Randy31416

Join Date 12/2019

Title bar context help question-mark icon not displaying

None of the default skins with WindowBlinds is showing the "?" context-help question-mark icon in the title bar used by some applications. Normally you click on this icon, the cursor changes to an arrow with a question mark, you click on something else, and help information is shown. (Windows showing this icon have the WS_EX_CONTEXTHELP extended style attribute.) The image below, taken using the WindowBlinds "default theme" (meaning no skin) shows such an icon. But this icon is never shown for me with any of the skins. It is shown if the specific application is excluded from skinning with a per-application setting in WindowBlinds. Any ideas?

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LightStar

Join Date 12/2002

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What operating system are you using? That ? icon hasn't been used as far as I know since Windows 7.

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Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Version 2004

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LightStar

Join Date 12/2002

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Well, must just be Windows 10 only or that window using the ? Icon then. As a skin designer, that ? Icon hasn't been used in several years.

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Hello,
Sorry to hear you are having issues. The help button is there just that most Windowblinds skins, including mine, do not include it. You can easily include it in any design. It just that it will always appeared on all WB skinable windows. Refer to my screenshot below. Putty in this example. The help button appear after I add that. But, now, it also appear on Skinstudios, Windowexplorer etc etc which normally do not have "help button".

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant.

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Basj, thanks for that. In some old documentation I found online, the "Stardock WIndowBlinds Skinning Guide", a PDF by Stardock for Version 3, there is a section on Buttons. In that section there are various code lines that may be applied to buttons. One is "Visibility", and Visibility=13 means "Show if the window has help button (WS_EX_CONTEXTHELP)". The button created by your example, above, is not a "Button" but is "[WindowFrame.Button1PerPixel]" in the output .uis file, and the "Visibility" code does not seem to do anything in this case. The numbers for visibility are likely out of date, anyway. I am not claiming this should work, just observing that at some point WS_EX_CONTEXTHELP was meant to do something.

But, further to your example, In My SkinStudio there is a section for UIS2 buttons (see the image) and that allows visibility to be set. The image shows an added button set to be a Help button and showing the availability of the visibility detection. But I have no clue about how to make a UIS2 frame -- what causes a frame to be UIS2? I'd like to try this out, just to see if it does work as I hope, but need a pointer to a basic start.

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UIS2 Format is different set of Windows frames and buttons that you can turn on or off using the option in Windowblinds below. When you turn off per pixel frames in Windowblinds. WB will use UIS2. And yes, I believe you can set a help button from there too. UIS2 problem is that it can't have transparent part in frames. Usually all Style also include UIS2 section. Just that they don't include help buttons.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

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Thanks for the pointer. Will try it out later and see what I can find. This is a great forum.

Edit: It is now later and I have tried it out. Once I set that do-not-use-per-pixel-frame checkmark, and then use the UIS2 button dialog I mentioned above, and then remove the "always show the button" and leave the "show the button if there is a help button", then this works perfectly. The button shows up if the programmer of the application has supplied a help button style, and it is not seen otherwise.

Note that I am doing this not because I want to design a skin with help buttons or because I want to write a program that uses these buttons but because one of my most-heavily-used purchased programs (xplorer2) uses these buttons in some dialogs to supply its help information.

So now I am all set, I think, as soon as I make sure that the rest of the skin still works and as soon as I supply a decent graphic decently positioned for the help-button icon.

Again, this is a great forum.

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