Did you ever try communicating with Neil directly? pm him your email and the two of you can communicate.

I have to agree with Carl regarding such a warning... all because of 1 overlooked line of code? Please. 

Just how many of your users complained, anyway? And just how did you pursue your 'due diligence'? "I waited" is not equivalent to "I acted" which in this case would have been communicating with Neil Banfield when you saw no solution forthcoming.

This is not an official support channel. This is a USER supported forum. Official support is via support@stardock.com or the esupport system LINK

Many thanks for taking the time to reply and look into these problems.

I'll post a link to your response at the top of our blog post.




I assumed this wasn't needed since, as I understood it, some of our mutual customers had already contacted Stardock support over the issue and Stardock support had already posted in this thread (after my June postings), and alerted you to the thread, and you'd replied to the thread and seemed to agree that the check should be removed. So it looked to me like the right people were already aware but that nothing had been done.

I also assumed that, since the WindowBlinds forum doesn't have a high amount of traffic, threads and posts in it were unlikely to be overlooked or buried before anyone had a chance to see them.

I fully understand that the forum isn't the official support channel (we have the same deal with Opus), but as far as I was aware the issue had already been reported through the official channel (although not by me), and it seemed a safe assumption that posts made here would be difficult to overlook.

As you can imagine, it looked to me like the issue was reported and confirmed back in June, and then nothing at all had happened, except an update which made things even worse.





There were already two threads (this one and "WB not correct on dopus 10") about Opus, both mentioning having to hex-edit the WindowBlinds DLLs, near the top of the forum. It didn't seem right to create a third thread with two existing ones still near the top of the list, especially when it was a follow-up to one of them.

Given that the post wouldn't be buried under lots of other posts/threads, it seemed safe to assume that it would be read (if the forum itself was read, which it seemed to be from my previous experience of the forum).

Indeed, although my most recent post (until today) was from just before Christmas, it was still one of the most recent posts in the WindowBlinds forum for the two weeks up until today.

But that most recent issue, and the lack of response to my post about it, were just the straws that broke the camel's back. The unfixed, six-month-old issue was the underlying problem.

WindowBlinds still caused the same problems it did six months ago. It still had DOPUS.EXE in the DLLs, still caused the same problems if anything else was renamed to dopus.exe, and still stopped causing all problems if hex-edited to remove dopus.exe. There was no mention of any (attempted) fix in any of the change-logs (that I found, at least; maybe they were incomplete), and no follow-up posts here, while people were still posting here about hex-editing the DLLs without anyone saying "hey, you shouldn't have to do that any more..."

So my post to the Opus blog was not because nobody had replied to my pre-Christmas post here after two weeks. That was a part of it but only a very small part. The main issue was that WindowBlinds was still breaking Opus, even worse than before, and it looked like nothing was being done or would ever be done. Without telling our users what was up, and proving to them that we weren't just trying to pass the blame, they would assume that Opus was at fault.




Thank you.

There was only ever one instance of DOPUS.EXE in the DLLs, which is still there now, but string-pooling might account for that, so it makes sense that a second check could have been missed. I can accept that.

I hope you can also see how we could assume that nothing had been done when the DOPUS.EXE string was still in the DLL and when the six-month old problems (plus the new, more recent one) could still be solved by removing it, as per the instructions in several posts on this forum. There was no indication that anything had been, and now Opus was being broken even more than before.

I don't really understand how the change could have been done and then not even smoke-tested before handing it to QA. When I make a code-change to address compatibility issues with another application, I install that application in a VM and test with it to ensure the change is correct and that there aren't any other compatibility issues that were being hidden by the previous check's failure.

I mean, that's quite a chain of failures:

• Not doing the change correctly.
• Passing the change to QA without doing a smoke-test.
• QA failing to test the change themselves.
• No mention of the (attempted) fix anywhere in public (that I can find, at least), so nobody else knew the fix had been attempted and that you should be alerted to the fact that it didn't work and/or made things worse.
• Nobody noticing that the forum was still getting new posts telling people to hex-edit the DLLs, which should no longer have been required.
• Nobody noticing, (in an existing thread or not, and Christmas or not), a post near the top of the WB forum for two weeks making a serious complaint.

Many thanks!





Fair enough; I don't have to live with it.

