Aero Taskforce

tino wrote on June 8, 2008, 1:07am

True. But what about integrating the progress bar into the background of the taskbar button? Like the flashing orange showing us that there is something new, there could also be a green background showing the progress like on the addressbar...

eried wrote on June 8, 2008, 1:50am

Could be but that would be a new feature request rather than a bug/annoyance

Julien Manici wrote on June 8, 2008, 2:58am

There is a reason the previews are no more updated when the windows is minimized :

when you minimize a window, the content of the window it self (not just the thumbnail) is no more refreshed, in order to save processing power (and thus battery life on a laptop!).

When a window is minimized, the application owning the window is aware about it, and it may decide to release some ram no more needed for drawing operations after a few seconds/minutes (that's what IE does when there is not much ram available its windows is minimized... one more reason to use IE ^^).

The solution would be to not tell the applications that their window has been minimized, but we would lost the advantage of this optimisation used by IE and many windows applications. So it's definitely a bad idea.

eried wrote on June 8, 2008, 3:13am

@Julien Manici: So what's the point of live previews? I only complain of "progress bars" on file operations (in IE7 works as spected, when downloading a file you can see the progress updated in the live preview)

Julien Manici wrote on June 8, 2008, 4:49am

"So what's the point of live previews? "

-to see live preview of windows hidden by other windows
-to see static preview of a minimized window as it was before minimize

"I only complain of "progress bars" on file operations (in IE7 works as spected, when downloading a file you can see the progress updated in the live preview)"

no, even in IE7 it works as the file operations window (un)live preview!

if it is minimized, the preview is no more live
if it is just masked by a foreground windows, then it IS live

daniel_rh wrote on June 8, 2008, 6:56pm

I think this behaviour is to save system resources

eried wrote on June 9, 2008, 12:31am

@daniel_rh: Yeah but to "save system resources" we will keep using XP. For progress when coping or moving files I think is necesary because live previews are nearly useless, with this exception.

Jaco wrote on June 9, 2008, 5:47am

When you minimize a window, WM_PAINT is not pumped in the WM message pump.

To free up CPU usage, ram consumption and how often the graphic card is forced to paint a canvas, Windows shuts off all paint messages when a window is minimized.

What is the point? You cannot see a window when it is minimized.

cmsiempre wrote on June 9, 2008, 5:00pm

+1 AND you can not resize the dialog info, thats realy bad

Ensign Joe wrote on June 10, 2008, 12:44pm

Well tino's idea is a really good one. The progress bar in the taskbar button as well :-)

maxico86 wrote on June 11, 2008, 9:30am

The live preview is useless when it is not "live". Especial when you are waiting for something beeing copied...

lpraveen wrote on June 11, 2008, 8:16pm

Preview is useless if its not live.

rus.newman wrote on June 11, 2008, 11:46pm

I reckon the taskbar icon could tell you all you need to know about a transfer...

fowl wrote on June 12, 2008, 4:39am

I'm conflicted on this, on one hand it's annoying it's not live, but on the other hand, every shell progress dialog uses about 30% cpu on my machine just with the animation...

fowl wrote on June 12, 2008, 4:39am

I also love the "progress in taskbar" idea.

npiaseck wrote on June 18, 2008, 4:42am

I disagree with this one, for the technical reasons mentioned (the window is minimized and is not being asked to redraw itself) and for sensibility reasons (when minimizing Windows on Mac OS X, the icon in the dock is also a snapshot, because windows aren't redrawn in that scenario, either).

eried wrote on June 19, 2008, 10:52pm

@npiaseck: Would be really useful if MS adds a manual call to WM_PAINT function manually once a while when the copy/move window is transferring some files.

I don't mean that they *must* update all the minimized windows and lose a lot of performance. In fact, most applications does not required be updated when they are minimized.

I also like the idea of the progress in taskbar idea

Windows/MSN Messenger windows does not update when they are minimized, even if a contact sends a message to you. Wrong idea for Flip3d and Live Previews.

zooba wrote on June 25, 2008, 10:13am

Why shouldn't opening the preview start pumping WM_PAINT messages again? Isn't the window being displayed, albeit in a smaller space? Makes sense to me.

blueskynis wrote on June 29, 2008, 12:55am

This was the first thing I noticed while using Vista... :-(

0vermind wrote on July 23, 2008, 9:56pm

Agreed and +1.
Yes! Why do we have these live previews if they are not really live? It defeats the whole purpose. The purpose is so that you don't have to maximize the window to see what's going on or to see what the window looked like you could just hover over. But they don't do any good if they are not live.

-Mike