Feature requests

A few (maybe) useful suggestions

Published on December 30, 2004 By J Q In ObjectDock

A few ideas for making the tabbed docks more useful (for me anyway):

1) Allow placement of icons in dock, currently they just flow:

Instead of:

xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxooooo
oooooooooo

Allow:

xxxooooxxx
ooooxxoooo
xooxoooxxo

where 'o' represents an empty space and 'x' represents a shortcut/whatever.

2) Allow the hiding of the tabs. This allows a drawer that's hidden off-screen and opens when a hotspot is hit.

3) Hotspots (edges) also apply to normal docks like OS X.

4) Allow the hotspots to be click activated instead of just hover activated.

Thanks for making my switch to Windows bearable!

Cheers,
Jason.

Comments (Page 1)

hrtrulz

on Dec 30, 2004

Jason all your ideas are good. The one I really want is the Hotspots apply to normal docks which ia a feature I really want. hope some or all will benn add

J Q

on Dec 31, 2004

Of course, for item 1, I am referring to "tabbed" docks

Maktaka

on Jan 01, 2005

Wow, this is convenient, I was just thinking about making one of these myself. Thanks for getting the ball rolling, now I can post a bit- I mean request list. Anywho, grab a drink and relax cause this is a bigun (sorry).

1) Better right-click support all over the board. I'd like to have right clicks on icons in my taskbar on Objectdock bring up the same list of options as a right click on Windows' taskbar. If I want more, I can turn em on, but as it stands there are two extra options and two rows of blanks added to a right click, which I find really obvnoxious.
The start menu could also use some better right clicking, ANY right clicking. The Folder:programs link doesn't always open the right folder and it takes up extra space (There can be two versions of a folder in the Start Menu, one for the active user and one for all users. The Folder: link only opens one.) Again, I'd really like to see a right-click both on the start button itself and within start menu items that functions the same way as the default Windows' right click.

2) Resolution specific dock placement. I normally run at 1280x1024. Diablo II runs at 800x600. This means that the docks I have centered at the top and bottom of my screen get moved to the left whenever I run Diablo, requiring me to move them back whenver I quit (same goes for Dos games played through DOSBox). If Objectdock stored the dock positions for each resolution separately, then this wouldn't be a problem. Whenever the resolution changed, a new set of positions would be used and so normal settigns wouldn't get screwed up. I hate having to recenter my docks whenever I play a game with a lower resolution.

3) Not sure if this is solveable, but I cannot use Objectdock how I'd like to because of incompatibilites with other software. Specifically, I can't use the nifty zooming docks because they prevent ATI Mediacenter from displaying an image. I've fiddled around with this and I think this is because the zooming docks use the transparency effect, which takes the same video slot in Windows that ATI needs to do its throughview effects (you can see the image through all your open windows, very nifty). Tabbed docks don't have this problem since they cannot go transparent. Is it possible to completely shut off the transparency effect when I set transparency to 0 (freeing up the slot for other apps), or would this require a complete rewrite of the code for drawing zooming docks?

4) Others have probably experienced this and I don't think it's really anything Stardock can do, but I'll mention it anyways. While every other app I have works just peachy with the latest version of Objectdock's systray, the Steam icon (for Valve's software) cannot right-click (the right clicking again!). When I right-click, I get a flash of the menu, then it goes away immediately. This is kind of annoying since I can only shut down Steam from the systray or the task manager. Steam is a very poorly designed piece of softare, and it takes up a ton of resources to boot, more than DesktopX with 1 object and 2 widgets, CursorXP, Windowsblinds, and Objectdock COMBINED, and Steam doesn't even do anything for me except launch Half Life. I really would like to be able to close this atrocious app without resorting to the Task Manager, but since this problem seems to be Valve's fault and not Stardock's, I don't know if there's anything that can be done at this end.

Yeah, that was kinda long. I really like Objectdock, but the fact that I still find myself occasionally frustrated by a clunky design isn't good. Won't stop me from using it, but still, these issues (first two anyways) really need to be addressed). Thanks for reading this whole damn thing.

lilstarfish

on Jan 01, 2005

Very good suggestions!

Here comes one more.

The possibility to have "icons"/pngs as tabs instead of "text tabs".

That would be really cool =D

Essencay

on Jan 01, 2005

The possibility to have "icons"/pngs as tabs instead of "text tabs

That you can do right now. Since each tab can have a separate skin, you can create individual skins for each tab and open up the tab image and paste an icon in it. Then when you create your tabs in OD+, don't put any text description in them. You'd probably have to use 16x16 icons or 24x24 icons, anything larger would look too huge I think.

Essencay

on Jan 01, 2005

To do the spacing thing in the first post, make a transparent png image and place it in as a spacer....I think that would work.

lilstarfish

on Jan 01, 2005

Thanks for the tip Scribe Essencay.

