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Topic: «
Actual Window Manager 5.5 beta 2 is available!
, Tray on secondary taskbars,advanced mouse actions,transparent consoles » on forum:
Beta Testing
Views: 16057
Alexey Fadeyev
Administrator
Moderator
Posts:
1450
Joined:
09/30/2005
Posted:
11/04/2009 11:19:39
Hello, everyone!
I'm glad to inform you about the recently released
Actual Window Manager
5.5 beta 2
.
The first thing I'd like to turn your attention to is the significant internal change made in this beta to improve the behavior of
Actual Window Manager
and other programs upon their unloading, either manual or automatic during the logoff process.
(If you are not interested in technical details you may skip the next paragraph.)
In technical terms, before this beta our library (
aimemb.dll
) stayed in memory even after unloading
AWM
due to the stability reasons - it embeds so deeply into other processses so that removing it might cause (and it did cause!) hangups and crashes (especially in our "beloved"
Windows Explorer
). Though the stuck-in-memory library did nothing but it is not well-behaved from the system point of view - each program should clear the resources it used. Also, such approach doesn't allow us to develop the long ago requested portable version of
AWM
- being run from a flash stick with the library stuck in memory, system won't allow you to unplug the flash safely even if you completely exit
AWM
. So, in this beta, after some deep research and experimenting, we present the well-behaved library which unloads accurately upon closing
Actual Window Manager
.
The important consequence of the subject change is that
since this beta
Actual Window Manager
is incompatible with previous versions
. It means that if you have several versions of
AWM
installed on your PC - don't launch
beta 2
after you launched and exited any previous version, because they left in memory their copy of library which is incompatible with
beta 2
executables, and you'll end up with all running applications crashed or hung up.
After discovering that in
Windows 7
console windows became free of
limitations
and can be made transparent or ghosted, our software engineers have been undertaking some additional research which has brought the exciting result: now
console windows can be made transparent or ghost in any
Windows
as well, since
Windows 2000
! You can use any method provided by
Actual Window Manager
for this, either automatic (startup, deactivation, mouse hovering, etc.) or manual (title button, window menu item, hotkey, etc.).
In this beta we have made the second important step on improving further the Multi-monitor Taskbar's usability:
the Multi-monitor Taskbar extension
is finally able to
display the clock and mirror the primary notification area (a.k.a. system tray) on secondary monitors
! Now you can easily access programs running in background from any monitor. You can turn these features on in the Configuration window as shown below:
Although there is a limitation in the current implementation of the notification area on secondary monitors (it does not hide the inactive icons), we plan to remove this limitation until the release. To compensate the incompleteness of current implementation, we have added a bonus feature: it's possible to
manually reorder tray icons by dragging them with the mouse both on secondary taskbars and on the primary one as well
. See below the new options added to the
Multiple Monitors - Taskbar
panel to control this feature:
One of the most popular requests we receive regularly is
to add the ability of minimizing windows by clicking the right mouse button on the title bar
. Oh, no, sorry: the most popular request, of course, was
the ability to roll windows up by clicking the middle mouse button on the title bar
. Or it was the request
to minimize windows to the system tray by clicking the right mouse button on the title bar while holding the
Shift
key pressed
? Man, I'm confused! So, to prevent our customers from such confusing, we have added
the whole new panel in the Options window to customize advanced mouse actions
:
Here you can see some advanced actions which can be invoked by clicking on standard spots that most windows have (such as title bar, Minimize/Maximize buttons) and can customize how exactly they should be invoked: which mouse button should be clicked, in which way (single or double click) and with which modifier keys pressed - so that everyone can adjust the set of actions and methods of their activation according to his/her personal preferences. Hope you'll like the specially designed
Maximize Horzontally
(
Shift+RClick
on Maximize button) and
Maximize Vertically
(
Ctrl+RClick
on Maximize button) actions!
In addition to the above-mentioned mouse actions, there is finally available the feature to
drag windows freely without the need to click on the title bar
but click anywhere within window's interior instead, with the specified activation key (
Alt
by default) being pressed. The same is true for resizing a window except you should use the right mouse button instead of left (which is used for moving). You can enable/disable this feature and customize the set of activation keys in the
Mouse Options
panel, as shown above.
Because of its increased popularity (we received several requests recently) and relatively easy implementation, the
Cut to Clipoard
title button
has been added. Thus, the set of buttons for quick Clipboard operations (Cut/Copy/Paste) is complete now:
The inevitable part - shoft description of most noticeable bugfixes and improvements:
the bug with
interrupted Desktop Background Slideshow feature in
Windows 7
has been fixed;
components that work with window captions (like Multi-monitor Taskbar, Virtual Desktops Switcher, tray and screen icons) have been made Unicode-compatible;
the
Multiple Monitors - Background/Screen Saver
tabs in the Configuration window now more accurately display the current system settings;
the intermittent crashes of applications written in Visual Basic have been fixed.
For those who joined us just now, I'd like to briefly remind that now our beta versions
know that they are
beta
versions
and they can tell you about it: just open the
About
dialog
to see how many days remain until the beta expiration. Despite this fact, I still can't give up the habit of reminding the terms of our beta testing at the end of each beta-related message, sorry!
Beta versions have an expiration date
which they can't be used after.
The beta 2 of
Actual Window Manager 5.5
will expire on
December 15, 2009
.
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).
And don't forget about the recently added
internal error reporting service
! If some fatal error occurs in
Actual Window Manager
you will see the special query asking you to send us the error report - I beg you don't hesitate and click
Yes
: this report contains no private information whereas the error information could be invaluable for us! Many thanks in advance for your co-operation!
Happy testing!
Top
Joseph Sullivan
Posts:
44
Joined:
02/21/2007
Posted:
11/04/2009 13:37:13
I can't wait!
Thank you so much!
Top
Xahi4475
Posts:
59
Joined:
09/12/2006
Posted:
11/04/2009 20:59:35
Testing now.
Thanks, mister Alexey!
-----
Actual Window Manager, ShellToys, Macro Express, AdMuncher,
gMote, DMEXBar, AutoHotkey...
Top
Quark
Posts:
8
Joined:
12/21/2006
Posted:
11/18/2009 15:03:13
This feature have GDI objects leak in Windows 7 RC — GDI objects count go up to 10000 then AWM throw a error and make some corruption in windows (shifting blocks).
Top
Alexey Fadeyev
Administrator
Moderator
Posts:
1450
Joined:
09/30/2005
Posted:
11/19/2009 02:03:17
Quark, thank you for the report. Please specify the following details:
1) edition of your
Windows 7
- 32/64 bit
2) which process the "GDI Objects" counter figure you specified applies to
3) which programs are running at that moment
4) which specific actions (if any) did you undertake to make the error appear
Thank you for your help!
Top
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