• Replaced the Female and Male Clock and Email Checker Voices with new higher quality versions.
• Added new 'Activate if hidden when an application in the dock requests attention' setting to the Activation Settings dialog of the dock's Behavior tab. Enabled by default, this setting controls whether the dock should pop up if hidden when an application with an icon in the dock starts flashing to get your attention.
• The Email Checker module is now able to use speech to report more than 59 new messages (up to 1 million).
• The Email Checker module now displays the number of new messages in the icon itself by default. This can be prevented by disabling the 'Show number of messages in the icon' setting in the Email Checker Settings dialog.
• The Email Checker now checks for new mail immediately after changing settings in the Email Checker Settings dialog, unless automatic checking has been disabled.
• Apparently some Registry Cleanners would sometimes delete Winstep uninstall information from the Windows Registry, which resulted in the user being unable to uninstall the software normally and in him being unable to update normally (trying to install an update via the Winstep Update Manager would result in an error message being displayed instead). Before downloading an upgrade the Winstep Update Manager now checks the Windows Registry for the existence of this critical uninstall section and, if it has been deleted, downloads and installs the full version instead of the smaller upgrade pack. Current settings, etc, are all preserved regardless.
• Module previews in the Module settings dialogs of Preferences now instantly reflect the proper background icons specified by the user via the 'Change Icon' dialog. Previously the Module Settings dialogs were not reflecting changes made to the background icons of modules until those changes were made effective either by pressing the Apply or Ok button in Preferences.
• Improved what happens when the user makes changes to a module in Preferences and then opens the Settings dialog for that module via the right click context menu while Preferences is still open.
• The automatic scaling of the Net Meter module has been changed to progress from 10 Kbit to 100 Kbit, 1 Mbit, 10 Mbits, 100 Mbits, 1 Gbit, 10 Gbits, etc...
• Optimized the performance of updating the meter modules (CPU, Net, RAM) in gauge style when smooth meters is enabled (which is by default).
• Extensive re-organization and fine-tuning of all module related code, both to improve performance as well as to make it even easier to add new modules in the future.
• Made some cosmetic changes to the banner of the Alarm Manager dialog.
• Made some cosmetic changes to the Alarm Reminder in LCD Mode to better keep with the LCD theme: removed the degrees character from the temperature, added automatic replacement of foreign characters with western equivalent for the days of the week.
• Added 'Yearly' option to the clock Alarms - ideal to be reminded of birthdays and anniversaries.
• Yahoo changed the conditions of access to their Weather API, which caused the Yahoo backup weather feed to stop working. Restored this feed by using an alternate URL.
• The user can now define the units used to scale graphs manually in the Net Meter modules as either Bytes, KB, MB, Kbits or Mbits.
• If the Weather Module Settings dialog is open and a weather check is performed in the mean time, the information in the dialog is now updated too.
• METAR Weather information is now retrieved directly from a raw data NOAA server.
• Added 'From Now, On the Hour, Quarter Past, Half Past, Quarter Till' options to the 'Every x hours' daily clock alarm schedule.
• Response to the user pressing WIN+D is now almost instantaneous (before, the dock might momentarily flicker in and out of view).
• 'Restore Wallpaper' thumbnails now transition from wallpaper to wallpaper, when the Windows wallpaper slide-show is active, without first reverting to the general icon.
• WIN+D (Show Desktop) detection is now much more reliable. Microsoft deliberately did not provide a method to know when WIN+D just became active. Knowing when this happens is essential to prevent docks, etc, from hiding together with all other windows. The previous work-around method to detect WIN+D could sometimes falsely assume WIN+D was active if the user clicked on the desktop and no other windows were visible at the time. The changes applied to deal with (the falsely detected) WIN+D would then make docks set to always on top or always on bottom temporarily lose their z-order status.
• Under Windows 7 and later, if Desktop Composition is enabled the iconic window thumbnail extractor will use the DWM instead of PrintWindow to get a still thumbnail. This achieves success in most cases where PrintWindow would fail.
• The 'Busy' animation is now more responsive when starting up, restoring and backing up settings.
• The Weather and Email modules now refresh automatically immediately after restoring old settings.
• The 'Get Weather' button in the weather Module Settings dialog now bypasses the current weather information cache and stores a diagnostics 'Weather.log' file in the Winstep user data folder.
• The clock module is now able to announce the time using the proper format for the following languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese Brazilian and German.
