Got the beta but nowhere to go with it right now as can't go into Windows right now. "Man Flu" aka rotten cold has struck me down again so only online for very short stints, alas. But shall try to run beta ASAP - keen to see what happens with the Weather.com transition.

New Betas of v26.6 are out:

Winstep Xtreme beta:
https://www.winstep.net/xtreme-beta.zip

Nexus Ultimate beta:
https://www.winstep.net/ultimate-beta.zip

Nexus free beta:
https://www.winstep.net/nexus-beta.zip

This is a beta and MUST be installed ON TOP of a full v26.4 OR LATER installation. Do NOT uninstall anything first, just exit all running Winstep applications and run the beta setup file.

There is no need to backup your settings first, but it does not hurt if you do either.

####

New beta barely a couple of days after the last beta (still waiting to get some feedback, good, bad or neutral, otherwise I'll just stop posting the betas).

The new beta adds full support for Ms Edge and Chrome PWAs (Progressive Web Applications).

If you are running the Brave browser you will have to wait a bit more, sorry.

Think I'm out of things for the count, likely for the rest of the week, sorry Jorge. However, shall try to get around to the first beta ASAP and comment here.

Don't worry my friend, get some rest and take care of yourself.

Now that the PWA work is essentially wrapped up - the only remaining task is adding support for Brave PWAs, which should be straightforward since it’s Chromium‑based - I can finally shift my focus back to integrating built‑in support for the Winstep Theme Builder.

I’ve already separated shared resources (bitmaps, icons, and so on) into a dedicated resource DLL that all applications can access.

Each application will include its own embedded version of the Theme Builder, limited to the components relevant to that application. For example, the free version of Nexus will only allow creating dock themes, just like the old monolithic alpha of the Theme Builder.

The Theme Builder embedded in WorkShelf will handle everything WorkShelf related - shelves, docks, and desktop modules - but not NextSTART. To work on the NextSTART portion of a theme, you’ll need to run the Theme Builder embedded in NextSTART.

Hopefully this clarifies the structure. In practice, it’s not very different from how things worked until v9.5, where each application managed its own theme‑specific settings within its UI.

A unified monolithic tool isn’t feasible, since theme settings must integrate directly with the application they belong to, e.g. this separation is necessary because the Theme Builder relies on the same internal code each application uses to access its own theme settings. Since NextSTART doesn’t contain any WorkShelf‑specific theme logic, the embedded Builder in NextSTART can’t edit WorkShelf themes - and vice‑versa.

And just as expected, also adding support for Brave PWAs was a breeze. Winstep applications now fully support Edge, Chrome and Brave Progressive Web Apps.

Also going to add this (window dodge, or auto-hide when covered by window):

And done! Actually works better than I expected.

"Auto-hide the dock after a short delay" and "Auto-hide when the active window covers the dock" are, of course, mutually exclusive settings. Selecting one unselects the other.

Still not sure what to do with the "Enable/Disable Auto-Hide" in the dock's main context menu though. These are essentially two different "modes" of auto-hide, so the current "Enable/Disable Auto Hide" menu option might turn into a "Auto-Hide" sub-menu with "Never / After a short delay / when a window covers the dock"

Thanks Jorge - looks like I need it - last two days spent exactly 15 mins. at computer, and just bed rest.

Don't get me started on Brave browser. Damn thing masquerading as a privacy browser when really it's ad-driven and Chromium based! :/

As for Theme Builder, yeah, seems obvious that a monolithic tool wouldn't be feasible. Does it matter? Don't thinks so myself.

New Betas of v26.6 are out (Beta 3):

Winstep Xtreme beta:
https://www.winstep.net/xtreme-beta.zip

Nexus Ultimate beta:
https://www.winstep.net/ultimate-beta.zip

Nexus free beta:
https://www.winstep.net/nexus-beta.zip

This is a beta and MUST be installed ON TOP of a full v26.4 OR LATER installation. Do NOT uninstall anything first, just exit all running Winstep applications and run the beta setup file.

There is no need to backup your settings first, but it does not hurt if you do either.

####

Besides adding PWA support to Brave browsers, this one adds the new "Auto hide when active window covers the dock" setting.

Not bad, but personally I would be driven crazy by the constant hide/collapse and show/expand sounds lol. Fortunately you can turn those off or set them to nothing.

Installed Winstep Xtreme v26.6 Beta 3 on a fresh install of Windows 11 25H2 with Start11, WindowBlinds11, and ExplorerPatcher installed. Everything is still working Ok. The Weather Monitor found my location by itself. I might also install Rainmeter next week, just to push my luck. I'll let you know if that causes any problems.

I don't use PWA's and I don't hide the dock, so I can't comment on those. As for the "thing that can now be named", the Theme Builder, I can't wait to play with it when it arrives. I don't have any artistic talent, but that shouldn't stop me from creating something ghastly.

