Software update: ShellEnhancer 2.0 beta

ShellEnhancer is able to add various tweaks to the use of Windows. For example, it is possible to use mouse gestures, adjust the transparency of screens and improve the look and feel of certain programs. on this page some features are explained on the basis of screenshots. The latest version of ShellEnhancer is too to download as 2.0 beta and has the following laundry list of bug fixes, features and open bugs:

Version 2.0 Beta

New Features
• Option to display desktop wallpaper as background for Mosaic-TaskSwitcher.
• Show an On Screen Display (= OSD) when executing a ShellEnhancer task, to give visual feedback of what is happening.
• Mouse Gestures: Run a Shell Enhancer task with a mouse gesture.
• An “Apply” button in the settings window.
• The window fading system now works time- and step-based.
• When a window is auto-managed, clicking on the “Auto Manage…” system-menu-item will allow you to edit the auto-managed rule instead of deleting that rule.
• A new Auto-Managed-Window option: make window fully opaque when it is maximized.
• Ability to add the currently selected text in the currently active window as parameter to a Run-command in a task. This feature can be used to make a ShellEnhancer task which will open the selected web address in the active application with Internet Explorer when you press a hotkey. This feature can also be used to make a hotkey that will open the currently selected file with a program (for example notepad).
• You can also use X-Window style moving to move any popup menu. Of course, this only works when the X-Window hotkey is not ALT!
• Rollup windows (only show title bar of a window) Also, option to unroll window when hovering mouse above titlebar.
• Change transparency of a window when hovering above a window-button (close-, minimize- and maximize-buttons).
• Lock window position (Press CONTROL to override temporarily).
• Truncate window titles in ShellEnhancer menu to user defined length.
• Enhanced Alt+Tab TaskSwitcher Changes:
  • Ability to scroll through the icons with the mousewheel.
  • Truncate window titles to user defined length.
  • Option to hide the banner in Enhanced TaskSwitcher when visual styles are not used.
  • Option to display alt-tab tasks as a “list” rather than icons
  • Option to change the font size of the text.
  • Delay for Enhanced TaskSwitcher preview generation.
• Change taskbar transparency when mouse is hovering above it.
• Show system/window menu when right clicking on tray icon of window that is minimized to system tray.
• Option to allow left click on ShellEnhancer tray icon to open settings window instead of menu.
• Change the order/visibility of the extra menu items in the system/window menus
• Priority submenu in system/window menus: changes priority of that process.
• Reorder Windows taskbar buttons + hotkey for this.
• Add default tasks files containing: maximize, minimize window, run explorer…
• Add “Run Task Now” button in tasks window.
• Run a task when mouse is in a corner of the screen.
• Hide Windows desktop icons when the mouse is not hovering the desktop.
• Always hide Windows desktop icons.
• Import task files.
• Added option “Always use XP-style menus”: Uses XP style menus on all operating systems.
• Change transparency of a window via user-definable hotkeys (For example, Alt+Shift+#, where # runs from 0, no transparency to 9, 90% transparent).

New Task Commands

• Show Mosaic-TaskSwitcher.
• Screensaver blocker: blocks screensaving/powersaving.
• Copy, delete and move files from source to destination, including support for recursive operations + show warning with summary before copy.
• Toggle Desktop.
• A confirmation dialog: Dialog gives a summary of the task you will be running and YES/NO button. When you click yes, the rest of the task is executed, otherwise it is aborted.
• Create a Windows System Restore Point.

Bug Fixes

• ShellEnhancer backend is rewritten from scratch and because of this the nasty “Serious error” messages that sometimes popped up are gone.
• Only 1 instance of ShellEnhancer could be started for a given user. Now, 1 ShellEnhancer instance can be started for each desktop of the user.
• Sometimes ShellEnhancer crashed when click-dragging-middle-mouse-button in hotkey task manager.
• Wizards: the image on the first page on the left wasn’t scaled properly with hi-res fonts.
• For some windows, the wrong small-icon was extracted to be displayed in the ShellEnhancer menu.
• The ShellEnhancer registration system sometimes gave DNS errors.
• Sometimes the message “Unable to detach the input threads” would appear while running a task.
• Some features were not working on Windows ‘Longhorn’.
• When ShellEnhancer was running, some applications crashed while starting.
• With X-Window Style moving/resizing and a moving transparency or resizing transparency, clicking one of the items on the window taskbar with the hotkey causes the whole taskbar to become slightly [more] transparent.
• Minimize To Tray should now work with more windows.
• Register dialog is not shown on first start of ShellEnhancer.
• X-Window moving/resizing didn’t work when above a scrollbar or other non-client part of the window.
• An error message was shown when you pressed F1 in a dialog without a help-button.
• When you had a hotkey task to minimize active window to the system tray and you pressed that hotkey while the Windows taskbar had focus, the whole windows taskbar would disappear.
• Hitting delete in “Manage Hotkey Tasks” did not work.
• With X-Window resizing you could resize Windows Explorer to 0x0, and when you released the X-hotkey, you couldn’t get explorer back.
• The text boxes in bugreport/registration did not wrap and no horizontal scrollbar was shown!
• Settings window was a bit small.
• When using the iSkin theme for WindowBlinds 3.3 the Enhanced TaskSwitcher didn’t not work. There was no error message and Alt+Tab still worked, just was not displayed.
• F12 is not allowed anymore as a hotkey, because Windows programming guidelines prohibit using F12.
• Unchecking “Add menu items to the system/window menu of each window” didn’t seem to have any effect.
• “Zoom Player” windows were not shown in AltTab/Mosaic unless they were minimized.
• When you assigned a hotkey to the Enhanced TaskSwitcher, the hotkey didn’t work unless “Replace Windows Alt+Tab TaskSwitcher” was checked.
• Mosaic-Hotkey sometimes showed the mosaic and immediately closed it.
• Crash when using Mosaic TaskSwitcher as AltTab TaskSwitcher and pressing AltTab twice fast.

Known Issues

• On Screen Display (= OSD) does not work on Win95.
• 16-bit applications are not fully supported: no extra window/system menu items are added.
• When you click on “Exit And Restore”, not all windows are restored immediately. With some windows you have to activate that window or move your mouse over that window before it is restored. This is issue is related to the way hooks are implemented in Windows.
• Hide desktop icons is not working on Windows 95: icons will disappear, but desktop is never redrawn (try to move a window and see)
• Transparency on large windows can cause a performance issue. Unfortunately this is an issue with the way Windows implements transparent windows and there is nothing I can do about this. (These issues will most probably be solved in ShellEnhancer for Windows Longhorn).
• When you enable transparency on windows, you might get some redraw problems in some applications. This is not a bug with ShellEnhancer but it is an issue with these applications because they are not designed to be made transparent.