I could send you a list of a bunch of other issues I noticed with the Windows desktop (Windows Explorer, the taskbar, Aero Peek; all unrelated to Opus) if you want them. (I didn't bother including them in my videos as it didn't seem necessary.)




Some people are keyboard die-hards. I was surprised that it wasn't noticed by someone, and that combined with some cosmetic issues (with Aero Peek, in particular) made it look to me like the styles hadn't been very well tested with Windows 7.

By the way, if you missed the focus rects, you may also have missed the highlights that Explorer draws over matching parts of filenames when you do a search. (I didn't think to check for this when I have WB in a VM, but I think it's part of the same theme that Explorer uses for the focus rects.)

It also looks like the theme used in most of my videos causes inconsistent window sizes to be reported to applications. I got some really weird things going on that didn't happen with any other theme, like maybe the reported window metrics don't match up with reality. (Or the perceived reality; I know that with Aero itself the window metrics aren't 'real', but the OS tells a consistent set of lies to applications so that it doesn't matter except for apps that try to take screenshots of window-birders or similar. This is different to that.)




I wasn't working on Opus back then so I can't say anything authoritative, but from the way the code is now it handles OpenThemeData returning NULL in every case that i've seen. It would have to, at least in general, else it would never work with themes disabled.

Perhaps there was an assumption somewhere that if one theme component was available then another related component would also be available, which didn't always hold, but I'm only guessing.

I did find and fix, a while ago, an assumption in Opus that the tab-control background texture would be a bitmap, not some other type of element, so maybe it was that. Just a guess, though.

Anyway, if there are any issues then we can fix them, assuming they are reported to us one way or another.

(Edit: Fix some spelling mistakes.)

It's one overlooked line of code that completely breaks parts of our application. The number of lines doesn't really matter; the effect of the problematic code is what's important. One line of code can do a lot of damage.

If we don't warn people then they will just think our app is faulty. People have already thought this for the past several months, including people blaming us for it directly until we proved that it wasn't our fault. We have no way of knowing how many potential users we've lost because they loaded Opus and found it to be broken due to WB.

What's actually wrong with warning the users here? Why would you not want people to know that a problem exists, where the problem exists, and how to fix it (i.e. either hex-edit the DLLs or look for an updated version of WB)?

As I said, we would only show this warning if we detected the problematic DLLs. We are NOT going to put up a blanket warning for anyone using any version of WindowBlinds; only for the problematic versions. As soon as the problem is fixed, the code in Opus would stop showing the warning.

Anyone who has already hex-edited their DLLs, or who has installed the fixed WB version that Stardock will (presumably) put out at some point, wouldn't be shown a warning message. But, if the program is about to launch in a broken state then I think it makes sense to warn people.

Keep in mind that most people don't know the details of this problem. They'll run Opus and think it's broken. Even if WB is updated quickly, people still using an older version of WB will think there's a problem in Opus. So I think we can help our mutual users by telling them about the problem. (Of course, if someone sticks with both an old WB and an old Opus, then Opus will look faulty and none of us can do much about that.)

I'm not trying to be silly or difficult here; I honestly cannot see why anyone would object to the idea or why you'd prefer users or both programs be kept in the dark and that our program was left broken, by another program, without any explanation to our mutual users.

Our aim is not to make users choose between Opus and WindowBlinds. Our aim is to inform our users if we detect that something is wrong.

 

See my reply to Neil above.

Not sure why I'm being given the blame for things here, given the chain of events.

No "blame". 

DOpus is your app. WB is Neil's.

When two kiddies mix it up in the playground, the parents generally talk about it. 

Leo: If you have other issues you have found please do contact me via PM so I can look into them.

String pooling is indeed why there is only one copy of that string in the dll.  It is worth noting that there will actually still be that string in the dll in the new fixed versions as we still have to detect you as you query the transparency support of a tab control.  The OS has always returned FALSE to this and a return value of anything other than this can upset some apps which assumed it would always be FALSE, but your app (and a couple of others) actively check for this value.  As it happens this doesn't help much as it seems it still does not paint transparency correctly but I don't believe thats our end.

The updated build should also fix a number of other issues that nobody has reported now that WB is exposing themes to the app.  In particular some strange menu painting issues (we paint a rectangle for one of the menu theme parts and you paint this on each line thus resulting in lots of rectangles rather than one - other apps act differently), some animated flashes when you mouseover some of the buttons in the panes and the above tweak to tab values, though as I say it doesn't fix the whole issue.

