The release of TD6R3 (or maybe TD7) is coming closer, so here is a quick update on what's going on.

Development has lately concentrated on getting the shell to be able to compete against windows 7. With Win7 many very powerfull features are added to the explorer shell and we feel that users switching to SharpE from windows 7 will miss some of those features. With the application bar module we already have one of the most important Win7 taskbar features integrated into SharpE, but it was time to add more new stuff.

With the next release the two most important new features are
1) Support for larger Skins
A lot of work has been done on the skin system to allow the creation of larger skins. All our current skins are pretty small and limited in height and icon sizes. With the latest changes it's no problem to have skins with icon sizes up to 32x32 and bar heights over 40 pixels. To demonstrate this a new skin has been created.
2) Task Previews
For users using Vista and Win7 versions which are supporting Aero Effects (Home Premium++) the taskbar and application bar modules will now show preview windows when hovering over the items with the mouse. These preview windows are using the DWM api, meaning that they are very fast and updated live. Of course we are taking this further than just implementing what windows7 taskbar does. New features for the application bar include stacking of multiple preview windows and the possibility to interact with several previews (restore or close several windows at the same time by left/middle clicking their preview while holding down the shift key).

Those new features are demonstrated best in a little screenshot


In addition we are working on fixing the remaining tray problems on Vista and on making it ready for Win7. The annoying crashing bug when closing SharpCenter on XP should also be fixed in the next release.

It took a while, but now it's done.
I finally managed to find some time to put together the long awaited bug fix release of TD6.
A lot of stuff got fixed and improved, but we aren't done yet! Development on R3 will begin right now

So please post feedback and bug reports to the new forum thread over here
Download as usual on the trac page: Download (yes the trac is online again)
Complete Changelog

I also want to say "thank you" to all the people supporting us, the feedback we got for TD6 was just amazing.
Keep up using and testing SharpE! Keep the feedback coming!

Time for some real news

As you might have guessed, the last news was an april fools joke.
But there was at least some truth to it. The development of the shell really has slowed down again. The reason for this is that for Pixol and me some stuff came up in real live which limits our time to work on the shell a lot. Things will get better in a few weeks, but until then not much is going to happen.

Besides this we are having big problems with the server. Our hosting company decided to move the site to a new server. While moving a lot of stuff got broken resulting in mc having to completely reinstall and reconfigure the trac system.

TD6R2 related things look pretty good, a lot of stuff has already been fixed and improved and we are trying to release it as soon as possible.
There are still a lot of things which aren't running as smooth as they should - so we are now focusing on fixing those issues.

Sorry for the delay.

Development has slowed down again (as you might have noticed).
The reason for this is that with TD6 we have gone one step too far. Many users where rather unhappy with how TD6 turned out. Especially the clumsy configs and the instable core of the shell where heavily criticized. It has also turned out that the new "features" like the application bar module caused mostly confusion and trouble.

Over the past 5 weeks (in our attempt to fix those problems) we realized that we have been going too far too quickly with the development of the whole shell. Too many changes have been made in a short period of time. The result is that the source code got so complex and bloated that it's imposible for us to work with.

At the same time we had some long discussions among the development team and some old hardcore users of the shell. It came to our realization that actually since the good old cvs6 release not much has changed. We have all been focused too much on the shiny and want to be pretty aspects of the shell. And under the hood, nothing really changed. Functionality is still the same - everything just got a lot more complex - resulting in the shell getting more instable and impossible to work with.

Due to this we decided to go back to the roots of SharpE. From now on the source code base of cvs6 will be used for the future development of the shell. Cvs6 was the most successful and stable release of SharpE ever. And we are going back to it. From now on we won't focus on useless stuff like skins and schemes anymore. Our whole effort will now go into the development of new functionality - brining a minimalistic, but powerfull shell to your desktop.

Stay tuned for the release of CVS7 in a few weeks.


If you haven't been around in the glorious days of SharpE cvs6,
here is what will soon come back to your desktop!

We had a few issues with a server move, and as such it has broken our wiki system. Until we have a fix for it, here is a alternative link for the main testing day wiki page. We also look forward in releasing TD6 R2 any day now.

Download and Setup

Today on 22 February 2009 we are having testing day 6!
Our Developers will be providing live feedback and help in IRC for the next 12 hours. We need your opinion about the shell and all crazy ideas you have how to make it better!
Join us in #SharpE on irc.freenode.net and help to improve SharpE!

Everything you need to know how to get started:
(Make sure to read the the information pages below before getting started!)
Testing Day 6 Main Page
Download and Setup
Changelog
Frequently Asked Questions and Known Problems

Nearly everything is done and so it's time to announce the next SharpE Testing Day! Due to all the changes which have been done it is necessary to do TD6 as a full 12 hour testing day with live IRC support.

For the whole time developers will be present in IRC to answer your questions and solve possible problems. Detailed informations where to get the release will be posted when the testing day begins.

Date: Sunday - 22 February, 2009
Time: 12:00 to 24:00 (GMT)
Place: #SharpE on irc.freenode.net

So what are the changes that make this release so big and important?

SharpCenter and Configs
The plugin system of SharpCenter along with all configs has been completely rewritten. Everything is a lot more stable now and the overall design of the configs has improved a lot. Besides this all the remaining configs which where still missing in TD5 are finished now!


