What's New? Highlighted Features:

• Faster and more convenient access to colorization options.

Clicking the arrow symbol at the bottom of the Themes tab in Preferences now slides the colorization options in. This allows quick experimentation with the settings and instant previews without having to constantly open and close the Color Settings dialog.





• New and improved colorization options.

Added alternative hue shifting colorization method and text can now be optionally colorized as well.

The old Tint colorization method first converts an image to grayscale then applies a tint to the image. Blacks remain black but Whites become tinted with the new color. Original color information is lost.




The new Hue shift alternate colorization method first determines the dominant color of the image then shifts the hue of the whole image so that the new color becomes the dominant color. Unlike the tint method, Whites are also preserved along with Blacks, but all other colors are shifted as well.




Which method will work best for you depends on the theme and your own personal preferences, but at least now you have a choice!


• Wallpaper hot-track now works with the Windows 7 wallpaper slideshow.

The option to automatically colorize themes based on the dominant color of the current desktop background was introduced with v15.9, and just got a lot better with the new Hue colorization method.

Unfortunately it did not work with the way Windows 7 changed wallpapers in slide-show mode. Now it properly detects when Windows has changed the wallpaper and automatically adjusts the theme's colorization accordingly.





• If Theme Integration is enabled, colorizing a theme in WorkShelf now also colorizes it in NextSTART and vice-versa.
• New Battery module customization options.

The battery in the Battery Information dialog now displays using the currently selected style and glows with the dominant color of the module.




Charge percentage and run time can now also be optionally displayed outside the battery image itself, which allows the use of customized multi-state images such as the one below:




If you like the cartoon look above and would like to use it for your battery module, here is what you need to do:

1. Download the multiple-state PNG strip from HERE.
2. Unzip the PNG file.
3. Open WorkShelf Preferences and navigate to the Modules tab.
4. Select the Battery Monitor module.
5. Change the module style to vertical.
6. Click the Change Icon button.
7. Browse to the cartoon-battery.png file you extracted above (optionally, if you still have the containing folder open, just drag & drop the PNG strip to the icon preview panel).
8. Press OK to close the dialog and click on the 'Battery Monitor Settings' button.
9. Unselect the 'Overlap information on battery icon' setting.


• New 'Auto Backup Settings' internal command.

Internal commands are special commands that you can add as shortcuts to docks, the Shelf, NextSTART menus, hotspots and taskbar: Hibernate, Power Off Monitor, Empty Recycler, Show Start Menu, Language Bar, CD Control, Lookup IP address and over 80 more!

You can add shortcuts to internal commands by right-clicking a dock, Shelf or NextSTART menu, and then selecting 'Insert New Item' followed by 'Internal Command' from the context menu that pops up.




All the new 'Auto Backup Settings' internal command does by itself is make a backup of the settings without prompting the user for a filename. The filename is automatically generated based on the date and time, and the backup is stored in the default Backups folder. The internal command also sends a message to the other components of the suite to backup their settings (i.e.; if you run the internal command in WorkShelf a message is sent to NextSTART and vice-versa).

So, by itself the new internal command is just a convenient way to backup everything with a single click. It's when you combine it with the Alarm Manager introduced in v15.9 that it truly becomes useful:




The Winstep Alarm Manager is not a simple pop-up of reminders with audio abilities. It is, in fact, a full blown task scheduler with very flexible scheduling abilities.

Besides normal alarms, you can also make it run programs and/or internal commands at specified times. And it's this ability we will be using to our advantage.

So, open WorkShelf Preferences, go to the General tab, click the Manage Alarms button. Now click the 'New Alarm' button and add a new alarm looking something like this:




Up to you which schedule to use, but you should NOT make this a daily event, since 1) it would be overkill and 2) the Auto Backup internal command does NOT delete older backups automatically. You would soon have hundreds of backup files lying around.

