Aero Glass for Win8.1 RTM RC3

[Guest DarKWerX]

First post on the forum specifically to give a big thank you to BigMuscle. I'm still working on my theme due to bugs in the 8.1 color intensity/saturation adjustments (royal blue changes to purple upon lowering either). This however, is where I'm at for the moment.

I am waiting on AsRock to complete my RMA on my z77e-itx (pci-e slot ceased funtioning during a manual UEFI reset) to get my main system up & running again so I can aquire the liscensing for both. Many thanks for the hard work mate, it works great!

[infinality]

BigMuscle- Any way to make 100% transparent theme areas (from the themeatlas.png file) *not* get their background blurred, while anything with any other level of transparency would still be? I'm thinking it would be easier to make a rounded corner version theme that way, instead of adding padding to the shadow areas (which then encapsulates the buttons and doesn't look right, IMO).

Thanks!

[MrGRiM]

BigMuscle- Any way to make 100% transparent theme areas (from the themeatlas.png file) *not* get their background blurred, while anything with any other level of transparency would still be? I'm thinking it would be easier to make a rounded corner version theme that way, instead of adding padding to the shadow areas (which then encapsulates the buttons and doesn't look right, IMO).

Thanks!

BlurDeviation DWORD Standard deviation for Gaussian blur, default = 30 (which means σ = 3.0)

Value 0 results in non-blurred transparency.

http://glass8.berlios.de/guide.html

Here is a tool I made to set up Aero Glass instead of having to create Registry Settings manually. http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170384-aero-glass-cofigurator-for-windows-81/

Edited November 23, 2013 by MrGRiM

[ace2]

infinality

100% Transparency on Themes.

With older DWMGlass.dll - Beta1 / Beta 2

MAY not work with Auto Color set on Themes.

MAY loses 100% Transparency if you change the Theme, & settings will need to be applied again.
MAY loses 100% Transparency with just "BlurDeviation"=dword:00000000 when you Sign out, but not with a restart of the Pc.

Work's Fine with Beta 4

This is the way i get 100% Transparency:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM]
"BypassThemeSignature"=dword:00000001
"BlurDeviation"=dword:00000000
"ColorizationGlassAttribute"=dword:00000002

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM]
"BypassThemeSignature"=dword:00000001
"BlurDeviation"=dword:00000000
"ColorizationGlassAttribute"=dword:00000002

Edited November 23, 2013 by ace2

[ralcool]

Going by the list of acknowledged and maybe cured bugs lately, beta 5 will be extensive.

Rotated screen calculations, aero peek glitches, magnifier tools, odd restarts... quite a work load for our only developer emulating years of refined code.

Thumbs up BM! Replacing the programming of Aero back into an OS designed to basically delete the feature cannot be easy.

Thank you (and NoelC) for making my system look & feel really nice. (The work of MrGrim also hasn't gone unnoticed- but I don't need to go backwards. I actually like ribbons (generally) , and don't need footers at the bottom of my explorer windows reminding me of my system specs)... I always thought it a waste of space even in Vista.

If Microsoft took the direction of Classic Shell or Star Trek, add functionality, remove nothing..... leave no foot prints... Prime Directive type stuff. Don't f**k with or remove things even 0.0000001% of users might use... its not like notepad is expected to be any better after all these years. The Visuals in Media Player haven't been updated for at least a decade, or even the default screen savers...... really MS?, Mystify & Ribbons or WMP Alchemy the best offerings for default themes?!

No NEW decent screens savers, or Windows Media Player visualizations have appeared for a decade.... Even tools like WinAMP get updated occasionally....

Don't even bother complaining to me... I don't care.

I expect even less.

[Soukyuu]

bigmuscle, could you please adjust the behavior of the pop-up window? It's getting annoying having my clipboard contents replaced by the machine code every time it pops up. Please consider another way for us to get it.

The beta is rock solid on my rather uncomplicated setup otherwise

Edited November 23, 2013 by Soukyuu

[NoelC]

Ralcool, I'd say BigMuscle's work is already beyond the level of those "years of refined code" in Microsoft's sources. I've never felt Microsoft produced particularly refined implementations, frankly. For years their stated policy was "put together a working prototype and move on without ever optimizing it". But since Vista it's pretty much been all optimization of what was already there, and now we're seeing that only goes so far. I'm glad you like my little theme atlas contribution, but it was literally nothing by comparison to BigMuscle's project. Just a bit of Photoshop work is all.

I imagine BigMuscle's next build could be good enough to be a release candidate. I'm looking forward to it, and I applaud his work (and I hope hundreds of thousands of donations are pouring in to him). Like Ralcool, I feel that Windows 8 would be a complete bust without it, and I would still be on Windows 7. Things like Aero Glass for Win 8 and ClassicShell are saving Windows' butt.