You will find there is still a menu issue with the sublime skin, but thats a DOpus bug with not asking for the right theme text colour for selected menu items.  You always ask for part 14, state 1 but mouseover is state 2.  I understand you mention that in one of your videos, but I have to confess I only viewed video 4 as I was aware of the fundamentals of the issue in terms of it being partially excluded.

Additionally we have sorted the focus issue with the keyboard in explorer.  This was actually specific to a specific set of themes.  Older themes designed for XP would have worked fine as would newer themes which used the 6 part selection image.  The only one that did not was the compact form 3 state image where the additional frames were simulated.

Regarding the resizing from the top corner, this turns out to be an OS level bug rather than WB itself.  The OS seems to have an internal bit of code that returns HTCLOSE for that area without sending a a WM_NCHITTEST message.  This is only a problem with the skins that have their own shadows as part of the border rather than using the shadow images.  I have tweaked the handlers for the other corners though to make them have wider hotspots.

On how that series of events happened, you must remember Stardock sold off the Impulse division of the company in May and while the sale was final as of May there were various agreements that required considerable internal resources to handle.  Because of this a few balls may have been dropped.  As some people on the forums may be aware there was a point where support were so overloaded it took two weeks to get a reply rather than the expected 48 hours.  I am pleased to say all the resources are now back to Stardock only.

The Directory Opus fix should have been in the 7.3 history text but it is possible that got missed off as at the time we were working on Windows 8 support and had to make some very last minute changes due to changes in the public build.

Most of us who scan the forums looking for issues would use the recent posts list.  Unfortunately this means any posts older than a certain amount will get missed and a thread titled "Directory Opus issue remains with WB 7.3 - Please fix" is far more likely to get attention than a reply to an existing old thread.  When scanning a long list it stands out so much better.  It actually isn't my job to read the forums so if anyone needs my attention it is best to make it obvious (but not stupidly obvious).

Another way to get me is to send mail to support@stardock.com saying please send this over to Neil.

I will say that how you chose to handle this is extremely unfortunate as all it manages to do is cause ill feeling between our communities.  It really would have been better to contact support directly.  It would certainly be appreciated if you could update your blog once the update is out.

If we had told you to go away and we didn't care that would be one thing, but in this case you jumped to the wrong conclusion and forgot the most important rule.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Anyway the important thing is we now know about the issue and have taken steps to resolve it and hopefully you now know how to let us know if you have problems in the future.

You have a lot of excuses for why the ball was dropped Neil, but the fact remains that you have known about this problem for over six months, and from what we could see had not attempted to fix it at all. It's not our responsibility to go chasing up through your multiple layers and various methods of support - WindowBlinds is your responsibility, and it's your responsibility to fix the problems that it causes.

 

Bonjour,

Utilisateur depuis de nombreuses années de Directory Opus ainsi que de WindowBlinds, etc je me permet d'intervenir pour soutenir Leo dans sa démarche... J'admire sa patience

Il est simple d'obtenir un D.Opus avec WindowBlinds en modifiant une simple DLL...

Je commence à croire que ce problème est purement commercial... Quels sont les intérets de Stardock à bloquer D.Opus toutes ces années ???

Un choix économique??? des accords commerciaux et de développement avec Microsoft ???...

Tous ces posts sur ce forum qui restent sans solution concernant Directory Opus laisse à penser que le problème technique est dépassé depuis longtemps, le blocage est intentionnel et prouvé...

J'aime le travail de Stardock, Windowblinds c'est allégé et à évolué, Fences, Tiltes et Iconpackager etc.... sont des incontournables que je ne regrette pas d'avoir acheté...

Je regrette votre sectarisme et votre désinvolture et puisqu'il faut l'écrire votre malhonneté dans toutes les réponses fournies par les modérateurs et développeurs de Stardock concernant Directory Opus...

Je me passerai bien de la traduction dans la langue de shakespeare mais par respect pour vos utilisateurs la voici...

 

Hello

User Directory Opus thus that WindowBlinds, etc I allows me to intervene in support of Leo in his approach for many years... I admire his patience

It is simple to get a D.Opus with WindowBlinds by modifying a simple DLL...