So set it to run once a week or once a month. You should also disable the 'Wake the computer up if it's sleeping or hibernating' alarm setting, since this is not a critical operation that must be performed at that specific time. If the computer is sleeping or turned off when the Alarm fires - or would have fired - the event will simply be run as soon as possible.


• NextSTART taskbar is now also high-DPI aware.

With ever increasing screen resolutions and the arrival of 4K monitors, high-DPI systems are becoming a lot more common. Version 15.9 made Winstep applications fully high-DPI compatible, and since then we have been tweaking the existing high-DPI support to make it perfect.

Even though in previous versions you could adjust the size of the taskbar by increasing the size of the tasklist icons, this was not a perfect solution because things such as the spacing between icons and size of other taskbar items did not get proportionally increased, which made the taskbar look a bit 'cramped' on high DPI systems.

The NextSTART taskbar now automatically adjusts itself properly to the current system DPI by default. This is, of course, optional: you can always turn off this behavior in Preferences, if you prefer.





Taskbar at 100% DPI settings.





Taskbar at 150% DPI settings.


• Improved NextSTART taskbar overflow protection.

The NextSTART taskbar holds several individual elements (Start Button, Quick Launch icons, Running Applications, WorkShelf modules, System Notification icons, Clock button, etc...) and automatically resizes itself so everything fits... but there are, obviously, limits.

Automatically increasing the size of the taskbar on high-DPI systems also meant that the space available for all the elements in it became proportionally smaller. This can become a problem when you have lots of Quick Launch icons and/or start attaching WorkShelf desktop modules to the taskbar - a problem that only got worse with the new taskbar high-DPI awareness.

Version 15.9 began tackling this problem by limiting the size of the Quick Launch area to a user-defined percentage (30% by default) of the taskbar's width, automatically adding an expansion button whenever this limit would be exceeded.

Version 16.5 further improves on this by automatically decreasing the size of Quick Launch icons if and whenever necessary.





Taskbar at 100% DPI settings with Quick Launch section expanded.





Taskbar at 150% DPI settings with Quick Launch section expanded.


• Deleted Windows Quick Launch shortcuts are now automatically removed from the NextSTART taskbar.
• Added new 'Delete Quick Launch Shortcut' option to the right click context menu of Quick Launch hotspots that point to actual Windows Quick Launch shortcuts.
• Grouped task icons on the NextSTART taskbar now display the number of running instances on the icon itself rather than on the task button label.
• Pseudo-3D dock backgrounds like the Leopard theme no longer appear heavilly distorted at certain icon/icon reflection sizes.





• Always on top docks set to auto-hide for maximized applications will now only do so if they are not reserving screen space (maximized applications would not be overlapped by the dock in this case anyway) and will only auto-hide for full screen applications.
• The dock would keep bouncing up and down if 'Auto hide for maximized applications' was enabled and the user tried to drag a shortcut from a maximized window into the dock.
• The 'Auto Hide at Startup' option could sometimes fail to hide the dock, leaving it visible and in an unresponsive state until you activated it with a screen edge bump.
• The Capture Desktop feature can now save screenshots in either JPG or PNG formats.




This is a head's up to Tom McNamara, a Senior Editor at Cnet's Download.com who felt the inability to save screenshots as PNG files was important enough to mention it as one of the few Cons on his review of the Winstep Nexus dock. Here you go, Tom, you can scratch that one off now. :)


• Themes are now validated when restoring from old backups so the user doesn't end up with a blank theme if the theme used by the backup was deleted in the mean time.
• URLs dragged from all Internet browsers will now use the web page title as the shortcut's label instead of the web site address.
• The Winstep Update Manager failed to download updates with a 'File Size Mismatch' error on East Asian systems.
• ... many other performance and stability improvements! Please see complete change log below...

