes.

Reply - I think he used this piece of software: http://www.bome.com/Restorator/

He says it is better than ResHack....

BTW, any luck with this issue? (it still happens in the beta)
http://www.binaryfortress.com/Forum/index.php?topic=864.0

Thanks.

Nevermind... I tested it exhaustively including in a VM and I can only conclude that it has nothing to do with DF but a much rather moronic decision by WLM's programmers. All conversation windows start minimized, no matter what.

Of course, that only affects me because tasks in DF's taskbar don't flash.

Re: funny font rendering. It gets even funkier. The taskbar sometimes renders as a mix. Sometimes, individual words in a program title will render incorrectly, and the rest will render correctly. I've marked this out in the attachment.

Note: (1) Monitors are in portrait mode (2) ClearType is on. However, jshope seems to be having this problem even with ClearType turned off off.

Hmmm interesting, we may be onto something here, taoyue pointed out my cleartype is OFF, when in fact it is ON. I checked to make sure since I always turn it on. I then tried turning cleartype off by clicking the checkbox. The chunky font problem on the DF Taskbar goes away immediately and with no artifacts showing at all in any text. See the two attached screenshots.

regards,
~jim

It looks like the Windows built-in taskbar always renders using "standard" antialiasing, even if ClearType is turned on.

Antialiasing is a complete mess in Windows these days. There used to be three settings: none (jagged), standard (full-pixel), and ClearType (subpixel). Now there's just the ClearType tuner, which only offers two options: none and ClearType. Except that some UI elements are hard-coded to use standard (?!).

Ideally, DisplayFusion will use ClearType if it's turned on. If there's no way to do that, then it would be acceptable to do whatever the Windows 7 taskbar does, even if it's wrong. Of course, testing would be a pain -- ClearType settings don't take effect consistently throughout the whole system without a reboot.