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Nexus Dock v19.2 Released!

February 28, 2019




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, blur-behind effects, and much more. Completely customizable, with thousands of different backgrounds freely available online, Nexus is fully compatible with skins for all 3rd party docks.

Windows 10 Ready Nexus runs on the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.x and 10.

Primarily a maintenance release, v19.2 fixes an issue with the weather module returning N/A for certain locations, adds support for HTTPS weather connections, allows setting fixed width and/or height for Grid Stacks, adds a new Light Mode to the User Interface to match the upcoming April update Windows 10 light mode, further improves handling of UWP apps (Sticky Notes), and offers many other stability improvements!
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What's New? Highlighted Features:


  • Fixed weather module displaying N/A for some locations.

  • Some locations close to airports use a METAR code to obtain current weather conditions. METAR information is reported directly to NOAA by airports around the world and is thus updated more frequently as well as being more detailed.

    Recently NOOA's website started enforcing HTTPS connections instead of regular HTTP connections, which caused the connection to the NOAA server to fail, but in such a way that it did not trigger the fail safe mechanism designed to automatically retrieve current weather conditions from another weather provider such as Weather.com.

    This release fixes this issue and also adds HTTPS support to all the other backup weather feeds (Weather.com, MSN and Yahoo).

  • New Light Mode User Interface style.

  • Microsoft is adding a new light mode in the upcoming April Windows 10 update. We've proactively added a new matching 'Light Mode' to Winstep applications, which affects not only the User Interface panels but also context menus, balloon tooltips and thumbnail/live preview backgrounds.


  • Ability to set the size of Grid Stacks (Nexus Ultimate).

  • The size of a Grid Stack is automatically determined by default based on content and screen space available. Added new options to the Appearance tab of Grid Stack Property panels to set a fixed width and/or height.


  • Improved handling of multi monitor profiles.

  • The current multi monitor profile is now saved automatically when the application exits, which should prevent wrong settings from being applied after a display change.

    Multi monitor profiles are especially useful for users with laptops and a second monitor, who need two different profiles for when at home or on the road.


  • Further improved handling of UWP apps.

  • Winstep applications are unique in their category because they're able to handle UWP apps in Windows 10 like normal Win32 applications. This is never-the-less made more difficult by Microsoft's propensity to break their own rules when it comes to UWP apps.

    An example of this is Sticky Notes, which is owned by a Win32 Explorer window despite being a UWP app. This was causing Sticky Notes not to be handled properly by the Winstep application (especially if you tried pinning it to the dock) until we fixed it in this release.

    Also fixed in v19.2 is the fact that left clicking a UWP app in a Shelf, Drawer or Grid Stack (Nexus Ultimate) would always launch a new instance regardless of the current 'Do not launch multiple sessions' setting.


  • Bad activation date for annual alarms.

  • A bug calculating the next activation date for annual alarms could cause them to skip one year. This has been fixed, but if you have any anual alarms set you might want to double-check their current activation dates - to fix it just edit the alarm and press OK.


  • Multiple User Interface tweaks.

  • Changed some of the icons used in the User Interface to better match the overal style of Windows 10 and made sure section headers in the User Interface are always bright enough to be seen against Dark Mode panel backgrounds even if the currently system Accent color isn't.


  • Fixed icon label text effect settings.

  • The text effect setting (Normal, Outline, Shadow, Sharp, Emboss) used for dock icon labels in the new Icon Label Settings dialog was not being properly applied.


  • Many other performance and stability improvements! Please see complete change log below...


Nexus v19.2 complete change log:


  • Under Windows 10 with Dark Mode enabled for the UI, the color of the section category text in Preferences is always kept bright even if the currently selected Windows accent color is darker.
  • Current multi-monitor configuration/profile is now saved on exit.
  • Folder items set to open as menus can now be double clicked to open in an Explorer window instead.
  • All the weather feeds now support HTTPS connections.
  • Added new 'Light Mode' to the User Interface to match the new Windows 10 Light mode.
  • When adding an URL item a default replacement icon is now used if the system does not have a usable class icon defined for HTML documents.
  • By default screen edge bump activations are limited to the width of the dock to help prevent accidental activations. Added new 'Activate along entire screen edge' option to the Edge Bump Settings dialog to disable this behavior.
  • Updated Windows 10 style User Interface icons.
  • Added new 'Say the Time' option to the action taken when clicking on the clock module.
  • The 'Winstep Multi Media Player' helper application (WsMMPlay.exe) is now also shutdown when the application exits, just in case it needs to be updated or removed.
  • Sticky Notes UWP app in Windows 10 is now handled properly in the list of running applications and when pinning it to the dock
  • The routine responsible for peeking window thumbnails could be interrupted, which could potentially crash the application with an array locked error and leave most windows only partially visible or not visible at all, which could only be fixed by a Windows restart.
  • Asus GPU Tweak II is no longer affected by AeroPeek emulation as it does not restore properly afterwards.
  • The selected text effect for floating labels set in the Label Settings dialog was not being applied, the label always used the Outline effect.
  • NOAA's weather feed had stopped working because the web site now enforced HTTPS access and no longer supported HTTP access.
  • Fixed issue where METAR current weather conditions could show only a single 'Possible' word if no weather phenonema was present.
  • Under Windows 10 the sndPlaySound Windows API call used to play event sounds was leaking memory and an handle every time it was called (for instance, every time the hide/show sound was played). Fixed by adding the SND_SYSTEM flag which makes the sound be played by the system instead of from inside the application's own process space.
  • Kb, Mb and Gb units shown throughout the application are now properly displayed as KB, MB and GB to prevent them from being confused with Kbits, Mbits and Gigabits.
  • In Windows 10 it is no longer possible to capture the content of layered windows which resulted in all black thumbnails for icons of running applications.
  • The next activation date of alarms set to go off yearly was not being correctly calculated