WorkShelf v16.5 complete change log:

• Updated Russian language file.
• File format of screenshots taken by the 'Capture Desktop' internal command can now be set as either JPG or PNG.
• Filled histogram colors used for the CPU, Net and RAM Meter icon modules are now a bit transparent so the background of the icon can still be seen.
• URLs dragged from all browsers should now use the web page title for the item's label instead of the actual URL domain address.
• Added new 'Overlap information on battery icon' option to the battery module, enabled by default. Controls whether the AC Power symbol, charge percentage and battery runtime values are drawn on top of the battery icon or next to it. This allows using customized multi-state battery images that wouldn't look good with battery information overlapping the battery image.
• The 'Most Active Programs', 'Power Events Log' and 'Battery Information' dialogs now show a button on the taskbar.
• Since it's global, also added the 'Do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' setting to the More Options dialog in the General tab of Preferences. Also renamed the dialog from 'Advanced Settings' to 'More Options' for consistency with the button that invokes it.
• The Animation Speed slider in a dock Auto-Hide Settings dialog is now disabled if the auto-hide animation is set to No Animation.
• Added new 'Auto Backup Settings' internal command. Intended to be used with the built-in Alarm Manager to make automatic scheduled backups, it makes a backup of the application's settings without prompting the user for a filename. It creates the filename based on the current date and time and stores the backup in the last used backup folder (or C:\Users\Public\Documents\WinStep\Backup\ by default). It also notifies NextSTART (if it's currently running) to make an automatic backup at the same time.
• The battery in the Battery Information dialog now displays the style and settings currently selected by the user and glows with the dominant color of the battery image.
• The 'Colorize low and critical battery states' battery module setting now also properly colorizes customized multi-state battery images.
• Added new alternative 'Hue Shift' colorization method which allows color information to be preserved and whites to remain white.
• Iconic (not skinned) desktop modules are no longer colorized.
• Changed the Hue shift colorization algorithm to one that is more accurate than Microsoft's solution. This can affect colorization of the Battery Monitor and Wanda fish modules.
• The 'Edge Swipe Settings' buttons in the Behavior tab of the Shelf and Dock Properties panels are now grayed out if the user is using edge bumps instead of edge swipes to activate the dock/Shelf.
• A theme validation is now performed when Restoring settings from a previous backup, so the user doesn't end up with a blank theme if the theme used at the time of the backup no longer exists.
• Added 'Most Active Programs' button to the CPU module settings dialog, to make this feature more visible.
• The Colorize settings are now also directly available in the Themes tab by sliding the UI with the arrow. This allows quick preview of colorization changes without having to constantly open and close the Colorization Settings dialog.
• The Winstep Update Manager now uses the currently selected settings when you click the 'Check for Updates' button in the Advanced tab of Preferences.
• Increased the interpolation quality used to render dock backgrounds.
• The 'Minimize to dock' and 'Combine dock icons with running applications' settings are now only available when 'Show running applications in this dock' is selected.
• Improved the color hot-track algorithm so it also takes into account the average background color when it can't calculate a proper dominant color.
• A black or gray scale tint color now grayscales the bitmap for both the Tint and Hue shift colorizing modes.
• Context menus are now also colorized.
• Tweaked the vertical position of the text in the Shelf tabs when running under high-DPI settings.
