(Updated) WindowBlinds breaks Opus

Help & Support
1

UPDATE: Neil from Stardock has responded (and I've replied) on the blog's comments and the WindowBlinds forum. The WB forum is easiest to read, so I've linked to his post there. Continue down that thread for replies and other discussion.

UPDATE 2: From a support request I just handled and confirmed, we've also found that the current version of WindowBlinds breaks the Configuration Backup and Restore wizard in Opus, making it so that nothing happens when you click Next. There are probably other issues as well. As a general rule, if you're using WB with Opus right now and something doesn't work, try switching to Windows Aero.

UPDATE 3: List of related issues and their statuses: leo.dopus.com/dowb/index.html#summaries

UPDATE 4: Stardock have released WindowBlinds 7.30a Beta for registered WB users, with fixes to the Directory Opus issues (and a bunch more). Use it in conjunction with the 10.0.3.1 beta (or later) versions of Opus. I'll post about this separately as well, so more people see it.

Original post:

I'm posting this as a sticky for a few days to help spread awareness.

[ul][li]url=http://blog.dopus.com/2012/01/windowblinds-breaks-opus-and-stardock.html WindowBlinds breaks Opus[/url][/li][/ul]

Also, I'd be interested in feedback on the four videos (the first three more than the fourth; the fourth is intentionally under-produced) as they've been a bit of an experiment for me in doing this kind of video with narration (and subtitles), and getting to grips with the video-making software a bit more than I had before. Hopefully I can put that experience to use in future tutorials.

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Hi Leo,

just watched the video and I am astonished that a company like Stardock stll exists. It's a shame :imp:

Regarding feedback on the video:

  1. The pace is high for convenient following. Plus: Make some breaks for the user to fully understand what he just saw.
  2. The voice over could be a little bit louder.
  3. (Especially useful for non-native english speakers :wink:) Speak a little bit slower and more accentuated.

Regards
xbprm

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Thanks for the feedback!

Pacing is probably the most difficult part. It's hard to know how fast to make these things, balancing between being too slow/boring and too fast/confusing. I figured I could be quite fast here in most places as the aim was just so show what did & didn't work, and that can be seen quickly, but I also slipped in some extra details that fly past very quickly which interested people might want to pause for. (But they're not the focus of the video so I didn't want to linger on them.)

Yes. :frowning: I've been using a USB headset and it doesn't go any louder. (Or maybe I just need to shout into it! :slight_smile:) If I do more videos I might have to invest in a better microphone. I boosted the volume a little, but increasing it more seemed to make it painful to listen to. (That's using the video editing software, though; I expect I can find better audio-editing software if needed.)

Will do! As much as I can, at least. I made the subtitles to help there, but I know it's difficult to follow the visuals and the words at the same time. Maybe it's best to talk, then do things, then talk some more, instead of doing both at once. (But maybe that'll be too slow/boring for some people? Hard for me to know.)

YouTube has a neat feature where it shows you a transcript of all the subtitles, with the current line highlighted, which I expect will be useful, but I see it doesn't cope well with my videos because the subtitles are too long. (The software I'm using seemed to encourage up to three-line subtitles, but YouTube works better with one or two lines.) I'll do that differently next time, now that I know.

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Hi Leo,

glad I could help a little bit. Regarding pacing it may be helpful to concentrate on only very few things at the same time and don't get hectic. The last can happen if you want to show many things in a limited amount of time (Example: The section about the full-row selection was especially hectic). The first I learned during numerous presentations: People keep a maximum of 3(!) things in mind and can focus only on one.

Regards
xbprm

P.S. Forgot to mention "EXCELLENT JOB, LEO!!!"

