I will go search for a small animal to sacrifice...

Tabbed dock on top of the screen does occasionaly stay open on vista (32-bit). The drawer function seems somewhat "whacky".

This has occured in WinXP once in a while as well.

In Vista, there is already a window animation feature for minimizing and maximizing. The OD version of this effect does NOT appear to do anything or change the Vista animation - at least on my system. The problem with this is that as I said, the Vista animation is geared towards the task bar (which is hidden) and doesn't look good when using OD.

More strangeness with minimized apps:

I have "Always show windows as thumbnails" checked in Vista and show minimized windows on the dock (only).

Here is my dock (with minimized apps shown right of the last separator):



Here is what was running at the time and the window state:

- Two instances of Excel 2007 (not minimized)
- IE 7 (not minimized)
- Outlook 2007 (not minimized)
- Word 2007 (not minimized)

So basically, although I had no apps minimized, the dock decided to show Excel and IE7. In addition, the representation of Excel was poor... 4 icons and no thumbnails of the spreadsheets. Strange!

virtualrain: OD's Vista minimize animation minimizes apps into ObjectDock taskbars that are on zooming docks (and only zooming docks). The feature only works if you have thumbnails enabled, and for non-grouped windows only. So if you want the animation always, I'd recommend turning taskbar grouping off.

virtualrain: also, there's a note when you click it in the next refresh and the option grays out... if you have "always show thumbnails" clicked, there is no minimize animation as the image for the window is already being used as the thumbnail on the icon itself.

Thanks for the screenshot, yeah thats wierd behavior...can I ask, are any of the above running as administrator? Ran-as-admin apps will have trouble with the "show minimized apps only"/etc feature unless ObjectDock also is ran as admin. Realistically I should just be excluding them, since I can't keep track of them. So if say you had an admin app minimized when you started ObjectDock, and then restored it...OD would have no idea because of Window's security. The thumbnails being crappy icons instead of real representations, now that's just Window's fault...you probably recently came out of suspend or a screensaver or something like that, at which point Vista discards the information of the thumbnail and I cannot use it anymore.

Ok, I unchecked "always show windows as thumbnails (Vista only)" and the animations worked as expected. That's great! But then why is this option even there? With my settings as shown below, all this check box appears to do is enable or disable the animation. Perhaps it should be unchecked and greyed out when "Types of windows to show" is set to "Minimized windows only"? Users will likely be confused by what this option is supposed to do when there settings are as shown below. It's redundant with the checkbox lower down that says "Represent minimized windows by their screenshots". I'm not sure I'm not confused.

Here are the properties for the excel shortcut I used to launch excel where the icons were all screwed up. Note that run as administrator is not selected or enabled.



Could the screwed up icons be somewhat related to my problem above where I had all three of these somewhat confusing and overlapping features turned on?

- Types of windows to show = minimized windows only
- Always show windows as thumbnails (Vista Only) = on
- Represent minimized windows by their screenshots = on

??? I think you need to clarify these settings or clean them up.

One other thing I've noticed... for whatever reason, MS Project 2003 refuses to use the OD animation even though other applications do. It insist on using the Vista animation.

JMBdev: Re the "objectdock closes sometimes" problems, I've had it happen again today & there is no crash log, but it does seem to be triggered by leaving the machine for a while & the screensaver activating if that is any help.

Jeff, hit a bit of an annoying problem... I cant right-click on Live Messenger if I'm signed in.  I can if I'm signed out, but not if I'm signed in using a zoomer dock as my system tray.  Someone else had the same problem as well I think, but i cant remember who.

CerebroJD: yep yeah several people have reported the windows live messenger problem. got a report about Outlook 2007 as well. Both are fixed in the build I'm uploading as we speak

Oops, actually looks like it just finished. So in that case, announcement time!

---------------------

***New v1.6 build is now available on Stardock Central! Should fix the majority of problems that have been mentioned on these boards

Fixes include:

1.59b beta
------------
x-Fixed mouse lagginess on startup / when ObjectDock is busy.

x-Improved system tray, should now work more reliably than ever! Outlook 2007 and Windows Live Messenger should both now work reliably.

x-Fixed issue where autohiding tabbed docks would not autohide anymore after you right clicked anything.

x-Fixed up a couple minor resource leaks

x-Improved taskbars / thumbnail behavior.

x-Added option to turn off tabbed docks' ability to automatically dock to the edge as a drawer when dragging. Option available in "misc options".

x-Fixed multimonitor issue with the Start Menu functionality, and added better problem-notification.

x-Fixed issue with flyouts where if they contained 9+ items and zooming is disabled, they could show up partially behind the dock.

x-Fixed issue where icons for url-shortcuts would not get remembered

x-UI improvments

JMBdev... I like what you did with the UI for the minimize effect... much clearer now.

With my settings as shown here...



I still have a problem with Excel or Powerpoint 2007 icons. If I only have one instance of either Excel or Powerpoint open... no problems. As soon as I open a second instance of either one, even with neither instance minimized... I get two icons as shown below in the dock...



If I then minimze Excel (or Powerpoint), the proper icon will appear in the dock, including the thumb, but the other two are still there...



For some reason, with the way these apps handle MDI windows, the OD thinks it's got two minimized apps when there isn't. Let me know if you have any questions.

Note also this doesn't happen with Word 2007 because when you open two instances of Word, you actually get two windows. With Powerpoint and Excel, multiple instances may be started but only show a single window.

virtualrain: thanks thought you could appreciate that!

gez. that is wierd. I'll have to take a look at that specifically...can't say with 100% confidence I'll be able to work around it immediatly though...not sure what rules its trying to play by. (If the Office UI itself and how it works under the covers is any indicator, not by the ones everyone else plays by! )