• Added a new 'Colorize text' option to the Color Settings, enabled by default. Text can now be optionally colorized as well. Disabling this option allows the user to colorize a theme but still be able to tweak text colors manually via the theme 'Fonts' dialog.
• If Theme Integration is on, colorizing a theme in WorkShelf will now also colorize the theme in NextSTART and vice-versa.
• Adjusted the disposition of the objects in the preview of the Themes tab to better accomodate high DPI displays.
• Replaced the Shelf and dock images used in the Docks & Shelves tab in Preferences so they can scale up properly on high DPI displays.
• Added 'Flip Dock Background' option to the Appearence sub-menu of the dock's right-click context menu. Equivalent to toggling the 'Do not flip background for docks at the top of the screen' setting but with immediate effect.
• Added 'Show Container' and 'Browse Container' options to the right-click context menu of the 'Restore Wallpaper' internal command. Allows you to open or browse the folder where the Windows wallpaper is stored.
• Fixed malformed request to GeoIP location server that caused GeoIP location to stop working for a week after 2016/03/17.
• The 'Lookup IP address' internal command would fail if the GeoIP information was not already in the cache.
• The dock could crop the number of visible tray icons in grouped mode when changing the icon size of the dock.
• Pseudo-3D dock backgrounds like the Leopard theme no longer appear heavilly distorted at certain icon/icon reflection sizes.
• The 'Capture Desktop Settings' dialog, when invoked from a right click context menu, was not saving the settings to the proper location.
• The Shelf could auto-hide while a item delete confirmation dialog was still on screen if the user moved the mouse pointer over the Shelf.
• If the auto-hide delay was too short, the Shelf could auto-hide while it was still performing unrelated animations such as shifting icons after deleting an item, etc...
• Synchronization of the system clock with the Internet Time Servers failed if the regional settings for the SYSTEM account (used by the Winstep Helper Service) used a difference decimal point character than the user account under which the application run (e.g.; "123,4" instead of "123.4" or vice-versa).
• Some routines were still using bilinear instead of bicubic transformations for rescaling bitmaps, which caused the bitmaps to look blurrier than they should.
• WorkShelf would crash if a dock was set to auto-hide when selecting a new theme in the Dock Properties dialog and the user clicked outside the Dock Properties window (which would cause the dock to hide) and then on the themes list.
• Certain dock backgrounds could cause visual glitches when mousing over near the position of a dock that was hidden into a screen edge.
• A dock set to hide/collapse automatically after launching an application (or a sub-dock set to close automatically after launching an application) would fail to do so if the item being launched required admin privileges (i.e.; UAC prompt).
• Always on top docks set to auto-hide for maximized applications will now only do so if they are not reserving screen space (maximized applications would not be overlapped by the dock in this case) and will only auto-hide for full screen applications.
• The preview of the Destop Module Battery Monitor on the Modules tab of Preferences would show a disabled battery if the battery module was not currently in use.
• Fixed some Shelf tab width issues that could occur if the tab font size was too large to fit.
• Drag & Drop of URLs was not working with certain browsers (e.g.; Waterfox) that did not supply the ANSI UniformResourceLocator format. ANSI and Unicode formats are now correctly accepted.
• Changing units of the weather module from C to F or vice-versa only became effective after the cached weather information became stale and the weather information was refreshed.
• Sub-dock indicators were overlapping other icons and causing visual glitches if the icon spacing was less than 8 pixels.
• The 'Popup delay' slider in the Activation Settings dialog of the Dock Properties Behavior tab appeared enabled even if 'Bring dock forward on mouseover' was not selected.
