Published on June 4, 2005 By Darkthorn In
Again, this is based on my Developer theme on wincustomize.

The good:
1)The working directory problem seems to be fixed. Though the first time I ran my test it used c:\winnt\system32 for some reason. Every other time after that its been working flawlessly though, so who cares

2) Resizing the bar (i.e. changing the width on a left docked bar) works great.

3) Properties action now makes good sense

4) The white bar, and other bar drawing problems (ghosting, auto-hiding etc) seem to have all gone away.

5) Adding desktopX widgets now goes to the right directory

6) The drawing of desktop X widgets on an autohiding bar now works great. The move cursors will still appear, but it will not stay behind anymore when the bar auto-hides.

7) Clicking on empty areas no longer causes auto-hide bar to disappear.

Basically, there's been a LOT of progress (good work!) and I now feel comfortable using it at work. However, there is still....

The bad:
1) Icons to bars on bars. There was a previous post about this where I misunderstood what the guy was talking about (again, you call them popup menus, which has vague meaning, please change name to have 'bar' in there). Basically, if you configure a popup bar, there is no place to select it's icon. You have to go to the advanced theme editor to do this, or after adding the popup, right click on it and set its properties. You should be able to do this in your theme editor somewhere. Otherwise its incredibly confusing. Especially since it will appear for all other types of items in their configuration step.

2) Wierd bug that I've reproduced on 2 machines. I have a folder menu link that uses the special folder properties to point to MyDocuments. While the popup functionality works fine, if you double click on the MyDocuments item, it will CRASH object bar. However, this is not a problem for normal folder.

3)Speed in loading up large folders on the popup menu still exists.

4) I know your restricting sizing the different sections of a bar in object bar 2.0, but could we at least have a place to put in percentages of how much an area it should try to take up? Or some sort of layout hints (i.e. this section should stick to the left and only be the size of it's items, these sections should be evenly distributed, etc).

5) and now my subjective whine, change the red exclamation mark icon for the various-function items, it looks like there's an error

-Scott MacDonald






Comments
on Jun 11, 2005
Dear Scott how do you get to the advanced theme editor? I can't find how to do that anywhare
Jose
on Jun 11, 2005
BTW I'm using build 731
on Jun 12, 2005
You have to add a multi-function item to your bar, and then under its properties select an object bar command. Advanced Theme Editor should be in there.
on Jun 13, 2005
Wow I would have never found that! Thanks Scott.