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Bastards! :slight_smile:

Nice research, Leo. It must have been an interesting feeling, when you first tried renaming some program to dopus.exe, and WB instantly started hating it. :smiley:

Regarding the videos, I agree with xbprm, the overall pace should be slightly slowed down. You seem to start sentences with very fast pace and less intelligible pronunciation, and if it weren't for subtitles, I'd be lost. Ok, not really lost, but I'd find it much harder to concentrate because I would sometimes have to reflect on what I just heard in order to try and filter it. I guess it's not a big problem for native english speakers, they might not even notice this, but it might be good idea to articulate the things more clearly, especially when starting sentences (sometimes it's ok all the way through, and sometimes, you start speaking like an angry mexican wife only to finish the sentence with the diction of a royal butler :grin: ).
If you look at the users' profiles here (and your customer database), you can see that many of them are from non-english speaking countries, they'll find it harder to process a viva-voce english speech, so it might be a good idea to make it more accessible for everyone. I'm intentionally focusing just on audio here, with subtitles, everything is ok.

And the presentation... it kinda feels weak, lacking strength and clear direction. I mean, will fulfill its purpose just alright, no problems there... but if we would talk about ways to make it even better, I'd say it would benefit a lot from a proper presentation structure. Oh, and speak like this — youtube.com/watch?v=wkzBNgo59u0... it will be epic. :grin:

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Awesome... if that doesn't change Stardock's ways, nothing will.

As an Englishman, I thought the videos were perfect. I found the pace was just right for short informative clips, although for anything longer than around 10 mins, I agree with xbprm that some breaks for the user to fully understand what they just saw would be essential. Great work though and hopefully the kick up the backside that Stardock requires.

How about a full video manual for Opus on the amazing... http://www.lynda.com/

Example here... http://www.lynda.com/home/Player.aspx?lpk4=82217&playChapter=False

What video capture software do you use?

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The capture software is Camtasia. It's not without its quirks and little bugs you have to work around but now that I'm used to it I quite like using it.

Doing the whole Opus manual as a video would take about 15 years to do and 15 days to view, and probably be more sleep-inducing than the Lord of the Rings movies (Yeah, I went there!). :slight_smile:

I found a good tool to fix the audio volume levels, for next time.

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[quote="leo"]
Doing the whole Opus manual as a video would take about 15 years to do and 15 days to view....[/quote]
Martin Scorsese seems to have time on his hands for projects these days.

Is your video on YouTube? That would get the word out. Also, if it isn't there already, a warning on the GP Software site about incompatibility induced by WindowBlinds, suitably couched of course, would deal with your point about potential buyers of Dopus jumping to the wrong conclusions about the source of the errors they might encounter.

I agree about the speed. You talk very quickly at the beginning. Slowing everything down a bit would work better.

As to pauses for stuff to sink in, some of those dreaded "bullet point" slides might help to sum things up as you go along.

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Yep, all the videos are hosted on YouTube. It seemed like the easiest way to put videos on the web so they will work in all desktop and mobile browsers, and with support for optional subtitles.

(I'm still dreaming of the day when I can just use HTML5's video tag to put a video on the web and have it work everywhere. Maybe in 100 years or so...)

We plan to make the program itself detect WindowBlinds and, if the DLLs look like ones that cause the problem, display a warning. We won't be able to get that into a non-beta release for a few weeks at least, so a message on the main website might make sense in the meantime.

[quote]I agree about the speed. You talk very quickly at the beginning. Slowing everything down a bit would work better.

As to pauses for stuff to sink in, some of those dreaded "bullet point" slides might help to sum things up as you go along.[/quote]

I guess the speed is partly my reaction against how slow many web videos are. So many have all those animated logos and titlecards at the start; I get bored before they've even started. I often end up skipping through the body of them as well because they move so slowly. I guess I grew up consuming TV in the "MTV generation," and it's like that hasn't reached the web yet (apart from Zero Punctuation :slight_smile:).

I figure everyone can pause in their own places, if needed, by pushing space or clicking the pause button. :slight_smile:

But these videos aren't tutorials, and when making tutorials I would definitely pace things a lot slower. My intention with these videos wasn't to show how to do things; it was just to demonstrate what goes wrong and prove what causes those problems.