LOL Thanks for the feedback.

Went back to the weather stuff...

Now that locations are based on latitude and longitude coordinates, sunset and sunrise times can be calculated even if the weather feed itself does not provide that information.

Since knowing that is actually pretty useful, I added sunrise and sunset fields to the weather settings panel.

Problem is, when the weather feed does not provide sunrise and sunset hours in local time and these have to be calculated, the result is in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

Now, each country in the database has an offset from UTC so you can kind of convert the results to local time, but there are two MAJOR problems with this: some countries are so large (like the US) that they actually span multiple timezones (e.g. East and West coast), and as if that wasn't enough, we also have DST (Daylight Saving Time) kicking in for several of them - but not all of them (and not all go forward or back by 1 hour, some more, some less).

I had already been struggling with this previously because of the local observation times, but now with sunrise and sunset being relevant information this stared driving the perfectionist in me up a wall.

The application could simply assume that the timezone of the weather module's current location is the same as the user's actual location (which would be true 99% of the time) and extract the user's current DST settings from Windows, but this would be completely wrong most of the time when checking the weather in other locations.

So I decided to tackle this once and for all... I could use online queries based on latitude and longitude to determine UTC and current DST offsets, but besides being dependent on 3rd parties, these would have to be repeated daily and would thus generate hundreds of thousands of queries per day.

Instead, Windows already has multiple TMZ keys that represent a shared set of DST rules and UTC offsets. For instance, New York, Toronto, Montreal all Ottawa all map to the "Eastern Standard Time" Windows TMZ key because they currently share same offset, same DST transitions and same DST behavior.

These Window timezones are already used for the "world clocks" feature introduced in v25.9.

So, in the internal locations database, I added a Windows TMZ key association to each country (e.g. while before the database had entries like "+0430 Afghanistan" (UTC offset + country name) it now has "+0430 Afghanistan, Afghanistan Standard Time". "Afghanistan Standard Time" is the string that will be used to match that country's timezone and DST settings to the Windows TMZ keys.

Now, this takes care of the 170 countries that use a single timezone. For the remaining 23 that do not (not only a question of geographical size, but also different territory locations, for instance, continental Portugal and Azores are so distant from each other that they are in completely different time zones despite both being grouped under "Portugal") I added exception rules in the code itself based on the country name and latitude and longitude coordinates.

Still in the process of implementing this but hopefully it will resolve the timezone + DST issue once and for all (e.g. no more "Observation times" apparently one hour into the future, for instance).

I also wonder how useful it would be (i.e. how many users might be interested in) to add support for multiple weather modules, each showing the weather in a different location of the world. After the work and the ideas put forward for the disk meter module, this might actually not be too difficult to pull off without having to make the major re-writes to the code that I originally thought multi-session modules would require.

Location for iconic weather modules, for instance, could be set in that item's properties dialog, just like you do now when selecting a drive for the iconic disk meter module.

For the weather desktop module, on older themes we could use something like what Picco14 came up with, i.e. when displaying multiple locations, you simply repeat/tile the same desktop module in either a vertical or horizontal configuration (e.g. as what he did here for the disk meter module in this KTEK-4D theme):

And it's done.

It might have sounded like a simple thing, but believe me, it was anything but. Lots of work to pull this one off, but well worth it IMO.

In other news, there seems to be an issue between ‘Mica for Everyone’ and the 1‑pixel, nearly‑transparent ‘sentinel’ window I added in v26.4 at the top‑left corner of the desktop to detect WIN+D and fix the bug where the first click on the desktop is ignored.

Despite the sentinel window being a 1x1 pixel *layered* window (so it should be left alone), if Mica for Everyone is running it seems to change the properties of the window via the DWM in such a way that a very noticeable circle appears around it.



This is one of many examples of 3rd‑party software interfering with Winstep applications and causing problems for them. Obviously, since the issue - whether it’s something like this, silently denying file access, or even causing a crash - affects only the Winstep application while the true culprit plays innocent, guess who ends up being blamed for being buggy or unstable despite not being at fault?

Integrated roughly 1,000 legacy Weather.com locations part of the previous database - entries that were missing coordinate data until now - into the new latitude/longitude‑based weather database. With the help of ChatGPT, of course.

Apparently I am taking this weather module uplift thingy very seriously.

Also, after letting ChatGPT analyze the Mica for Everyone code looking for what it uses as windows exceptions, I should have fixed the "Mica circle" vs "sentinel" window issue now. Still TBC, though.

Well, it'sbeen in need of some TLC for a good while, so well done Jorge. Shame about that malicious and malignant ChatGPT though. Like all of US Big Tech "AI" - just evil!

Certainly all of us within Europe at least should stop using US Big Tech altogether in favour of European secure and private alternatives - and there are quite a few!