• With very short auto-hide delays, or under certain circunstances when a dock was set to auto-hide for maximized applications, a dock could auto-hide in the middle of a resize/move animation, which would cause it to glitch.
• Clicking an icon to open an in-Shelf sub-dock could cause a persistent blank white box to appear if in-shelf sub-docks were set to open on mouse over and the sub-dock had started playing the open animation just prior to the click.
• Changing an icon for a module via drag & drop or by righ-clicking the module was not updating the icon in the Desktop version of the module.
• The Winstep Update Manager always failed to download updates with a 'file size mimatch' error on East Asian systems.
• A sub-dock opening animation would briefly flash the full glass blur region at the begining if the 'Aero Glass Blur' effect was enabled.
• The dock would keep bouncing up and down if 'Auto hide for maximized applications' was enabled and the user tried to drag a shortcut from a maximized window into the dock.
• The 'Colorize low and critical battery states' battery module setting was not 'sticking' between restarts of the application.
• The 'Aero Glass' (non-Windows 10) balloon tooltip style was blurring the tooltip window background on Windows 10 systems.
• Under certain circumstances, if a theme's original font style did not exist on the system, text width could be calculated as zero and cause visual glitches.
• Winstep applications should now display the high-resolution icon in Explorer on high-DPI/large icon systems.
• Docks should now be a bit less 'jittery' when inserting items into them via drag & drop.
• A Shelf attached to the top screen edge with the tabs set to appear at the top of the Shelf, was not hiding the tabs properly when collapsed if the 'Hide tabs' setting was enabled.
• The 'Auto Hide at Startup' option could sometimes fail to hide the dock, leaving it visible and in an unresponsive state until you activated it.
• It was very easy (and very annoying!) to accidentally activate a dock at the bottom of the screen via an edge bump when going for the last option in a context menu. This could make the dock cover the menu(s). Edge bumps are now ignored if the mouse pointer is over a menu.
• Getting the current wallpaper to use as the background in certain dialogs with result previews could sometimes fail under Windows 8.x and 10. This could cause changes in previews to overwrite instead of replacing each other (Dock Icon Spacing and Dock Transparency dialogs, for instance).
• The 'Colorize with dominant color of desktop background' feature could stop working properly after going to the Themes tab in Preferences.
• Shelf tab overlay bitmaps (used in the DarkTech theme, for instance) were not obeying the user specified transparency settings.
• The Themes tab in Preferences, unlike the Themes tab in a dock Properties dialog, was unable to display RK Launcher Nexus themes.
• Fixed slow memory leak in the Shelf that occured whenever an icon in the Global icon cache was changed or a Shelf tab was deleted.
• 'Colorize with the dominant color of the desktop background' now works properly with the Windows 7 wallpaper slideshow.
• Fixed a couple of visual glitches with the DarkTech, Evolve and Windows 7 Xtreme default themes on systems running with high-DPI settings.
• Fixed another memory leak that occured when switching tabs in the Shelf if one of the tabs contained Winstep modules.
• The Battery Monitor Event Actions dialog would not properly display the background image if the Low Battery alarm was set to 'Do Nothing' and the Critical Battery alarm was set to something other than 'Do Nothing'.
• Fixed some issues displaying and correctly applying RK Launcher dock backgrounds in the Themes tab of Preferences.
• Closing Preferences could interfere with the Windows wallpaper slideshow feature if Windows changed the wallpaper while the Preferences window was still open.
• Fixed a few issues with Theme Integration between NextSTART and WorkShelf.
• The application crashed if a context menu got repainted while a thumbnail preview of a document in the menu was being shown.

