Hi,

Having played around with Start11 v2 for a bit, there were a few things that stuck out to me -- missing features and potential QoL changes and whatnot. I ended up using the "Windows 11 style" of start menu as I was after one quite close to Windows 11's native one, but with more customization and a few improvements.

Missing/potential QoL changes:

• The ability to hide the folder path for "recent documents"/search results. The path often does not serve a purpose -- especially when also allowing folders to be shown among the "recent documents" list. The full path is also available on mouse hover so a QoL setting would be to allow users to disable the second line beneath the file name that currently holds the folder path. This would make the affected areas of the start menu much less busy. Inspect the native Windows 11 start menu for a comparison, where they instead of the folder path uses a relative timestamp since last used, or nothing at all.

• When using a rounded taskbar (nice addition, btw!) with a left-aligned start button the user is sadly missing out on being able to easily accessing the start menu and Win+X menu when clicking in the screen corner of the start button. This seems to be because the start button is moved a bit on the X and Y axis, which means the start button no longer overlaps the hotspot of that corner. This is actually a major downside and loss of functionality to using rounded taskbars as it prevents quick "cursor throws" into the corner to access either the start menu and the Win+X menu. Instead the user has to throw the cursor into the corner, then made exact and tiny adjustments to hover back up over the mouse button. For me, this is a dealbreaker and makes the rounded taskbar feature unusable.

Feature requests:

• One major annoyance I have with Microsoft in Windows 11 is that whatever intern they told to re-implement the "Always show all icons in the notification area" feature from previous Windows versions did so incompetently and incorrectly through the new "Hidden icon menu" toggle which does not actually do the same.
  • The original behavior of this toggle, from Windows XP and up to and including Windows 10, disabled the ^ overflow menu entirely and always showed all icons in the notification area.
  • The new behavior of this toggle in Windows 11 hides the overflow menu icon only but does not actually reveal new application icons automatically.
    • This means that if you have the "Hidden icon menu" disabled (meaning the overflow menu is invisible), any new notification icon that would've otherwise appeared is now hidden and inaccessible. This have an actual major user impact on applications and tools which is only accessible through their notification icon, as these would be completely inaccessible and assumed broken until the user randomly gets told of this issue.
    • This also means that if you have the menu enabled (meaning the overflow menu icon is visible), the user has to manually move all new icons out from that menu and "pin" them to the notification area. And for applications that creates a new executable whenever they get updated (e.g. Discord), the user has to do this every, single, time!
  • If the above section reads a bit pissed off, it is because I absolutely am -- I refuse to acknowledge that this UI design change was checked off on and I have to imagine that a really major misunderstanding or mistake was made somewhere.
  • So anyway, the feature request is to re-implement the original proper behavior of the "Always show all icons in the notification area" in Start11 so that all icons (new and old) are always automatically visible in the notification area as in previous versions of Windows.

• I'm not entirely sure if this is a feature request or if I'm just not sure how to use the app properly, but what I'm missing is a proper replacement for the native start menu's "Recommended" section that shows both recent documents, recently installed apps, and recently used apps all in one section. Right now Start11 only has the two separate "recent documents" and "suggested apps" groups, but the "suggested apps" does not seem to actually list recently installed or used apps? I'm not really sure what it is supposed to list other than the "Windows Menu" entry. Not even the "Apps -> Recently Installed" section seems to react and show my recently installed copy of the Sublime Text app, despite that app having properly created a shortcut in the system-wide Start Menu\Programs folder. There is a "Show recently added apps" setting in Start11's configuration, but this only affects the "All Apps" view and not the initial view of the start menu where it would make the most sense.

Bugs:

• "Windows 11 style" start menu - Sometimes when right clicking a group (e.g. Suggested apps group) and clicking "Delete -> Delete group", the start menu gets minimized instead of the Delete Group confirmation prompt popping up.

• "Modern style" start menu - This is a bit of a weird one but occasionally there seems to be a focus glitch where an application on the left-hand side of the start menu (in the pinned/frequently used list) retains focus despite the user having moved the mouse cursor over to the right-hand side of the menu (Documents, Personal Folder, etc). This causes the jump list of the unfocused application to suddenly appear instead of the Documents/Personal Folder/etc shortcuts, and can be a bit distracting when it occurs.

I'm quite glad to see how far Start# has come from when I first used it back when Start8 was first released, but I am also sad to see that it is missing a few critical QoL changes and bug fixes. Hopefully some of the above can be used to further improve the app because it is as they say; the attention is in the details.

Cheers!