I'm starting to believe that this problem is purely commercial... What are the interests of Stardock to block D.Opus all these years?

An economical choice? trade and development with Microsoft agreements?...

All these posts on this forum who remain without solution for Directory Opus suggests that the technical problem is exceeded for a long time, the blockage is intentional and proven...

I like the work of Stardock, Windowblinds it is Lite and to evolved, Fences, Tiltes and Iconpackager etc... are of compelling that I do not regret having purchased...

I regret your bigotry and your flippancy and because he must write it to your malhonneté the answers provided by moderators and developers of Stardock about Directory Opus...

I myself will be spending much of the translation in the language of shakespeare, but out of respect for your users is this... 

 

PatPat31 please do NOT suggest anything of the sort.

What transpired is a simple failure of correct procedure in problem resolution.

To suggest anything else is both defamatory AND wrong.  Several on Stardock's staff are also GPSoft/Directory Opus users [including myself] and it is clearly unfortunate that none of us experienced the program conflict in a timely fashion.  My particular reason for missing it was due to continuous running of a Game program which itself disabled aspects of the Windows 7 system.

What say we leave this program conflict resolution to the two programmers involved ....:)

PatPat31: As Jafo stated please do not post things which are defamatory and wrong on our forums (or anywhere else for that matter).  Should you do so again we would be forced to take further action against yourself.

I am not going to respond to any more posts on this thread but I will leave you with one thought. 

If we were intentionally ignoring this issue and wanted to break that app why would we respond so quickly when it was finally raised with us?  I actually investigated the issue and worked on a solution on a Sunday.

In fact if we really wanted to mess with them we would have simply excluded the app for 7.3 and made it look ugly, or recommend alternatives.  We have done none of these things.

This issue came down to a serious of unfortunate issues which in isolation would not be such a problem, but combined together resulted in us being totally unaware the latest update had made matters worse and not resolved the problem.  Could this have been avoided at our end, sure with hindsight.  Could this have been resolved quicker had the developers of Directory Opus actually contacted us about it via the correct channels, sure.

As you can see unfortunately there is blame on both sides as to how this was handled.

We do not currently have any products that are in competition with Directory Opus and I am unaware of any plans to do make one, so there is no benefit to us to being incompatible with them.

We are never interested in having apps that are incompatible with any of our apps and work hard to resolve issues when we are made aware of them via the proper channels.  Our aim is to have as good compatibility as possible which oddly enough is why DOpus.exe got added to the internal list back in the XP days...

I second that.

Hello

First of all what is written on the Forum remains on the Forum... I deliberately pushed the plug a bit far I acknowledge....

Doing your intelligence confidence I would have never thought wait years for the solution "is taken to arm the body"...

In any case thanks to: DrJBHL    Neil Banfield   Jafo    for other solutions in the forums that you have provided to me...

And thanks again for everything...

PatPat31 \/ Patrick P.

 

Bonjour,

Avant toute chose ce qui est écrit sur le Forum reste sur le Forum... J'ai volontairement poussé le bouchon un peu loin je le reconnais...  .

Faisant confiance à votre intelligence je n'aurais jamais cru attendre des années pour que la solution "soit pris à bras le corps"...

Quoiqu'il en soit Merci à : DrJBHL  Neil Banfield  Jafo   pour d'autres solutions dans les forums que vous m'avez fournis...

Et encore merci pour tout...

PatPat31 / Patrick  P.

(I've sent Neil a PM to let him know about this post, in case it would be missed otherwise.)


Okay, I've spent a lot of time on the Opus side of this over the past week and have done the following:

1. There is a list of visual-style issues which I have found when using Opus with WindowBlinds. Several of these issues are new, so please see the list.

2. Where issues can be fixed or worked-around on the Opus side, I have done so and the code is already committed for the Opus 10.0.3.1 release in about a week. I can provide an early copy if needed for testing/verification.

3. I can't fix some of the issues because they appear to be bugs in WB with no clear work-arounds. Please see the list for details.

4. The list includes detailed descriptions and screenshots/videos, so we all know we're talking about the same things. I've also put what I perceive to be the action points for Opus and WindowBlinds, with green points being done/solved, red ones needing work, and yellow ones being mostly solved with a few questions remaining.