NextSTART v16.5 complete change log:

• Updated Russian language file.
• File format of screenshots taken by the 'Capture Desktop' internal command can now be set as either JPG or PNG.
• Deleted/Removed Windows Quick Launch shortcuts are now automatically removed from the NextSTART Quicklaunch hotspots/taskbar too.
• Added 'Delete Quick Launch Shortcut' option to the right click context menu of Quick Launch hotspots pointing to Windows Quick Launch items.
• URLs dragged from all browsers should now use the web page title for the item's label instead of the actual URL domain address.
• Added new 'Auto Backup Settings' internal command. Intended to be used with WorkShelf's built-in Alarm Manager to make automatic scheduled backups, it makes a backup of the application's settings without prompting the user for a filename. It creates the filename based on the current date and time and stores the backup in the last used backup folder (or C:\Users\Public\Documents\WinStep\Backup\ by default). When used in NextSTART it also notifies WorkShelf (if it's currently running) to make an automatic backup at the same time.
• Added new alternative 'Hue Shift' colorization method which allows color information to be preserved and whites to remain white.
• Grouped task icons on the NextSTART taskbar now always display the number of running instances on the icon itself instead of on the icon label.
• The NextSTART taskbar is now scaled up properly on high DPI systems. Automatic DPI scaling can be disabled in the Taskbar tab of NextSTART Preferences.
• Fine tuned some visual aspects related to the NextSTART taskbar and the new high DPI settings.
• Improved the rendering quality used for scaling up NextSTART taskbar related bitmaps.
• The newly added high-DPI support for the NextSTART taskbar increased the probability of the taskbar not being large enough to hold all the objects in it (Start Button + Quick Launch icons + Tasklist + WorkShelf modules + System Tray). This could create a situation where the Quick Launch icons would overlap other objects on the taskbar. To greatly aleviate this problem, the size of Quick Launch icons is now automatically reduced, when necessary, so everything fits.
• Limiting the size of the Quick Launch area now also works for vertical taskbars and multi-row Quick Launch sections.
• The Colorize settings are now also directly available in the Themes tab by sliding the UI with the arrow. This allows quick preview of colorization changes without having to constantly open and close the Colorization Settings dialog.
• The Winstep Update Manager now uses the currently selected settings when you click the 'Check for Updates' button in the Advanced tab of Preferences.
• Improved the color hot-track algorithm so it also takes into account the average background color when it can't calculate a proper dominant color.
• A black or gray scale tint color now grayscales the bitmap for both the Tint and Hue shift colorizing modes.
• Added a new 'Colorize text' option to the Color Settings, enabled by default. Text can now be optionally colorized as well. Disabling this option allows the user to colorize a theme but still be able to tweak text colors manually via the theme 'Fonts' dialog.
• If Theme Integration is on, colorizing a theme in NextSTART will now also colorize the theme in WorkShelf and vice-versa.
• The list of available NextSTART menus in the Item Properties Editor was displaying temporary system menus as well as the user defined menus.
• It was not possible to change the drive letter assigned to a CD Control internal command in the Item Properties Editor.
• NextSTART was still using the old 'Close CD-ROM x: Door' and 'Open CD-ROM x: Door' internal commands instead of the new 'CD Control x:' in the default Disk sub-menu.
• NextSTART would crash as soon as you inserted media on a CD-ROM drive or inserted a thumb drive if the Quick Launch section in the taskbar was disabled.
• Drag & Drop of URLs was not working with certain browsers (e.g.; Waterfox) that did not supply the ANSI UniformResourceLocator format. ANSI and Unicode formats are now correctly accepted.
• To prevent interfering with other edge bump activations, the taskbar no longer shows live window previews if the mouse pointer is above a task button but also at the very edge of the screen the taskbar is attached to.
• The Winstep Update Manager always failed to download updates with a 'file size mimatch' error on East Asian systems.
• Under certain circumstances, if a theme's original font style did not exist on the system, text width could be calculated as zero and cause visual glitches.
• Fixed lots of visual glitches with old themes.
• An invisible menu could get 'stuck' in memory and cause NextSTART to constantly steal focus from other applications.
• Under certain circunstances it would be impossible to resize the NextSTART taskbar back to one row of icons after resizing it up from a single row.
• Winstep applications should now display the high-resolution icon in Explorer on high-DPI/large icon systems.
• Getting the current wallpaper to use as the background in certain dialogs with result previews could sometimes fail under Windows 8.x and 10.
• The 'Colorize with dominant color of desktop background' feature could stop working properly after going to the Themes tab in Preferences.
• Hotspot buttons were not being properly colorized when the wallpaper changed and 'Colorize with dominant color of desktop background' was enabled.
• 'Colorize with the dominant color of the desktop background' now works properly with the Windows 7 wallpaper slideshow.
• Fixed a couple of visual glitches with the DarkTech, Evolve and Windows 7 Xtreme default themes on systems running with high-DPI settings.
• Closing Preferences could interfere with the Windows wallpaper slideshow feature if Windows changed the wallpaper while the Preferences window was still open.
• Fixed a few issues with Theme Integration between NextSTART and WorkShelf.
• The application crashed if a menu got repainted while a document thumbnail preview was being shown.