• The email module is now able to count incoming messages using the proper format for the following languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese Brazilian and German.
• Added new English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese Brazilian and German voice packs with high quality voices and all the words required to properly announce the time and count messages in these languages.
• The Winstep Update Manager is now able to look for and update voice packs as well. By default the application only comes with English male and female voices, but if other voices packs are available in the user's own language, the Winstep Update Manager will notify the user and download them right after installation.
• When changing the currently selected language in Preferences, if a voice pack in the selected language exists, it will be automatically selected as well.
• Added a 'Open Folder' button in the Sounds tab of Preferences to show the folder containing the files for the currently selected Voice theme/pack.
• Dock icon labels now bounce up and down with the icon for effects such as jump, bounce, etc...
• Changed the Bounce effect so it's a bit more similar to the original Mac OSX bounce effect. Like the other effects, it now also has settings for fine-tuning • magnitude and duration.
• Added a 'Magnify Settings' button to the Effects tab in Preferences, which allows changing settings for this effect directly when combined with other effects.
• Improved icon reflection rendering performance for themes such as KTEK-4D1 where icon reflections are 'cropped' to the background tile.
• Modified the Performance Settings dialog so the 'basic' slider values now perform a linear escalation as originally intended. The user can still 'pick and choose' in the Advanced dialog.
• None of the settings in the Alarm Settings dialog (Initial Volume, Final Volume, LCD Style color, etc...) were being saved between sessions.
• Clicking the Default button in the METAR Server Settings dialog of the Weather module was restoring the previous, no longer working, NOAA weather link and search string.
• Because of the new aviationweather.gov METAR information page format, a non-working METAR code (i.e.; invalid code or no METAR information for that code) was not being recognized as such, and current weather conditions would be displayed as N/A (Not Available).
• Changing a Windows color scheme or applying a new WindowBlinds theme was not updating the background color of slider controls.
• The Wanda 'Hide/Show Systray Icon' right-click context menu option was not doing anything.
• Fixed bug with the easeInExpo and easeInOutExpo easings which would return the wrong value for t=0.
• In very specific circumstances the Weather module could display a moon icon during the day.
• If the user opened a dialog via a Always On Top dock, the dialog could still appear behind the dock even though the it was also set as 'always on top'.
• If the user opened a dialog via a Always On Top dock, any secondary dialogs would appear behind the parent dialog.
• When resolving shortcuts, if the shortcut had never been used before a MSI dialog would sometimes popup asking to install files. Normally letting MSI complete the install would fix the problem, but not always. This issue has been fixed and the MSI dialog should no longer pop up when resolving shortcuts.
• Minimized windows would lose their 'snap to edge' status when restored from the Winstep application.
• Full screen Adobe Flash videos were triggering a WM_DISPLAYCHANGE message which caused a reset of the reserved screen areas and subsequent screen flickering.
• The backup overwrite prompt appeared twice.
• Running indicators on the dock could take up to a second to refresh after uncollapsing/un-hiding the dock.
• After downloading and installing an updated language file via the Winstep Update Manager, the wrong language could be applied to the application.
• URLs and mail support addresses were still pointing to the old Proxma AG partner website in the German language file.
• Fixed extremelly annoying z-order bug that normally would only happen if a dock was at the bottom of the screen right above the taskbar. Conditions to trigger were: the user would be working on window A and would move the mouse pointer down to the taskbar, thus travelling across the dock, to give focus to window B. The user would click the relevant button in the taskbar and window B got the focus. As the user moved the mouse pointer to window B, it would travel across the dock again which would then (wrongly) bring window A to the top of the z-order (thus above window B).
• If the dock was docked to the top of the screen with the 'Do not flip background for docks at the top of the screen' setting enabled, the distance between the top screen edge and the top edge of the dock might not be enough to show some of the effects without the icons becoming partially cropped at the top.
• Fixed issue that could cause the View Change Log parser to enter an infinite loop and hang the application.
• Fixed some issues with the opacity of the icon reflection as icons in the dock moved up and down.
• Fixed some cropping issues with icon reflections in the dock.
• The movement of the icon drop shadow in combination with the Bounce effect was not correct.
• The Recycler style drag & drop animation was not activating.
• A change to the 'Do not display confirmation when deleting' setting in the Delete Confirmation dialog itself might not be immediately reflected in the Recycler Settings dialog.
• Changing the 'Cache animated icons using original resolution' setting in the Performance Settings Advanced dialog was not causing a memory usage report to be displayed.