Nexus Ultimate v19.2 complete change log:


  • Under Windows 10 with Dark Mode enabled for the UI, the color of the section category text in Preferences is always kept bright even if the currently selected Windows accent color is darker.
  • Current multi-monitor configuration/profile is now saved on exit.
  • A dock set to always be behind other windows now remains above other windows while a sub-dock or grid stack is open.
  • Folder items set to open as menus can now be double clicked to open in an Explorer window instead.
  • All weather feeds now support HTTPS connections.
  • Grid Stacks can now be optionally set to a fixed width and/or fixed height in the Appearance tab of the Grid Stack Properties panel.
  • Added new 'Light Mode' to the User Interface to match the new Windows 10 Light mode.
  • When adding an URL item a default replacement icon is now used if the system does not have a usable class icon defined for HTML documents.
  • By default screen edge bump activations are limited to the width of the dock to help prevent accidental activations. Added new 'Activate along entire screen edge' option to the Edge Bump Settings dialog to disable this behavior.
  • Updated Windows 10 style User Interface icons.
  • Added new 'Say the Time' option to the action taken when clicking on the clock module.
  • The 'Winstep Multi Media Player' helper application (WsMMPlay.exe) is now also shutdown when the application exits, just in case it needs to be updated or removed.
  • Sticky Notes UWP app in Windows 10 is now handled properly in the list of running applications and when pinning it to the dock
  • Left clicking on a UWP app in a Shelf, Drawer or Grid Stack would always launch a new instance regardless of the current 'Do not launch multiple sessions' setting.
  • Under Windows 10 the sndPlaySound Windows API call used to play event sounds was leaking memory and an handle every time it was called (for instance, every time the hide/show sound was played). Fixed by adding the SND_SYSTEM flag which makes the sound be played by the system instead of from inside the application's own process space.
  • Changing the Ascending/Descending order in the 'Sort By' field in the Content tab of a Shelf, Drawer or Grid Stack Properties panel had no effect.
  • Setting the position of a Shelf or a Drawer by selecting the monitor in the UI (instead of a context menu or by dragging) was not working properly on multi-monitor systems.
  • The routine responsible for peeking window thumbnails could be interrupted, which could potentially crash the application with an array locked error and leave most windows only partially visible or not visible at all, which could only be fixed by a Windows restart.
  • Asus GPU Tweak II is no longer affected by AeroPeek emulation as it does not restore properly afterwards.
  • The selected text effect for floating labels set in the Label Settings dialog was not being applied, the label always used the Outline effect.
  • NOAA's weather feed had stopped working because the web site now enforced HTTPS access and no longer supported HTTP access.
  • Fixed issue where METAR current weather conditions could show only a single 'Possible' word if no weather phenonema was present.
  • Clicking Apply or Ok in the Properties panel of a Grid Stack opened before opening the Grid Stack itself was reseting the position of the Grid Stack to the top left screen corner.
  • Fixed Access Violation crash that could still happen when rendering the icons of a UWP Apps Drawer, Grid Stack or Shelf tab on a Windows 10 system.
  • Kb, Mb and Gb units shown throughout the application are now properly displayed as KB, MB and GB to prevent them from being confused with Kbits, Mbits and Gigabits.
  • Icons in Shelves, Grid Stacks and Drawers were not being properly refreshed after editing the item in the Item Properties dialog.
  • In Windows 10 it is no longer possible to capture the content of layered windows which resulted in all black thumbnails for icons of running applications.
  • The Battery Settings and the Power Events dialogs could take a long time to open for large power event logs.
  • The next activation date of alarms set to go off yearly was not being correctly calculated.

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