+1

Another problem I've noticed is that windows which normally shouldn't appear in the taskbar/leanbar are having a (blank) button in the bar. For eg: the "Run" dialog appears in the bar.

So basically the problems that need to be fixed are:

- Window title text getting cutoff (from the left) on taks buttons
- Active window's task button isn't highlighted
- Windows which normally don't show up in the taskbar get a task button

The display of the active task is determined by ToolbarWindowLabel. All other tasks are displayed using the Toolbar styles.

The "classic" bb4win stylists make sure that ToolbarWindowLabel is different from Toolbar. IF the blackbird Ubuntu style is adapted from openbox (which has no Toolbar specifications in its styles), then the adapter may have missed this need on bb4win.

^ so how do I fix it?

@[deXter]: You're right, the 'Run' dialog does appear in the taskbar as a blank task. I didn't notice that — good catch!

@unkamunka: I think we're talking about different things. IIRC, toolbar.windowLabel is used in the style sheet to determine the appearance of the WindowLabel item in the toolbar. That's different from the active task button, which is what I'm having problems with. Here's a screenshot of what I mean:


From the old bbLeanBar 1.16 by grischka


The new bbLeanBar 1.25

Just to make sure, though, I tried tinkering around with toolbar.WindowLabel, no luck. I even tried it as ToolbarWindowLabel (w/o the dot) just to make sure. Still no dice.

And just in case it may be an incompatibility issue with other plugins, here are what I'm using:

bbKeys 1.16 by grischka (Oct 31 2007)
bbLeanSkin 1.16 by grischka (Feb 29 2008)
bbDesktop 0.1 by Noccy (Mar 11 2008)

On blackbird's ubuntu style, try

toolbar.windowLabel.color: #aaaaaa
instead of
toolbar.windowLabel.color: #ffffff

That makes things stand out for me.

AFAICS on all flavours of bb4win having the Run dialog open is creating a Task & the taskbar shows "Run". Thus, it needs to be displayed on the Taskbar.

^ that's not true.

1) Not all tasks are supposed to be shown in the taskbar. For eg, windows of style WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW will not (and should not) show up in the task bar.

2) I've tested it and Run doesn't show up in xoblite, utbox and bbClean. It was working fine for me till I upgraded to bbleanbar 1.25.

---

Also, toolbar.windowLabel.color has no effect here on the leanbar task buttons. I've tried it with the 0505 all blue styles. Once again, this style was working fine here until I upgraded to 1.25.

--

Finally, what's your take on the missing first 4 letters on the task buttons?

Respectfully, it is suggested that something else was done to affect the system you are running at or about the same time that you installed bbLeanBar 1.25.

Testing was carried out on Win2k, WinXPSP2 & Vista on xoblite, bbClean, bbLeanMod & bbLean - in all cases using a bbLeanBar other than 1.25. ALL of them show the Run dialogue as a task.

AFAIAA the windows that you mention are not Tasks. Thus, they are not rendered on the Taskbar.

Did you test toolbar.windowlabel on the 070 ubuntu style - which was the original style quoted? If toolbar.windowlabel is set to parentrelative, then the colour settings are overridden & only toolbar.windowlabel.textColor has any impact. Changing toolbar.windowLabel.color in Fizzure - in the 0505 all blue pack - produces changes for me.

I do realise that some developers do not test thoroughly before they post code. OTOH I do so test & I am not the only one who does so. Please also note that for the vast majority of Moderators, to make a post without testing first is wasting both the time of the Moderator and the time of the person who raised the question in the first place.

The text rendering issue has not yet been looked at in detail. AFAICR there was no change in the code that should have impacted text alignment. FAIK it could be a side-effect of a recent Windows Update - although that will not stop me from trying to find out whether it was indeed something in the code.

Hmm... interesting. I did some further testing while switching back and forth between bbLeanBar 1.16 and 1.25 and it seems that editing toolbar.windowLabel on 1.16 works, but not on 1.25. Oh, it does work properly on the WindowLabel bbLeanBar.item, but somehow it's not affecting the active tasks on the toolbar. Could this problem be related to the text cutoff on the tasks items? It sounds like deXter and I are getting it, but not you (and others, I'm assuming). The only thing that deXter and I have in common seems to be the text cutoff error, w/c it sounds like most don't have. I wonder if AlFa also has problems with windowlabels, considering that he also has the text cutoff problem?

As for the Run dialogue in the task, I can confirm that it does appear in the toolbar in earlier versions of bbLeanBar. The only difference that I can see is that on 1.16 the taskbar item names it 'Run', while it only appears as a blank task item on 1.25 (for me, at least). It's starting to look like that whatever problem we're having is limited only to the task items.

Edit: I forgot to mention that if the WindowLabel item is activated on bbLeanBar 1.25, no text appears in it. It works on bbLeanBar 1.16. It looks like the WindowLabel in 1.25 is not receiving information about active tasks (or something like that).

Hope this helps in debugging. ^^

Edit2: This is the style for toolbar.windowLabel that I'm using:

About the Run issue:

I just did a clean install of bbClean and noticed that it *does* shows up in the leanbar afterall. Perhaps I'm noticing it now because of the title text getting cutoff?
A curious point to be noted is that while the Run invoked by bb shows up in leanbar, the Run invoked by any other program (Rundll32.exe / Task Manager etc) doesn't.

