mstex has been launched!

Updates:

Able to sucessfully move the icon rendered to it's own code base, making the speed of the app, well, faster.

Changed out the Resources caching sub to a better location, speeding up the app, because now it only caches the resources on either start up, or when the skin is changed or the AppTabs/Tiles are regenerated.

Classic mode's treeview icon issues has been handled, and the .Click even has been added. Only a few icons wont show up using the new icon rendering method, but I know how to fix that, so that issue is pretty much not an issue any more.

The added "Skin Template" settings is on the way to becoming a full-blown "Skin" setting. Users will have the ability to assign the icons, template backgrounds, the main background, etc... This is still in work, but as such, the code is a simple modification, so I should have it done if not today, then tomorrow (if i am lazy today, that is).

And now for a Rant. If you dislike rants, then dont read the rest of this post. Just stop right here and be happy

The rant is at my site, I wont post it here as how not everyone will want to hear me bitching. If, however, you're of a curious sort, click the link.

http://solo-soft.com/blog/?p=221

Get the new Release update compile, has a few Pro versions, for free.. FOR NOW.

http://solo-soft.com.com/mStartEX/release.zip

(Yes, you can just install over a previous install)


It Lives!!!



Click HERE to go to the Website to download the new Setup!
Click the mstex Download image, and follow what it says!

mstex launches tomorrow! Wonder whats new with it? See here! http://bit.ly/RljGL2




Updated and adjusted.

• Font is the Segoe UI Light
  
• icons return to 32x32
  
• active tasks goes to the left side
  
• username beside avatar pic
  
• control icons = right aligned
  
• slide trackbar replaces the page numbers

(Active Tabs, QuickSearch, Tile View, Tab View)

Thanks to my WebMaster and graphics guru for the layout suggestion.



Update to mstex Alpha.

I have alphabetic listing in proper (last subroutine was a dirty hack, this is much more efficient and elegant…

You can now change between “AppTab” (Default) look to “Tile” look. I purposefully went with the Windows 8 Tile look, that will most likely be a Pro option that you can change to however you would like it to be in the future releases. Also, added “Visual Indicators” that is, currently, the item the mouse is over will “Go Grey-scale” and it will have a Blue “Check” triangle in the upper left-hand corner.

You will be able to change the Visual Indicators (both mouse-over effect and the Corner graphic) if you decide to get the Pro version.

Please note : This app is still under development, aspects may change. A Free version will be available, but Pro users that pay the activation cost will get more options. No idea when the first Alpha will be available for download, but, I use this app on a daily basis, and it works fine for me.


took a while to do this... still not perfect, however, did a new layout, put ann options in a new options menu. in that menu, you will see "active tasks", it slides out (like the quicksort, but on the left hand side to the middle) a list of currently running apps.

however, listing apps is not as easy as how it was in vb6, and if the app is minimized (see the top purple ribbon of VS.Net 2010) then it does not grab a image graphics... anyway, a new feature. this almost makes that taskbar not needed... I can have one more slide out pane on the right hand side that can list apps from the "pinned to taskbar/startmenu" folder...

then i just need a notification area and a clock.

hummm, mstex is turning out to be a bit more, already. interesting.




Video demo. it should be noted that pages 1 and 2 had been pre-generated to show speed of loading, pages 3 and 4 left ungenerated to show how quick apptab generation is, or can be. also, quicksort from mStartEX shows up, yeah, i love that damned thing. and it is animated this time too! oh, and the form loading in is animated also..

All not-last-two-updates will be hidden in this spoiler tag, to keep this first post from being to damned long...




Updates:

a highly suggested by several people, lowercase app names. It does look kind of good. middle-right aligned text on the apptabs.

apptab backgrounds can now use and list from wallpapers. the wallpaper is loaded, then the apptab's dimensions (width, height) is randomly selected and cropped/copied from the wallpaper. this allows for a potential hundreds, if not thousands of apptab backgrounds from just 1 wallpaper, if the wallpaper's size is large enough.

gear menu now works, also, power menu in the gear menu works also. reused code from another app of mine, Desktop Control.

much better error handling that i have ever previously used. Why did I not think of that method sooner???




Ok, SO......

* Ability to import images for the use as backgrounds
* crops to needed area (1,1,320,54)
* re-sizes that app's icon to 48x48, ignoring the native 32x32
* saves the generated background for future usage
* correctly sets the windows to bottom-left hand corner
* gear button currently just closes the app

The big thing pretty much here is the save-and-reuse graphics. This speeds up loading for the next time it is shown, and the app has less work to do.
For the backgrounds I randomly grabbed wallpapers from my folder. Some seems great! Some don't.

Some icons are overly huge and fuzzy, working on why that is.
Anyway, a future planned option is that you can assign 1 pic as every background, have backgrounds always randomly generated (NOT SUGGESTED... Extreme memory usage), or just do random "Not-Calling-It-Metro 'Win8'" Apps colors.

Once I get those options in, I will copy that subroutine, paste it, rename it, and hack the needed items for ... Win8 Tiles. In complete Theory, should be done in about, oh, tomorrow. But you never know, I may be truly lazy. Never know.

Also, the "blacklist" options is partially working. Only reason why partial is because i need to make the code that saves all listed items to a file. Yup, Laziness. Or I just have not gotten around to it yet, your call.



Currently this is how the app looks. The gear is not the main icon, however, it does nothing as of yet in the app itself. The gear will pop up a menu to go to the Settings or Exit the app, or shutdown/restart/hibernate the PC.

[Concept Post {OLD}]
[center]

Background: mStartEX is doing good and well, but it has some issues. As such, I decided to do a version 2.0 of it. When I wrote it "Metro" was still the "Hot New Thing", and as such, I have been modifying my idea of Metro to fit what is known and associated with it. Due to this I have decided to re-write it from scratch due to "Feature-itis" and how I have had to modify my code to others suggestions of how it should work, look and feel like. Not the best thing to do

So this is the “Concept Art” of how Version 2 should look and feel. It should be started that I have been struggling with WPF, and as such, the new app will still be a winforms app. Or, for those that dont know programming, a “Desktop App”.

This only shows the list doing 10 items, but the final should display up to 20 items per “Page”. The numbers at the bottom indicate how many pages there is, click the number that you want to go to the corresponding page.


The main reason why I am adding Pages to the launcher is that many, many people have a lot of programs installed on there PC. It takes time to list all of those, especially when your generating graphics on-the-fly. By limiting how many per page, it will speed up the time that it takes to generate the graphics, compress, and load them.

The interesting thing is that by accident, some one year ago, i had made a graphics mistake and had almost this exact same layout, but I had dismissed it. Now, having seen new pics of the newest iOS device, that has an app launches almost exactly like this UI, I have decided that this is how I feel that mStartEX V2 should look and feel. Also, mStartEX v2 will have the Quick Sort method as how v1 did for quick finding.

If you have ever used the Linux distro “elementary OS”, it has an app launcher much like how v2 is, it’s called “Slingshot”. I use that distro often, and I like how Slingshot looks and feels.

Anyway, Suggestions! If you have a better idea layout, please do a graphics and post, and comment on your design! As it is now, this is how the app should work...

Default view : as above, but 2 columns, with 10 "app tabs" per column. one "app tab" is 256 wide x 48 high.
Metro view: a 5x5 grid of generated tiles per page. thats 25 "tiles" total per page. each tile should be about 50x50 pixels, although i have not done the math on this mode yet.