5. I've written a long list of reasons why we strongly request that WindowBlinds stops detecting Opus or treating it specially. If there are problems in Opus, just tell us and we will fix them, in Opus. Please don't inject code into our application that we don't know about and that you don't test or review; it's not neccessary and it's how we got into this mess in the first place.

6. There's also a list of WindowBlinds issues I found which aren't related to Opus, for reasons explained on the page.

All of that is here:

http://leo.dopus.com/dowb/index.html

If anything needs adding, updating or correcting, let me know and I'll do it. It's a long page (I don't see to make any other kind :)) so I'm sure there are still some mistakes.


Neil wrote:

Please, please don't do that. We will make any needed changes on the Opus side so that WindowBlinds does not need to detect Opus and can treat it as a generic application.

I'm not sure which place you mean where we check the tab control's transparency, but chances are we can change it if needed.

I haven't noticed any problems with any tab controls, except for http://leo.dopus.com/dowb/index.html#D6 which was a bug in Opus, not related to WindowBlinds or a reaction to any transparency information from the theme, just a bug that couldn't be seen with Windows Aero. (That bug existed whether or not the theme said the tab control had transparency, and it's fixed in 10.0.3.1.)




There's no need to detect Opus and inject special code to deal with that. I have already changed the code in Opus to stop it happening.

If you do want to change anything on your side, fix the visual styles that have bogus gutter elements. Details are included on my page. Those same visual styles cause problems with other apps, e.g. Firefox 9. Fix the styles and you fix the problem everywhere, not just in Opus, which is fixed now either way. Details about two theme menu-gutter problems (neither affecting Opus 10.0.3.1 anymore) are here:

http://leo.dopus.com/dowb/index.html#D2

http://leo.dopus.com/dowb/index.html#W7




Thanks, I have fixed it for 10.0.3.1.




FWIW, it affects these stock WB styles: Corporate, Diamond, Precision, Sabertooth, Sublime, Win8 and Win8 Metro.




There was already an extremely unfortunate problem long before Christmas. There has been a mounting problem for us and our mutual users for months (maybe *years* from what I've been reading); the problem didn't just start when we complained about it a week ago.

From our point of view, the problem was caused by WindowBlinds breaking Opus and Stardock failing to fix it -- long after people had contacted the official support channel -- then releasing untested code, without notifying any of the interested parties, which broke things even more.

For all the criticism we're getting about not finding the right way to contact Stardock, we did at least try. And we investigated and provided a temporary fix for the problem even though it wasn't our fault. Give us some credit. Stardock didn't try to get in touch with us at all (had they done so, we could've helped test the change we knew nothing about).

I accept that we could have found a better way to contact you, but we shouldn't really have had to contact you in the first place, and saying that's where the problem started is a bit much.




Will do.




When I said Stardock didn't care, I didn't mean to imply any malice or intent; only neglect.

Leaving in app-specific code that breaks programs in various ways for years without regularly reviewing that code, apparently ignoring forum threads and (at least from what I'm told) official support requests, bodging-in a fix which breaks things even more, not even doing a Find-In-Files let alone a cursory check that the new code actually worked (just launching Opus would've shown instantly that it didn't), then releasing it without telling anyone, while at no point communicating about any of it...

Some of those things could be forgiven -- we're all only human -- but when all of them happen together I can't help but describe it as someone not caring.

By the time we realised how bad things now were with WindowBlinds and Opus installed together, we had to write something to our users because this was causing them real problems. Not just the cosmetic issues we'd been waiting to see solved but functional problems that did not have an obvious cause or solution.




Agreed. All things said and done, we just want to get any issues resolved, make sure any users still seeing problems understand what they are and how to get them fixed, and move on.

If you ever need us to change anything in Opus, or just want to let us know of a WindowBlinds update that might affect Opus and be worth us testing against, just let us know, via any of the following methods, and we'll respond as quickly as possible.

http://resource.dopus.com/
http://blog.dopus.com
support@gpsoft.com.au
leo@pretentiousname.com

I just updated my Dopus today. I got a notice and in the listings there was a WB inssue being addressed. I'm glad to say, I have never noticed these issues while running Dopus and WB.

I really think the exchange of incompatibilities serves both sides. But I also think this should have been kept on an internal level, as what I really hate is all the people spreading FUD about WindowBlinds again. I can't imagine any PC of mine without it since more than 10 years.