Another thing I'm learning is that I need to leave big gaps where nothing happens, between each action, while recording the videos. Then if I realise later that I want to add more narration between those parts, I can do it easily. It's easy to cut out unwanted gaps when but not always easy to insert them. The video can be held on a still frame to let the narration go longer, but if the section I want to extend has window-close animations (or whatever) going on then extending a frame would look like the computer had locked up. So I had to talk fast in a few places to fit what I wanted in without re-doing the video at the last minute.

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Would it be easy to subtitle the videos with key points?

One point about speed is that you may have some viewers who are not native English speakers.

I know what you mean about skipping videos. You did well to split this one into episodes.

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In addition to the existing subtitles?

It could be done using overlays on the video itself (that you couldn't turn off), or by providing an alternative subtitle track.

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Yes. I thought that there would be room for "take home messages".

The current subtitles are few and far between.

At 1:30 in the first video, for example.

"Everything works fine in Opus"

At 2:00

"Turn on Windowblinds and Opus looks odd"

I'd flesh it out more than that – a new subtitle every 10 seconds or so – but this gives the idea.

13

"Something" got Stardock's attention... Seems there's movement on the issue: http://forums.wincustomize.com/408444/page/3/#replies

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[quote="michaelkenward"]The current subtitles are few and far between.

At 1:30 in the first video, for example.

"Everything works fine in Opus"

At 2:00

"Turn on Windowblinds and Opus looks odd"

I'd flesh it out more than that – a new subtitle every 10 seconds or so – but this gives the idea.[/quote]

Maybe you've got Google's auto-generated subtitles on instead of the proper, hand-written subtitles.

For me, the hand-edited version is what turns on when I click the CC button. I can then click it again to choose the auto-generated version. (I'll see if I can remove the generated subtitles as there's no reason for them to exist.)

e.g. Between 1:30 and 2:00 there are lots of subtitle lines. The screenshot below has them truncated (on the right-hand side) but gives you an idea of how many there should be:


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Thanks for the heads up. Neil also posted to the blog comments and I've replied in both places.

Looks like things are headed in the right direction, which is great.

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From a support request I just handled and confirmed, we've also found that the current version of WindowBlinds breaks the Configuration Backup and Restore wizard in Opus, making it so that nothing happens when you click Next.

There are probably other issues as well. As a general rule, if you're using WB with Opus right now and something doesn't work, try switching to Windows Aero.

17

I see no subtitles.

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Click the CC (closed captions) button on YouTube videos to turn on their subtitles (if they have any).

19

I've spent much of the last week looking for and writing fixes or work-arounds, where possible, for any visual-style issues that Opus has when used with the WindowBlinds styles. This is in anticipation of a WindowBlinds release that fixes the main Opus-related problems on their side.

Here is the list of known issues, their current statuses, and before (Opus 10.0.3.0) & after (Opus 10.0.3.1) screenshots:

[ul][li]http://leo.dopus.com/dowb/index.html#summaries[/li][/ul]

(As it says at the top of the page, everything there is from my point of view, so the Opus stuff is official but everything else is just a suggestion.)

We plan to put out Opus 10.0.3.1-beta in about a week with all the mentioned fixes/workarounds.

If you find any other issues, please let me know and I'll look into them. Even if it's just a pixel out of place, let me know. (I can't guarantee to fix absolutely everything -- sometimes it isn't actually possible -- but it's worth reporting even the most trivial cosmetic issue. Those are often trivial to fix anyway.)

Of course, if you're using the current WindowBlinds and want to look for problems in Opus, you'll need to hex-edit your wblind.dll / wblind64.dll if you haven't already, so that the visual-styles are applied at all. That requirement should go away with the next WindowBlinds update, from my understanding of the thread on the WB forum.