WB5 Taskbar Transparency

Published on November 5, 2005 By smest In WindowBlinds

Right now, the taskbar seems not to realize there are applications underneath it, I'm guessing that's a problem with the whole false transparency issue that's been mentioned earlier, but there are plenty of other programs (including WindowFX) that do taskbar transparencies properly, I'm just not seeing why WB5 should have a problem with it.

I have a screenshot, but I can't get it onto my website for some reason.

Comments

Neil Banfield

on Nov 05, 2005

WindowFX and all those other apps do constant transparency. The entire taskbar has one transparency level. If you set this to say 10% then the entire bar is 10% visible and the text would be unreadable.

The WindowBlinds 5 feature is per pixel. This gives the skin author so much more control and the text, icons etc can remain fully visible. The side effect is it is not aware of windows under it.

smest

on Nov 05, 2005

I did get that, but why??

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central

MarkMcQ

on Nov 05, 2005

Performance. If it had to constantly redraw every single semi trans pixel so it displayed the content underneath, it would probably cause a noticable jerkiness when moving a window that goes behind the taskbar.

smest

on Nov 06, 2005

You mean the same amount of redraw that semi-transparent window borders have when "drag entire window" is turned on, and have no jerkiness?

What if you take the transparency functions of WinFX to make the taskbar fully transparent and then overlay the more opaque bits on top of that? obviously doing it exactly like that might be a litle hefty performance-wise, but isn't there some way of doing it efficiently?

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