This quote from Stardock's CEO seems appropriate here:

In the case of Stardock, it means that the company reflects my values. In particular, transparency and collaboration with others.  

Transparency is a double-edged sword. We won't tell people what they want to hear. We simply tell them what we believe is the truth -- even if that is not necessarily good news for us.

I agree. I would rather be open and transparent about what the issues are, what has been done about them and what still needs to be done.

The page I posted in my previous reply is not just a list of problems in WindowBlinds. It includes things which are/were purely bugs on the Opus side, and I've been open about those issues and not tried to hide them or pass the blame. I've also made it explicit, at the top of the page, that it is all from my point of view and only my take on what has happened and what I think should happen.

I have invited people (with hex-edited WB DLLs, obviously) to report any other issues that they find between Opus and WB, using the list to check if they are already known (and as a hint for the type of things to look for). There are bound to be more issues lurking around, and the sooner they are reported the sooner they can be sorted out.

The list has not been posted in flashing lights. I just added it to the existing threads here & at the Opus forum, and added a single-line link to it in the earlier blog post. People interested in the ongoing issues and the work to fix them will now be better informed and know what to expect when we release Opus 10.0.3.1 later this week.

I also want people to see that, on the Opus side, we are still putting time into identifying, understanding and addressing these problems, regardless of whose fault they are, even while WB is still breaking Opus in ways which make that extra work fairly irrelevant. (Most people won't be able to see the fixes/workarounds I worked on if WB is still disabling themes in Opus, and all the cosmetic stuff is utter trivia while WB is still making it impossible for Opus to open standard file dialogs. To my knowledge, we still don't have an ETA on when that will be fixed.)

People can see that we are not just complaining about things and expecting someone else to fix them. We are putting significant effort in to get things solved, where they can be solved or worked-around on our side, and regardless of whose fault they are, with the aim that Opus and WindowBlinds will work great together.

 

What FUD? As I've said all along, if I have posted anything that is factually incorrect then I will gladly correct it. There are enough real issues here that I don't need to start making things up or trying to paint a false picture of anything.

(EDIT: Maybe you meant other people's comments, not mine. If so, apologies for taking things the wrong way, but I'd just say that those comments existed already whether or not the list of issues was public/transparent.)

Equally, I've made some pretty strong statements, so I feel the need to back them up with evidence. To the best of my knowledge and understanding, none of the evidence is untrue and all of it reflects reality. All of my statements are what I genuinely feel about the situation. People can decide for themselves if my statements are correct. Providing the evidence that led to my conclusions can only help people evaluate what I have said. If my evidence does not fit my conclusions then my conclusions will fall, as they should. Where something is subjective, we may disagree, but I still want to make what I'm saying and why I'm saying it perfectly clear so that it can be judged fairly.

I was also rather alarmed that Neil said he planned to have WindowBlinds continue to detect Opus and treat it specially, given that doing that is what has caused the biggest problems here, and given that it seems completely unnecessary for things which we can and will change on the Opus side. The Opus 10.0.3.1 release later this week will prove that. We are strongly against WB detecting Opus because we really want to avoid these problems happening again, and we believe any issues in the code should be fixed where they are, rather than each of us trying to modify the other's code.

If the list of issues makes anything look bad then the solution is to fix the issues, not hide them from people.

It would not be right to hide those details. Users should not be kept in the dark about problems and it is simply not fair to expect Opus to continue absorbing the hit to its reputation while shielding the thing that is fundamentally responsible. WindowBlinds has been making Opus look bad for years and broken for months, for reasons which could have been avoided a long time ago had proper care been paid to WB's development, QA, regression-testing and communication (both to users and to developers of the apps which WB affects).

Opus *is* being made to look bad, and has been for quite some time. Please don't ask me to hide reality because you want to make WB look good no matter what.

 

Leo, I didn't mean to offend YOU with my post. It is some peole in Your forums. And let's see the facts : WindowBlinds has to deal literally with thousands of programs and hindreds of different configurations. Given that fact we are speaking of 0,1 percent or something it may have issues with.

I also have SyncBack registered which warns me that WindowBlinds is installed and may cause problems. Only thing is, I don't have any problems using it on a daily base.

Please, I didn't intend to 'hide' anything, just t keep it fair. People claiming they don't understand how anyone could ever run WindowBlinds on his/her machine still just have no clue.

