First I need to mention that it's not at all complete - I just wrote it 5 min ago, just before connecting to Internet...


Also see the "P.S." section of this thread: Question on where to get info on particular rc-file settings for another thing. Oh well, I will say it also here - it is that the bbLean actually seems a bit less CPU-consuming, and bbLean's executable is only 112 KB in lenght (compare to bb4win's, which is 237 KB), and others from that thread I included below anyway.


BBLEAN - THINGS I LIKE:

1. The absolute favorite of mine is a feature to display only tasks from the current workspace. Oh and btw., is there a way to configure it in a way, that it would not reset to default state (show from all workspaces) after rebooting the computer ??


2. Then I totally like that menus and sub-menus (the "pinned" ones - is this the right term ??) stay open when you "put them aside", even if you hoover a mouse pointer over its parent menu (or parent sub-menu) after "putting them aside".


3. Well this one is pretty straight-forward - I like an option to change workspace with just a single-click (right or lft) on a workspace-name.


4. Similarly a pretty straight-forward one - I like an option to send a program to another workspace with just double-clicking on the program's task item.


BBLEAN - THINGS I DISLIKE:


1. As mentioned in one of my other threads here on Lost In The Box forums, I don't like, or better - I simply don't need them, so an option to simply turn them OFF would be great. If you are interested, see this thread here: Two totally basic questions on bbLean


2. And another totally non-important thing - however, I am a minimalism-fanatic, so... I only don't like that the .rc files are formatted after applying changes (spaces added), so I am wondering how to prevent that. Maybe setting them as "Read only" would do the trick, and anyway - I was used to edit .rc files in bb4win manually. Also maybe removing the "Config" menu from right-click menu would help ??


P.S., Well and another thing - it started occurring recently (or I just weren't yet in these sitiations before), that on certain occasions, like I suspect when uploading my home-site's pages to my FTP etc., bbLean starts acting very strange and slow. I mean there is an obvious delay when trying to switch the workspace, similarly there is a delay when clicking on some task in systembar, and also the right-click menu takes ages to show-up. Then after some time, everything is back to normal. And the strangest thing is that blackbox.exe process is still consuming its amazingly low amount 0-2 % of CPU...


regards all, satyr

It seems we like a few of the same things about BBLean. For me the big thing has been conserving system resources. Win98 manages graphical and user resources abysmally, and BBLean is so lean I can start my computer with more free resources than when I first bought it! As for CPU cycles, that depends less on BBLean than on your interaction with it. If you have a lot of self-updating plug-ins -- e.g. resource meters, WinAmp interfaces, etc. -- then you will see BBLean chew up CPU cycles just like any regular application. Of course, on a faster new computer, you won't notice the hit, but on my 450Mhz Pentium II, it hurts big time. So, I only load a few passive plugins, and the CPU and resource hit is very minimal.

In response to your dislikes:
(1) You can indeed turn off both BBLeanBar AND the built-in ToolBar. I have done just that and I use SystemBarEx instead. You could conceivably survive without a *bar at all (like the HoverDesk alt shell), which would make your system truly minimal. All you'd need then is BBKeys loaded, so it could respond to your mouse-clicks and key combinations. It would drive me batty to do that, but it could be done.
(2) I have two thoughts on minimal .RC files: First, I'm not sure how your hard disk is formatted, but I would guess it's not using anything smaller than a 512-byte cluster to store files -- i.e. even a 1-byte file still takes up 512 bytes on your hard disk, and a 520-byte file takes up 1024 bytes, etc. That being said, since the .RC files are usually less than 6K at most, the extra spaces in those files can't be impacting your hard disk storage too much. Second, I myself appreciate the formatting if for no other reason than it makes things a whole lot easier for my old eyes to read. All the values end up in a line, making finding particular values very easy -- especially in BBNote, which takes things a step further and color-codes comments, keys, and values.

As for the slowdown you've noticed, that is again dependent on how BBLean is interacting with the application. When I feel the need for speed, I unload BBLeanSkin so it won't try to skin dialog windows and alerts. (My wife's American Greetings CreataCard program looks really funny with BBLean title bars on it's kid-safe interface.) As I'm sure you're aware, any CPU-intensive program can slow BBLean to a crawl. I even hit web pages that take so much CPU time to render that it seems like my whole system freezes up. That's not BBLean, it's usually just Firefox or whatever CPU-hogging app I am using. Otherwise BBLean is quite snappy for me.

yinyangdragon,

You ever try K-Meleon 0.9? It's a also a Gecko-based browser, but only for win32 systems. Much faster than FF or Opera (which I still use), especially on older hardware (I, too, am using a 450Mhz PII w/ 256 MB). Plus, since it doesn't have the XUL overhead, it doesn't eat up so many CPU cycles

Just thought I'd mention that.

Just downloaded it. I'll try it out. I like the extensions I use with Firefox -- especially Forecastfox -- but for those days when I just need to read and post messages, K-Meleon looks like it might just be the thing. Thanks for the heads-up. I had thought K-Meleon wasn't quite ready for prime time, but it certainly looks pretty mature to me.

those little popup baloons sure did take a turn for the better