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Topic: «Actual Window Manager 5.0 beta 1 is available! , The being-awaited-for-years CMD windows support has finally arrived! » on forum: Beta Testing   Views: 11925
 
Alexey Fadeyev
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Joined: 09/30/2005
Posted: 07/18/2007 10:42:36
 
 
 Actual Tools has released the 1st beta version of Actual Window Manager 5.0.

This first beta version of the upcoming major update of Actual Tools products introduces the single but truly amazing feature that is being requested again and again - the fully-featured support for CMD windows (a.k.a. console windows) in Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista! This is a tremendous technological breakthrough our engineers happy to make public at last! For now, you can handle all those old-looking CMD windows in the same way as other normal windows - almost all Actual Tools features (except for Make Transparent/Ghost actions) available for them, including extra title buttons!

However, this console windows support needs some special actions and has some known issues. Please, read the following notes extremely carefully:

[*] To provide the advanced management abilities, we use two additional executable files - ConsolePatch.exe and ConsoleHelper.dll, which are located in the installation folder. Due to some specifics of their implementation, some antiviral suits may treat these files as dangerous and try to delete them. WE FULLY GUARANTEE THAT THESE FILES DON'T CONTAIN ANY HARMFUL CODE AND ARE 100% SAFE! Therefore, please, exclude them from your antivirus system's processing so they could stay untouched. CAUTION! IF YOUR ANTIVIRUS PROGRAM BLOCKS OR DELETES THESE FILES - THE CONSOLE WINDOWS SUPPORT WILL BE UNAVAILABLE!

[*] The ConsolePatch.exe application needs the Administrator privileges to run successfully. Therefore, in case you are not an administrator of your workstation, after each logon Actual Window Manager will display the standard "Run As..." system dialog allowing you to provide Administrator credentials (of course, you must know the login/password of any account with administrative privileges on your workstation). CAUTION! IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO PROVIDE THE ADMINISTRATOR PRIVILEGES FOR THE CONSOLEPATCH.EXE APPLICATION - THE CONSOLE WINDOWS SUPPORT WILL BE UNAVAILABLE!

[*] Once enabled, the console windows support will work until the full system reboot (or session restart in Windows Vista) even if you disable the "Enable support of console windows" option in the Options dialog.

[*] Due to intrincis peculiarities of CMD windows, it's impossible to affect them with Make Transparent and Ghost actions, therefore all features related to these actions (title buttons, menu commands, automatic handling options, etc.) will be automatically removed even if you enable any of them in certain window settings.

[*] The Copy/Paste title buttons just send to console windows the standard Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V key combinations - the actual handling of these combinations fully depends on a particular console application, which the target window belongs to.

[*] Specially for software developers: Once the console windows support is enabled, be careful when debugging console applications - in such case, all currently open console windows may stop responding until the debug session is finished or terminated. Therefore, we DO NOT recommend to use the console debuggers (like Turbo Debugger 5.5) to debug console applications, having the console windows support enabled - because in such case debugger's window itself may stop responding that will lead to mutual lock-up!


Anyway, I am sure that the advantage of console windows support will certainly compensate possible difficulties mentioned above!

Also I would like to remind that due to our beta-testing policy our beta versions have an expiration date after which they can't be used. Also, due to their nature, beta versions can't be registered, even with a valid registration data: they are not final products but betas! So when the beta version expires you should either roll back to the last stable release, update your beta to a new one (if available), or upgrade to a new stable release (if available).
The beta 1 of Actual Window Manager 5.0 will expire September 20, 2007.

You can download it here.

I strongly recommend to install this beta into a separate folder (for example, "C:\Program Files\Actual Window Manager 5.0 beta 1") so you could easily roll back to a previous version.
 
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