 

c242: Regarding SyncBack it seems there is blame both sides.

They are passing in incorrect set of flags to the DrawThemeTextEx api which is causing their text on their toolbar buttons to be misaligned.

There is a menu issue too which is now resolved on our end, but they continue to have a menu issue with selected menu items due to them painting the parts in the wrong order.  This isn't totally obvious with Aero as it has pretty high transparency in that image, but becomes so obvious with some WB skins.

I will be contacting them about those issues so they can fix them as I can well see the menu issue causing them pain on Windows 8 if it comes with a Metro skin.

Today, after noticing the problems with WB and Opus via the Opus update panel news, I have read through this whole topic and related ones. Opus is essential, WB is visual candy. I like them both and hate the standard Win7 theme. I like the simplicity of the Sabertooth theme, not because it's Mac like, but because it's uncluttered and clear. I don't have any particular visual effects added to Opus. I have had Opus for years and years, WB since getting Win7, I also installed Object Dock Plus v2 which adds a nice visual dock system.

Opus is always regularly updated and keeps on top of things with a wealth of information and details available at any time with lots of constructive help from people like Leo, always there to help and get things sorted. From what I've noticed about WB and OD, things aren't addressed fully in forums, updates are infrequent and don't seem to address the issues that repeatedly come up. I for one get the small icons problem in Object Dock that I couldn't find a solution for in the forums despite it being mentioned for several years and I have noticed lots of WB incompatibility issues with some quite important programs that I have had to exclude from WB's visual ill-effects.

I hadn't fully appreciated all the issues Leo has raised in the videos and notes, some I had come across myself, e.g. wondering why when I upgraded Opus that the Load button didn't work in Licence Manager and I'm seriously wondering what other random things I miss out on not just in Opus, but all programs. I'm no serious power user or expert in this field but I would have expected WB to be a bit more sorted out in terms of its efficiency and accuracy. The slow update cycle seems to be a major issue and I have been disappointed that updates are rarely available when I look at Stardock. There's also all that weird Impulse updater thing to contend with that seems to be on my system which as a non-gamer is just a pain and irrelevant. I have since realised this now is old or outdated and the last update I found to a Stardock program was after prolonged failed attempts via Impulse but then found elsewhere. This is the one of the problems with Stardock etc., not well documented and poor updating and irrelevant out of date information.

Reading all of the notes above and the related posts, it seems Stardock have still not quite yet understood what Leo has been trying to point out; WB should not be excluding Opus and if any issues are found that WB doesn't agree with, they will fix it almost immediately which by its nature precludes the need to be put on the exclusion list for 'special treatment'. A program such as WB that is only updated at what only seems to be as result of errors pointed out months after the issue was raised, really should not be trying to defend its position against another program that would identify, solve and update the issue with its users sometimes within a few days. QED, this whole issue and what can only be described as a defensive stance by WB developers. The points have been made and are justified, WB is doing some weird things and really should be on top of things a bit more with regular updates and fixes. Leaving Opus on some blacklist for years because of some incompatibility years ago really shouldn't be happening in a modern software development environment. WB undoubtedly does some clever stuff where Microsoft fails but as I say, it needs to be kept on top of which in some ways must be really difficult when dealing with various software developers and there odd workarounds, bodges and 'features' (Microsoft not excluded).

What perhaps surprises me with WB is that there isn't a user webpage or database of problem programs within WB and user-configurable suggested settings to use. If other program developers found themselves on this list then maybe some issues and disagreements might get sorted out quicker and perhaps in a more cooperative way. To embed undocumented 'fixes' into WB seems counter-productive and given the long update cycle it's no wonder stuff gets forgotten and errors reoccur.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming updates from both parties and hope that WB will continue to receive regular updates while its issues are sorted out.

If you have had to exclude applications please let us know so we can investigate it.

Looking at my list of "Per application" exclusions, I have the following set to be excluded from WBs effects. I can't recall the exact reasons why each would have ended up on my list, suffice it to say it was probably a serious visual or functional elements problem that went away when excluded:

Artisteer.exe

Diskeeper.exe

iexplore.exe

thunderbird.exe (uses a different skin)

TrueImageLauncher.exe

TrueImageTools.exe

UltraRecall.exe

 

None of the visual settings/themes for the above software is altered from the general defaults beforehand. All my software is generally kept at the current/latest version on Win7 64bit.

