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Nexus Dock v11.6 Released!

July 6, 2011

The Winstep Nexus dock is a FREE, dock for Windows. Every feature you’d expect from a dock, including widgets, mouse-over effects, skins, drag-and-drop, and many others not available in most other docks, such as live icon reflections, in-dock system tray, Vista Blur-behind effects, and much more. Completely customizable, Nexus has thousands of backgrounds freely available online and is fully compatible with skins for all 3rd party docks.

Combine different dock mouse over effects with the Magnify effect...

Version 11.6 is a maintenance release that fixes all the reported issues with v11.5 and corrects a couple of wrong decisions made on v11.5: edge bump to activate the dock being disabled by default and generic icons being displayed on the dock if rendering icons took longer than 400 ms.

Built-in support for animated icons...

What's New? Highlighted Features (v11.5 + v11.6):

• Dock mouse over effects can now be combined with the Magnify effect.
• Added System Tray icon customization (Nexus Ultimate).
• Added ability to align a docked Shelf by dragging it (Nexus Ultimate).
• New Teleport and Push dock mouse over effects.
• New Gauge style for the CPU, Net and RAM meters.
• Replaced legacy module images with new high resolution versions.
• Added built-in support for animated icons.
• Added independent vertical and horizontal icon spacing settings.
• Added independent transparency settings for dock background and icons.
• Categorized the Internal Commands.
• Major re-organization of the User Interface to make it more intuitive.
• Improved Drag & Drop support.
• Improved multi-monitor support.
• ... and much more! Please see complete change log below...

Nexus v11.6 complete change log:

• Updated Korean language file.
• Updated German language file.
• Updated Hungarian language file.
• Updated Polish language file.
• Added 'Show this dock when the mouse pointer bumps screen edge' setting to the Behavior tab of the Dock Properties dialog. When this setting is on, the dock will come forward when the associated edge is bumped but focus will be automatically given back to the window that previously had it if the user mouses away without clicking on it.
• Dock resizing and drag & drop of items into and from the dock is now much smoother.
• Cleaned up unused bitmaps in the resource file.
• Icons were first appearing blank if they took too long to render.
• It was not possible to select an individual tray icon in grouped mode using the Zoom effect.
• The option in the General tab of Preferences to hide desktop icons wasn't doing anything.
• Dock no longer 'lazy renders' icons (i.
e.; display generic icons if the dock icons took too long to render)
• Very large strips of animated icons no longer appear blank in the dock on 32 bit systems.
• The Water mouseover effect could appear a little bit cropped at the bottom for top docks.
• Fixed label overlapping dock icons for non-magnifying docks at the top of the screen when the 'Do not flip background...' setting was enabled.
• Fixed error that could *potentially* crash the application if a file belonging to the group of files that display thumbnails no longer existed.
• Fixed potential problem when dropping files into an empty dock with the 'Lock Icons' setting enabled.
• It was not possible to duplicate a dock item via drag & drop if dropping the item right next to the source item.
• If the dock popup delay on mouseover was set to 0 ms it was almost impossible to get to the System Tray hidden icons dialog after clicking the system tray expand button.
• Added fail safe code to prevent situations where mouse click actions on running application items were all set to 'None'.

Nexus v11.5 complete change log:

• Updated the German language file.
• Updated Polish language file.
• Updated Korean language file.
• Updated Italian language file.
• Updated Farsi language file.
• Removed 'dead' bitmaps from resource file.
• Most dock mouse over effects can now be combined with the magnify effect.
• Split the Position & Behavior tab in Preferences into two tabs.
• Re-arranged the Effects tab in Preferences.
• Added a new 'Contents' tab to Preferences.
• Moved 'Indicator Offset from Icon Reflection' to its own dialog box with preview.
• Icon Spacing in the dock now has independent vertical and horizontal settings and was moved to its own dialog box with preview.
• Dock transparency now has independent settings for icons and background and was moved to its own dialog box with preview.
• Re-organized some settings in Preferences for a more logical layout.
• Improved the bounce animation that occurs when launching an icon from the dock.
• Docks now un-hide or un-collapse automatically if displaying a list of running tasks and one or more of the tasks start flashing to call attention.
• Removed '@ Sign' Email Checker style, replaced it with default 'Envelope' style.
• Removed Cartoon Fish style, replaced it with 'Fortune Cookie' style.
• Removed the online cookie section from Wanda, since the only available fortune cookie server at the University of Upsala has been down for nearly two years and isn't likely to come back online again.
• Removed the SSL option from the Email Checker settings since servers no longer support SSL v2.
• Internal Commands in the Insert New Item menu are now shown categorized into Application, Desktop, Media, Disk, Misc, System and Shutdown sub-menus.
• Added new 'Push' mouse over effect.
• Groupped system tray icons in magnifying docks are now as sharp as the original icons when the dock item is not being magnified.
• Replaced 'Bar Graph' Net, RAM and CPU meter styles with 'Gauge' style featuring a 'smooth meter' setting in the Performance Settings dialog.
• Added setting to increase the system tray refresh rate from once per second to 16 times per second to the Performance Settings dialog in the Advanced tab of Preferences.
• Added new 'Teleport' mouse over effect.
• Re-organized the UI in order to place settings where they logically belong.
• The Update Manager now displays a 'What's New' link whenever such information is available.
• Added new high resolution images for the digital clock module and the NeXT style recycler.
• Only document files can now be dragged into a shortcut in order to open it with the associated executable.
• Applications are no longer 'ignored' if dragged straight into an icon, now being instead added to the dock. Previously the effect would be the same as launching the target shortcut with that application as an argument (which would simply result in launching the target shortcut), like it happens when you drop a document into a shortcut in the dock in order to open that document in that application.
• The balloon tooltip can now be specified to appear in the following cases: Never, Always, Only for Modules, Only for Modules and Documents.
• Decreased the size of the Wind mouseover effect, which was too big.
• Monitors in multiple monitor systems are now sorted left to right (i.e.; first monitor is the leftmost monitor and the last monitor the rightmost). The primary monitor also has '(Primary Monitor)' added to the description.
• Added new 'Safely Remove Hardware' internal command.
• Added new 'Show physical network adapters only' setting to the Network Meter module, which is now enabled by default.
• Re-organized Net Metter Settings panel.
• Added built-in support for animated icons (i.e.; single PNG strips holding all the frames of an animation). Animated icons are recognized automatically and animation delay settings, etc, can be set in the Dock Entry Properties dialog.
• The Weather system tray icon is now a full 128x128 image.
• Font size in UI command buttons is now automatically reduce if the localized text does not fit.
• Icon in the Version Information dialog had a dark gray background.
• Opening native Winstep theme files from FireFox failed with an error.
• Icon reflections for the Zoom mouseover effect where not being cropped properly.
• The 'Keep this dock visible when pressing WIN+D' setting would always be checked after a re-start.
• After beta 1 a magnifying dock with the persistent Flare/Afterglow mouseover effects could appear partially on screen after auto-hidding into the screen edge.
• A magnifying dock could suddenly appear garbled if you quickly moved the mouse pointer back and forth over it.
• Fixed automatic icon size problem that could sometimes occur when the dock was too large to fit on screen.
• Single .ICO files displayed in the Icon Browser dialog appeared jagged.
• Dock item separators were wrongly assuming the opacity of the dock background.
• Fixed bug in beta 1 that prevented icons from flashing to call attention in the dock.
• There wasn't enough padding for the dock Zoom effect, which would cause the icon to appear cropped when using a large magnitude for the effect.
• It was possible to accidentaly drag a shortcut to itself instead of launching it, which would launch the shortcut but also cause it to disappear from a dock.
• Fixed the date localization used for the clock and 'Lack Checked:' strings.
• 3rd party dock themes were not being applied properly when loaded from the right click menu.
• The dock was sometimes leaving icon 'leftovers' at the left or top when de-magnifying.
• Fixed re-positioning issue after dragging a floating dock.
• Fixed dock tooltip positioning.
• Fixed problem with the dock displaing the wrong right-click context menu with the zoom mouse over effect unless the icon was clicked dead center.
• Setting a clock background image manually would lock the clock hand colors to red and black.
• Selecting the first NIC Adapter from the 'Interface to Monitor' right click menu of the Net module was not working.