It may be unpopular to be a "hater" - I've certainly been called that for pointing out the failures to improve Windows, and especially the deletions of functionality. On the other hand, I had a perfectly working backup strategy with Windows 7, all set up through Microsoft's dialogs. Now to accomplish the same thing I'm forced to schedule wbadmin commands. How's that anything but degradation? Why did I have to spend time finding out about wbadmin? Right now my system can't get through a day without errors in the System Error Log. My Windows 7 system ran on the same hardware for months without errors. Worse, I used to have confidence that such things would be fixed in Windows Updates. Now...

-Noel

[ralcool]

This little article goes someway to describing what you said there Noel.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html

Except it goes further to argue that Microsoft once promised the impossible in order to dazzle the competition into believing they are behind what to compete with next!. (Well not the impossible... but ultimately undeliverable distractions)

I presume the end game was to make anyone else feel that they were wasting their time writing anything.. since M$ are gunna do it better... look at all our convincing fake screen grabs/artist impressions.

Hindsight being what it is... Cairo, Longhorn- all vaporware... 'visions' by Microsoft- little more than ... well, buggy prototypes as you said- useful stuff to leak when you are marketing a dream to defuse the competition.

The awful part is we got an OS that was always derivative and never optimal- but somehow resilient, and led me to my little saying.

"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away"

I wouldn't want to be on the helm of the ship.

Sean.

PS, My spare i7 still runs a now expired Win8 RP Build 8400 64bit with StartisBack. A few tweaks and the system is very nice.

It still runs.. but 'some' Metro Apps don't work anymore..... like who cares? Just need to solve the automatic restart rubbish.

Native Aero, generally solid system.

Edit... Some Apps do still work.. Weather, News, Travel... Hmm, Interesting if you let it sit and work.

Edited November 24, 2013 by ralcool

[NoelC]

Hey BigMuscle, after 3 full days of perfect operation (without reboots) I had another of those "wake up the monitors and see the DWM window, after having left it minimized" occurrences this morning.

The restart happened after 1:00 am, when I left the system and before 9:30 am when I moved the mouse and woke up the monitors. Judging from the log I'd say it happened between 5:00 and 6:00 am None of my scheduled jobs run at that time, save for the one that adds timestamps to your debug.log. I walked through the system jobs (wow, there are a lot of them in Windows 8.1), but I didn't see any that ran between 5:00 and 6:00.

More info: According to my Security event log, DWM-3 logged off at 5:04:16 am, and logged back on again in the same second.

Here's the pertinent debug.log portion, with my hourly timestamps added:

http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/DWMRestart.log

Interesting that it doesn't look like a crash, but like it shut down and restarted gracefully.

Do you have anything that runs every 3 days? If not, any chance you have some kind of resource leak?

-Noel

P.S., I looked through all the specific logs... One thing caught my eye, logged at 4:26:13 am:

Diagnostic module {282396b2-6c46-4d66-b413-70b0445df33c} (%SystemRoot%\system32\diagperf.dll) finished troubleshooting scenario {186f47ef-626c-4670-800a-4a30756babad}, instance {c4aa6c9e-fd84-4b04-a1fb-7d1c630eedda}, original activity ID {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}.  It set resolution {4d21da64-fd02-4b82-a0a5-783266e430ab} for user Everyone in session 0 with expiration date ‎2014‎-‎02‎-‎22T09:26:13.081997300Z.  The resolution was queued to start later.

I wonder what "later" means in this context.

Edited November 24, 2013 by NoelC

[MrGRiM]

I also had explorer restart a few times recently but not sure if it's anything related to Aero Glass, here is the last error report.

SourceWindows ExplorerSummaryStopped workingDate‎25/‎11/‎2013 3:06 AMStatusReport sentDescriptionFaulting Application Path:	C:\Windows\explorer.exeProblem signatureProblem Event Name:	BEX64Application Name:	Explorer.EXEApplication Version:	6.3.9600.16441Application Timestamp:	5265dec8Fault Module Name:	themeui.dll_unloadedFault Module Version:	6.3.9600.16384Fault Module Timestamp:	5215ebf2Exception Offset:	0000000000047be4Exception Code:	c0000005Exception Data:	0000000000000008OS Version:	6.3.9600.2.0.0.256.72Locale ID:	3081Additional Information 1:	65a7Additional Information 2:	65a7c5e0a90c68dd1e5f432070a10ca8Additional Information 3:	2741Additional Information 4:	274119ae97de42f64cceec128d17f297Extra information about the problemBucket ID:	9b9e068552e6cfc7a76eb733ee083613 (-308058731)

[NoelC]

DWM restarted itself again at 18:42 this evening, while I was at dinner.

http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/DebugRestart24Nov1842.log

As far as I can tell nothing is harmed or interrupted by this; just the dwm.exe window remains visible. I have yet to see it happen while I'm actually using the computer, though.

Edit: I didn't notice before - It left this minidump.dmp file behind: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/temp/minidump.zip

-Noel

Edited November 27, 2013 by NoelC

[Windows8RTMUser]

ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity does not work

[shelter]

ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity does not work

It does, set it to something like 70.

[Windows8RTMUser]

I tried it on both HKLM & HKCU

[MrGRiM]

ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity does not work

Did you set the image path to the reflection image in the registry as well?