With the Acronis TrueImage software I recall the problem was quite serious with missing panels and critical information missing. I seem to recall also some issues with WesternDigital MyBook software, I might be wrong with this one but there may again have been some missing or scrambled information. I don't currently have that installed to test again.

Aside from the above, the Opus issues described do exist on my system and having read through all the issues today, many of the unexplained visual and functional problems I've had with other programs over the last 9 months since purchasing WB have been ringing bells and could well be explained by WB's inbuilt exclusions of undocumented alterations and issues?  I use almost exclusively Adobe and Design/Creativity software and while I can't pinpoint any other particular issues with those at the moment, I do wonder if any of these programs might be on WB's current internal hit list of exclusions and if any of the odd problems I've had with those relate to WB's decisions and issues?  

 

 

I really need to know why you excluded IE as excluding that would seem to be crazy.  We test against IE extensively!

The only issues I know with IE are theme related and a bug in their code which does not handle theme changes well sometimes.  In that case you can get black scrollbars and blank controls BUT only if you just changed a theme and only sometimes and it would go away after you close IE or reboot.  This can be reproduced without WB too if you switch themes around.

The theme related issues are some scrollbars may show things stretching instead of tiled, but thats a actually a bug/limitation in IE itself.

TrueImage had an issue a while back but this was resolved in the 7.3 release.

To need to exclude all those points to something more than just WindowBlinds.

Support tells me they have not heard from you and I would urge you to contact them so they can assist.

Regarding thunderbird, there was an issue for a short period due to thunderbird switching to using your 3D graphics card to render all your mail.  This caused issues with WB until we set it to be detected as firefox (which it is basically)

Thunderbird does have a number of issues such as attaching a file can make the input cursor vanish in a mail, but these happen with or without WB.

I really can't remember now why IE is in the list, but maybe it was the black scroll bars you mention? I don't normally play with standard themes anyway so wouldn't know the difference. I have most of the stupid Win 7 transparency Aero stuff turned off anyway. 

I have V2012 build 5545 currently installed, I have no idea if I have updated it since excluding it which if I did must have been after purchasing WB in approx April 2011.

How do I know what a normal list should look like and whether my list of a few programs is excessive? I assure you I only included programs on the exclusion list because there was a rendering or functional issue of certain elements, i.e. At the time of exclusion, they showed errors which then worked fine without WB activated.

I have just deleted all the programs references I had listed in the exclusions list. I note that for Thunderbird I had unchecked everything so in theory it wasn't doing anything but the description still said "Uses a different skin". At a first quick glance of all the mentioned programs running again without a WB exclusion, I can't spot any issues right now. Maybe this is because of updates/upgrades to the programs or maybe the update for WB itself in November (I think?). 

But surely herein lies the problem, one moment there's a problem with a program, then it gets an update and is somehow fixed in relation to WB, or WB 'fixes' it internally, but users still have it manually added in their configuration as not compatible and perhaps altered in some way to make it function better. I have not seen any WB documentation about excluded or problematic programs past or present, and it seems that WB does not check or inform of possible 'fixes' to old problems. What I mean is, WB should perhaps actively and regularly check a user's configuration and program versions installed and make suggestions accordingly, revising its advice or suggestions when a program update is available or installed, or WB itself fixes or updates an issue. An automatic weekly or monthly WB database update of programs could solve lots of headaches for everyone and would keep users informed of possible improvements they could make as well as helping us understand what is going on with certain programs and WB itself.

I guess it's a difficult issue for WB's developers, if they spot errors by another programmer, then is it their duty to spend time sorting it out whether it's by a workaround or by contacting the developer? If the database of possible problems were open to all, then perhaps we could all take an active role in sorting out the issues whether by manual WB configuration and exclusion or by nagging the original developers of that other problematic program. To keep that data and information somehow hidden and no one is any the wiser can only lead to problems further down the line.

As alluded to by Leo and others, and as 'visual themes' are WB's whole reason for being, it really should be WB's role to seek the causes of problems and support the fixing of them rather than make hidden workarounds. Like in medicine; treat the cause, not the symptoms and side-effects.  

If I find anything from now on I may well do that. However, without a database of good/bad programs, there's no easy way to find out what is currently known or maybe just me not getting something right. 

Thanks for your time.