http://squareness.beeger.net/ en-us Copyright 2007 Fri, 08 Dec 2006 20:01:27 +0100 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss I have installed Internet Explorer 7 RC1 on my WinXP box and found that the menus on this site didn't work right with it. IE 7 now interprets child selectors. So the selector that was formally meant to be read by Firefox and Opera is now also read by IE. Unfortunately the `top:auto;left:auto` statements are interpreted differently by IE 7. So now I dropped the child selector and the auto-statements and now the menus look like they looked in IE 6 in all browsers. It's not that bad. They overlap the menubar items a bit now, but that's OK. At least it works on all major browsers now. http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/09/adapted_for_internet_explorer.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/09/adapted_for_internet_explorer.html General Sat, 30 Sep 2006 18:09:04 +0100 Finally it's here - the UIS2 port. It's also another attempt at fixing horizontal taskbars. Besides the port to UIS2 there's another -- visible -- feature: The tabs and tab panes now have a color of their own. Although many applications don't cope very nicely with the background of tab panes -- they simply put panes on them that use the window background color as their background --, it's getting better. Colored tabs are only available for the UIS2 version. There's also a UIS2 version with the old tabs that don't use the new color. The UIS1+ version is now considered legacy and will probably be dropped on the next release. http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/09/squareness_for_windowblinds_20.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/09/squareness_for_windowblinds_20.html News Windowblinds Sat, 16 Sep 2006 20:04:13 +0100 I'm hosting the Squareness site now on my own domain. It's way faster than SourceForge and here I can use MovableType which I prefer over WordPress. Static publishing which is supported perfectly by MovableType is faster than WordPress' dynamic publishing. All old page addresses are now redirected to the new site. Only for the RSS2 feed I wasn't able to formulate a working rewrite rule. So you'll have to add the new feed manually to your news reader. Since now there is a filtered representation of the DevBlog for each part of Squareness there are now also feeds for those parts. Take a look at [News Feeds][1] for a complete list of available feeds. [1]: http://squareness.beeger.net/feeds.html You'll notice that the site design has also changed with the move to the new domain. It now looks and feels like Squareness. You'll probably also notice that the tabs on those pages have now a new background color. I came up with that color as I developed the skin for ShapeShifter -- a MacOSX theme changer. This new background color will be included in all Squareness skins as the time goes by. The WindowBlinds skin will make the start later this week. http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/09/new_server.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/09/new_server.html General News Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:24:40 +0100 So I finally ported my Wiindowblinds UIS1+ skin to UIS2. It wasn’t very complicated or anything like that. In fact it was quite easy. I wonder why there is no automatic UIS1+ to UIS2 conversion option in SkinStudio like there is for UIS2 to UIS1. The main difference are the frame images. The rest is mostly the same with some of the options just not working in UIS1+. I’ll be testing the UIS2 version for some more time before finally publishing it. I want to make sure it’s working fine. At least the annoying menu bar bug is nonexistent in the UIS2 version. Well it’s really a shame Stardock apparently isn’t committed to fixing bugs for UIS1+, but that’s like it is. I haven’t had any negative effects because of switching to UIS2, yet. But I’m only using the port since yesterday evening, so that’s not a guarantee there aren’t any waiting to be discovered. http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/04/uis2_port.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/04/uis2_port.html Windowblinds Sat, 29 Apr 2006 16:29:00 +0100 Stardock as released another Windowblinds beta, but that one also does not fix the bug. The bug is rated low priority. Every time a beta comes out, I install it and check whether the bug is fixed. Every time I post a reply to my ticket in Stardock’s help server, but they keep ignoring it It looks like Stardock has given up on supporting UIS1+. That’s really a pity and it’s also a pity they aren’t honest about it. Officially supporting it in that manner is worse than explicitly ending the support for this skin format version. So it’s porting Squareness to UIS2 that I’ll have to do. http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/02/still_no_fix_for_menu_bar_bug.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2006/02/still_no_fix_for_menu_bar_bug.html Windowblinds Sun, 12 Feb 2006 16:12:00 +0100 Currently I’m waiting for Stardock to fix a really annoying bug, that was somehow introduced in Windowblinds 5. Menu Bars in UIS1+ skins - Squareness is one of those - now have a fixed background color that is independent of the skin itself. The color is a shade of gray with the RGB 212,208,200. It looks especially awful with Squareness’ bright colors. Fortunately Stardock acknowledged this to be a bug and will probably look into it soon. Before getting this positive answer, I feared I would have to convert Squareness to a UIS2 skin. While UIS1+ is older than UIS2 it has some advantages. It is more stable and faster than UIS2. Also some applications don’t play nice with UIS2 skins. Since Squareness doesn’t have and also doesn’t need any features only available to UIS1+ skins, I’d like Squareness to stay a UIS1+ skin. So that’s why there’s still no new release of Squareness for Windowblinds. If the bug gets fixed I’ll release the new version that comes with the announced change to the progress bar and yet another try to fix the task bar (This time it seems to work, though ;) ) http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/12/menu_bar_annoyances.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/12/menu_bar_annoyances.html Windowblinds Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:29:00 +0100 I've added a Development Blog to this site. On this blog I'll post all kinds of information and progress reports about the development of all the different skins and tool around Squareness. The blogging software I'm using here is Wordpress. The theme is mostly done. There are some rough edges left that will be fixed soon. http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/12/devblog.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/12/devblog.html General News Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0100 The Progress Bar in the Squareness skins is going to get a slight change in the next releases of the Windowblinds skin and the Java Look And Feel. The Progress Bar was originally designed when Windowblinds didn’t have the “Progress Bar XP” feature and painted a beveled border around it. Now that Squareness uses that feature the Progress Bar has a flat look and somehow the gap between the progress bar chunk and the progress bar border doesn’t look all that good anymore. I have removed those gaps some months ago from my local version of Squareness for Windowblinds and after having tested it for months now I really think it’s an improvement. http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/12/progress_bar_changes.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/12/progress_bar_changes.html General Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:21:10 +0100 In this blog I’ll post all kinds of informations and rant about the development of the different subprojects of Squareness. You’ll get informations about changes and new features long before they are released (or even implemented.) http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/12/squareness_devblog_starts.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/12/squareness_devblog_starts.html General Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:20:00 +0100 I've redesigned part of the website. The front page changed the most - you'll see all the news concerning Squareness on this page. I'm also planning to add a developer diary later, so you'll see what happens between the updates. Also new is the website generator used. Till now I was using Forrest, but that became too tedious. Now I'm using [fmpp][1], which is much more straight forward. [1]:http://fmpp.sourceforge.net/ http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/10/new_website.html http://squareness.beeger.net/archives/2005/10/new_website.html General News Sun, 02 Oct 2005 12:00:00 +0100