As for the rest two problems:

I have not applied any windows update in this week, or this month for that matter - (there were none for W2K3), and my Automatic Updates is off too. Reverting back to the 1.16 fixes the problem of the active task not highlighted and the task text getting cuttoff. This happens independent of the .rc file and the style. (ie, first I tested it by keeping the old .rc file but updating the .dll, tested again by updating both the .rc and .dll)

Just for the record, I'm on Windows 2003 Server SP2, Themes Service is turned off, no other theming/window customization program is active. Language is English (US), DPI settings are normal (96). Screen Res is 1024x768.

PS: Thanks for your contributions unkamunka. I never doubted whether you post without testing or not, but the fact is, no matter how much testing one does it's not always possible to catch all bugs. Bugs are a way of life.

If you need any other info/assistance do let us know.

Regards,
[deXter]

This is a known bug - if you've got >1 LeanBars running. Whether this one is fixable remains to be seen.

OTOH this is also a problem that seems to have crept in with 1.25 on bbClean - 1.20 does not have that issue. Unfortunately, it seems that noccy has cut off access to the bbClean source - which is on his private SVN client. The only solution I can guess at is setting WindowLabel to a fixed width - which would be a bit awkward (but doable).

As for toolbar.windowLabel, are you also on something like Win2k3? Presumably you can confirm that the styling for toolbar is different from toolbar.windowLabel? cmd.exe, OTOH, does show up.

• Not sure whether it'll shed any light, but is this the original 1.16 released by grischka in May 2005, or one of the very many other versions - where the date stamp is the main method of telling them apart?
• Just for the heck of it, can you try turning Themes Service on? While my own instinct has always been to turn it off, having it on has caused me no problems whatsoever on Vista.
• FTR these kind of issues are ones that are release-killers. There were very, very few code changes between 1.20 & 1.25 & IIRC the only change that did not revolve around the Vertical option was changing the minimumWidth for WindowLabel.

Has anyone had this problem on bbLeanBar 1.20?

(This is being asked simply because I am unable to reproduce the issue - even with icon.size settings of 24 or -1.)

I've got only one bbLeanBar running, so it seems to be a somewhat separate issue. Oh, and I'm on Windows XP, if that helps. Also, I've just tested on bbLeanBar 1.20 and it seems to highlight the active tasks just fine, though there is still no border (there's a border in the original 1.16). That's fine with me, though, since I can at least tell which task is active.



Yep, the stylings for toolbar and toolbar.windowLabel are sufficiently different. I used contrasting colors for testing to help tell the two apart.

I'm going to try updating my bbLeanSkin (1.16 BBClean SVN by griscka Feb 29 2008) to bbLeanSkinMod 1.16u1 (2008-04-14) to see if it helps any. It'll take a while for me to get back to you on that, though, as I'll also be trying a fresh install which I'll need to do later (currently busy on something that I can't put off).

Btw, you mentioned that BBClean's source is inaccessible? Is there any bbLean fork that you would recommend that has worked for you and has no problems with bbLeanBar? I think I'll try different flavors and see if it helps.

I think there's some version confusion going on here. The version(s) I'm refering to which works perfectly (tested) are

1) The default bbLeanBar 1.16 included with bbClean.
Datestamp: Feb 29 2008
Size: 101,888 bytes
MD5: BECC0E732DBEEF5DFD1BC2F76B05C4BE
Active task highlighting and task text display properly.

2) bbLeanBar Mod 1.20 which I downloaded sperately from this site.
Datestamp: 2008-05-03
Size: 68,096 bytes
MD5: 8FFE7C44D2AD50CC2FC43C89216B2E22.
Active task highlighting and task text work properly in this version too.

The buggy version is bbLeanBar 1.25
Datestamp: 2008-05-22
Size: 69,120 bytes
MD5: 75400248CEF2B8FD710B6D8C91DFF9BB

Now to answer a few questions:


Yes. Themes service enabled/disabled/running makes no difference.


1.20 works fine for me.

Confessing to being a bit of a purist, & trying to keep this "lean", I did take a deliberate decision to leave the border option out. The basis was that there was a suitable trade-off against the expanded mouse-click & bro@ms menu configurations. Also, as I have said, given the styling syntax options, it is up to the styling author to deal with the very issue that you mention. AFAICS the "classic" style authors do that. As you may know, I've been working on a project called bb4win_mod - of which I've so far been able to release the newer versions bbLeanSkinMod, the versions of bbLeanBar that you have been trying & bbKeys 1.80 + bbCore. With some luck, I may be able to release bb4win_mod itself (beta 5) later this month - provided not too many more bugs start lurching up. I would recommend that - wouldn't I?

There will be a number of unexpected features. AFAICS it will be a beta release simply because it will not be feature complete - rather than the code having been untested.

Thanks for the clarification. The md5 numbers are always helpful - but usually have to be specially generated. There have been AFAICS at least 10 releases of bbLeanBar 1.16 - most of which are feature different from each other.

Oddly enough, most of the 1.25 changes were in the 1.20 source - before I took them out at the last minute.

In the course of this week, I hope to go through the 1.20->1.25 patch(es) to see what is up.