SharpBar and Modules
Similar to SharpCenter the complete plugin system has been rewritten. The result of this is less memory usage and improved performance and stability. As a result of the rewrite the amount of flickering in the bar has been reduced furthermore. In addition to this many small and rare bugs are fixed now. This includes those annoying access violations one could get when attaching an additional monitor to the system or when just changing the screen resolution.

Skin System
Getting left behind during the last releases the whole skin system received some improvements for TD6. Besides just fixing some bugs several improvements have been made. It's now possible for a skin developer to dynamically adjust the lightness of any color directly in the xml file. With this a skin author can use different variations of the same color directly without having to define new colors or using differently blended images. Another big improvement is the possibility for a skin to color blend and lighten icons similar to the icon blending of SharpDesk. To demonstrate and test those new features a new Skin ("Minimal 2") is included in TD6.


Notes Module
The for many people most important and loved module of SharpE is going to be improved a lot for TD6. Not much to say here, except: check out the screenshot below!


Application Bar Module
TD6 will include the new "AppBar" module. This module is a combination of the "Button Bar" and "Taskbar" modules which makes it possible to monitor and manage your most used and favorite tasks. Similar to the Button Bar you can add applications to the AppBar module. Those applications are then monitored, which means that their running state will be indicated at the button associated with the application. If you click an applications button while the application is running it will simply switch to this application (like in the Taskbar), but if the application is not running yet - then a click on the button will start it (like in the Button Bar). If the application is started several times or if it's using several windows then a popup menu showing all windows associated to the application will be shown when the applications button is pressed. Of course this new module is fully integrated into the shell, which means that you can hide all the applications which are part of the AppBar module from your taskbar. This makes it possible to easily manage often used applications and to stop them from filling up your taskbar.


Everything Else
These where only the big changes which you might instantly notice. Besides this a lot of fixed and improvements have been done all over the shell. The dll file behind the theme system was rewritten completely and a lot of other crucial bugs are gone. This includes the login screen on Vista not staying visible for too long anymore and SharpE no longer crashing when used from a directory with a very long path. In fact so many changes have been made that at some point we failed to keep a complete changelog.

Some screenshots of the whole shell in action:


As you can see a lot of stuff has changed and improved since TD5.
And to test all these cool new things we need your help!
Join us on Testing Day 6!

So then after the news about the next release being delayed a few months I thought I would share some good news with you.

Firstly let me introduce two new members to the team.

Yay
You may know yay from helping quite a lot in the forums, and showing off his proud status of supporter. He will be working on adding content to the new site, acting as a forum moderator and banning anyone that mentions Astonshell in any one sentence on the new site! He is already proving a valuable addition to the team by populating our naked site with much needed content and creating a lovely NSIS installer!

Brum74
Brum has proved himself far more than adequate with his latest commits of SVN. He has even outshone mc in the CIA stats, and that is not an easy task! He even commited code over the Christmas break, "now that is dedication we would love to have on the team". The crunch of the deal for me was when i saw tons of module configs converted during the Christmas holidays...

The good news? This is the kind of help that makes TD6 come even quicker!

Another year has passed without version 0.8 of SharpE getting released. As usual we where unable to follow our imaginary time plan for the past year. There are several reaons for this. One being that the development team once again shrank to the size of two active core developers. The other thing is that with getting ready for 0.8 we realized that we have to take care of some ugly things which have been pushed away ever since. Our goal for 0.8 is it to bring out an overall solid and stable shell. For this to happen we recently started to rewrite and improve some older core parts of the shell. We where also still not satisfied with how SharpCenter and the configs turned out, thus making it necessary to rework the configs.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel and hope for the upcoming 2009.
Most of the still ongoing rewrites are nearly complete and two users (Brum74 and Yay) are actively helping us out on several fronts. There has also finally been some development on the new website and we are hoping to bring it online during the next 3 months.

So what will happen next?
Before we can go for 0.8 RC1 another testing day (TD6) will be done. This is simply necessary to test all the recently made changes for stability on different computer and system configurations. After TD6 we will directly go for 0.8 RC1. It's really hard to estimate when TD6 will be done. I don't think that we can make it in january, so I would roughly estimate end of february or march.

stay tuned and
Happy New Year

Have been working on something very cool tonight and as we get closer to a date of TD6 I am going to share more of our development process with you

For a long time we have had a lot of configuration data within SharpE, and sometimes this xml data can go *pop*. I have had it happen a few times in the last year or so... So what do we do about it? Well as you may or may not know we made a huge deal about interfaces and what It could mean if we switch over. Well that's what we are doing now... right? So I have created a new interface that wraps up all of the loading and saving of configuration data. The benefit being that every single file that uses it, will now have a backup automatically created when you save something within the environment. So when the XmlBaseInterface loads, if it fails for any reason... it will now load the backup if there is one. Which in a nutshell should mean, no more lost xml configuration files! Hurrah!

I hope some of you are rejoicing over this :P It also allows us to make sure every error while loading is logged to SharpConsole, which makes it much easier for us to debug issues. This is one of many ways how interfaces are helping us improve SharpEnviro I can't stress enough how different SharpEnviro will seem when we kick out TD6 sometime next month!