What I'm looking for though is to have, for example,
a cd png as icon that can be clicked to bring up the
dock with the different cd related stuff, Nero, Where-IsIt etc..
then maybe have a nice globe png that brings up the IE, Firefox stuff.

48x48 would be nice since that's my default size on the
OD+ bars.

Especially nice since I have my docks hidden outside the screen
until clicked.

Not sure if those "icon tabs" would be "zoomable" though.

Essencay

on Jan 01, 2005

The "icon" tabs wouldn't be zoomable. Not sure if there's a way to have a shortcut open up another dock

Koasati

on Jan 01, 2005

To do the spacing thing in the first post, make a transparent png image and place it in as a spacer....I think that would work.

That's a great idea, and it does work. But it gets a bit tedious setting up, on docks that have only a few icons.
Would be nice if we had an option in the Add menu to add these blanks.

J Q

on Jan 02, 2005

To do the spacing thing in the first post, make a transparent png image and place it in as a spacer....I think that would work.

That works - I did that already, but it slows down the dock a lot. If I add something to the dock, I have to move around all the icons (blank or otherwise) to simulate x/y placement - it's a pain and wastes time.

deboy2k

on Jan 02, 2005

can someone help me? i am using windows 2000 and i just wanna know how to apply the skins. it says go in control panel, then diplay and then the skins tab. but i have no skins tab.only an appearance one, but there not in there

help me please

dutchMasta

on Jan 03, 2005

Several nice features (I reckon) would be:
* An option to lock the dock, so no there is no drag-and-dropping, or any
other modification
* No text on the icons (or option below should sort this out)
* Transparency features for icons/text as well
* System+taskbar on same dock
* Turn off attention effect
* Modify attention effects (Time/speed, how many times it does it)
* Modify fly-out menus (no. of sub-menus to open before opening in explorer,
how many in view, single click to open in fly-out, double in explorer)
* Multi-coloured backdrops for docks, like instead of a seperator, you have
(for example) a red backdrop for internet programs, and a blue one for media
programs.
* Sound effects?
* Lock icons - sometimes the program changes the icon back to it's default,
or the icon filename causes this
* Different rows?
* Auto-hide delay activation option (and click/hover option)
* Auto-adjust after resolution changes
* Seperators in tabbed docks
* Mouse roller switches between tabs (only when tabbed dock is highlighted)
* Items fill out space in tabbed docks eg. Tab1 |XXXXXXX| Tab2 |X X X X

* Items can be centered in tabbed docks eg. Tab1 |XXXXXXX| Tab2 | XXXXX |
* Tabs can be transparent or auto-hide
* A dock which appears in the middle of the screen when a hotkey/mouse
button (middle, or fourth if available) is pressed. EG, you click the fourth
mouse button, and you get a dock which appears in the middle of the screen
(fades-in - optional), which the mouse cursor automatically moves to
(optional), which has icons of your favourite programs, or taskbar icons
(alt-tab replacement), and icons magnify on highlight (optional), and
optional attention effects. It disappears automatically (fades-away -
optional) after you click on an icon/task, or closes by clicking the mouse
button again, or the hot-key (which is user configurable). Options like
WindowsFX on the dock transitions, like shrink/vortex/appear from
left/right/etc./sand effect (pixels), and time/speed of transition.

I just copied and pasted this from one of my other posts (on newsgroups), so some have probably already been requested, or maybe I didn't notice some in object dock.

Koasati

on Jan 03, 2005

#11 by Citizen deboy2k
Sunday, January 02, 2005

can someone help me? i am using windows 2000 and i just wanna know how to apply the skins. it says go in control panel, then diplay and then the skins tab. but i have no skins tab.only an appearance one, but there not in there

help me please

Sounds like you're talking about WindowBlinds, not ObjectDock. If you have the WindowBlinds program installed, there should be an APPEARANCE (not skins, unless that's different on W2k) tab in dispay properties.
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/

ragnark

on Jan 05, 2005

I use a Radeon 7000 at work and when I set a dock to center align on a dual screen system it doesn't have the monitor selection option, thus it centers across 2 screens. Not sure if this is due to the driver or not, but would be nice to have an X position for the center of a dock. For the time being though I can happily use tabbed docks.

sundreamer z

on Jan 07, 2005

hello ! something that is bad in object dock plus is the fact you can't kepp the tabbed dock always on bottom and get it up when you go on it with the mouse as it is attached to the edge.

This feature was possible with normal object dock.

Now when you use tabbed dock with an full screen IE page you cant get the full IE page when you leave the dock... instead you are forced to click on mouse to get the IE page and obect dock on bottom

It would be great to have auto hide including the tabs, otherwise using IE in full screen would be difficult as you don't want to have mouse activation until you are really on the border of the screen

object dock plus active only when you are on the border that would be greeeeeeeat !

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