Hello,
I'm stuck at making Dopus 10 adapt WB's buttons and toolbar pattern, can someone please tell me what I need to do ?
I did the dll thing and so far everything seems to be ok but the toolbars and buttons
I read somewhere about an compatibility option in Dopus for WB but can't seem to find it, might that be it ?
Thanks
Not sure what you mean. Can you show some screenshots?
Opus automatically draws toolbars using the current visual style's button theme (provided Preferences / Toolbars / Appearance / Use Office 2003-style for toolbars is off) and toolbar background (provided the background is not overridden with a custom bitmap via Preferences / Display / Images or on individual toolbars via Settings -> Customize Toolbars).
Make sure you hex-edited both wblind.dll and wblind64.dll, else WindowBlinds will still break Opus.
I'll be writing more about this debacle in the next few days... IMO, Stardock do such a poor job of supporting, testing and maintaining WindowBlinds that it does not make sense to use it (whether or not you use Opus as well). I'm in the process of making a video to back up that statement.
Older versions of Opus had an option but it hasn't been needed for a long time. These days all the problems WindowBlinds causes Opus are due to it explicitly looking for processes called dopus.exe and completely breaking parts of them (which we told Stardock about six months ago, with proof and an easy fix, which they still have not implemented), and by poorly designed/tested skins that have missing elements or elements that do not work the same as the standard ones (that includes several of the skins that come with WindowBlinds itself).
TBH, we've had enough of Stardock not supporting their product properly and pushing the support burden on to us (and other developers), especially when the things their product does to Opus (or any exe named dopus.exe) makes Opus look broken if you don't know the details of what's going on.
The latest WindowBlinds breaks all standard file dialogs ("File Open" dialogs) in any process named dopus.exe when using about half of the skins that ship with WB. When I say breaks, I mean the dialogs will not even open. Nothing happens when you try to open them and Opus looks like it isn't working, yet it's entirely WB's fault. It's ridiculous.
While testing things yesterday I also found WB causes problems with parts of Windows Explorer, which shows how much attention and testing gets paid to the product.
Hi Leo,
thanks for the time you're putting into this.
I have gone through tens of posts both here and at stardock's forums and I know what you mean. I had some initial problems and most of them got solved by deleting dopus.exe from both wblind.dll and wblind64.dll.
My problem now are the buttons which I just can't change to WB themes's and toolbar pattern. I noticed that toolbar color tone changes, but it won't adapt theme pattern as you can see in the black theme where you can see the difference between Dopus and WE.
Regarding the blue/green theme after going through Icon packager's advanced options, rebuild icon cache / repair sheel icons, drop down menu buttons (blue) right beside buttons seem ok now as well as folder icons and all the rest
By what i understand I can only change pane bg colors through Preferences-Colors and Fonts, right or can wb also over write these settings ?
answering your questions
Preferences / Toolbars / Appearance / Use Office 2003-style for toolbars is off --->>> OFF
provided the background is not overridden with a custom bitmap via Preferences / Display / Images ---->>> Default (Standard File Display Image)
individual toolbars via Settings -> Customize Toolbars) ---->> post screenies with settings as there are 2 different settings here which I presume default as I haven't touched this.
so far, this seems to be ok here.
just out of curiosity, why would stardock add dopus to the dll ?
Screens
Window blinds settings
Do you mean the red bar at the top of your first Explorer window?
That isn't the "toolbar" theme element. I forget the name of it but I think Explorer is the only thing that uses it.
If you want that for your Opus toolbar backgrounds the best thing to do is extract (if you can get it out of the theme file) or recreate (e.g. copy & paste it out of a screenshot) it into a PNG or BMP file and tell Opus to use that as the toolbar background via Preferences / Display / Images.
The theme on the buttons in the second Explorer screenshot looks like it makes different assumptions about how the toolbar buttons will be drawn than Opus (and the standard Windows themes). e.g. It's drawing a border around the menu 'down-arrow' glyphs when that border would usually be part of the button background (which Opus won't draw until the mouse is over the button).
I'm not sure why WindowBlinds looks for dopus.exe and does what it does. It seems like something which may have made sense many years ago but hasn't been reviewed for a long time, and is now not only unnecessary but completely breaking the program. The bigger mystery is why Stardock haven't removed it after it was pointed out.
