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Aero Glass for Win8.1 RTM RC3


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AERO GLASS for Win8.1 Release Candidate 3

  • Fixes for occasional blur glitches
  • Fixed bug that settings was not sometimes loaded
  • Modified settings to allow adjusting composited (mode 3) glow effect size: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM:TextGlowMode (DWORD): HIWORD specifies glow size (0 = theme default), LOWORD specifies glow mode
  • Some other small fixes

Thanks for the update, I am a bit confused by this TextGlowMode (DWORD): HIWORD and LOWORD value though, how do we set that in the registry?

mrgrim, after he answers that will it be added to the configurator?

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AERO GLASS for Win8.1 Release Candidate 3

  • Fixes for occasional blur glitches
  • Fixed bug that settings was not sometimes loaded
  • Modified settings to allow adjusting composited (mode 3) glow effect size: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM:TextGlowMode (DWORD): HIWORD specifies glow size (0 = theme default), LOWORD specifies glow mode
  • Some other small fixes

Thanks for the update, I am a bit confused by this TextGlowMode (DWORD): HIWORD and LOWORD value though, how do we set that in the registry?

mrgrim, after he answers that will it be added to the configurator?

I was going to try but I need to figure out how I can make it work using vbscript in the HTA

At the moment for setting the glow type I have this:

Sub SetTextGlowModeSet oReg=GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv")strKeyPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM"oReg.CreateKey HKEY_CURRENT_USER,strKeyPathstrValueName = "TextGlowMode"dwValue = InputBox("Text Glow Mode (0=No glow effect, 1=Glow effect loaded from atlas, 2=Glow effect loaded from atlas and theme opacity is respected, 3=Composited glow effect using your theme settings)", "Text Glow Mode", "")If dwValue = "" then dwValue = "" End IfoReg.SetDWORDValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER,strKeyPath,strValueName,dwValueEnd Sub
But I don't know how I can set a LO and HI value with it that way, I would prefer it if there was just the old DWORD value for TextGlowMode and a new DWORD value for TextGlowSize, that would make it simple for everyone I think Edited by MrGRiM
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I got this message "ERROR: cannot create a file when that file already exists" while installing RC3. I had already ended aerohost.exe and dwm.exe, deleted minidump.dmp, debug.log, moved symbols folder out of the Aeroglass folder and left licence.key as is then copied the RC3 files over the RC2 files. There is nothing in the new debug.log to say which file gave the error. RC3 was working when install.bat completed but I decided to reboot because of this error but nothing appears broken.

Edited by DrStrange
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I got the same error with RC2. It seems like you didn't properly uninstall Aero Glass before you tried to install a newer version or the same version to another location. It took me a long time to figure out that the Batch file which installs AeroGlass also creates a scheduled task called "Aero Glass" which must be deleted manually with the task scheduler before installing any version of Aero Glass when you don't want to install it to exactly the same location as the first instance was installed.

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Hello Bigmuscle,

Sorry then for asking them again.

It could be maybe a good idea to have the most frequent questions answered in the first topic.

In the meanwhile, i will check all the pages of this topic.

Those questions have be answered million-times in this topic.

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I looked into the glow behavior and there is indeed a difference between RC2 and RC3:

I don't longer need to set the glow size value at two locations in the theme. Setting it at "Windows & Caption Buttons > Aero > Window" suffices. However, that's not enough to enable glow. The glow intensity has to be set, too. And here it's currently still necessary to do it at two locations (the former path + "Fonts, Colors, & System Metrics > Colors (Globals)"). The glow color is only set at one location (the latter path). As the official Microsoft themes currently have the color (white) properly set, I don't currently see a reason to be able to change this color with Aero Glass. But it would definitely make sense to be able to change the glow intensity the same way as the glow size, because those values work in tandem.

You could simply split the glow mode setting even further (first byte for intensity, second byte for size) or just use two additional settings to set size and intensity. The first approach would limit the values to a maximum of 255, which seems to be enough for intensity but could theoretically be higher. Or you use the first two bytes for intensity and the third one for size. But if it's really that difficult for MrGriM to calculate multiple values into one value, it may be better to use three different values in the registry like TextGlowMode, TextGlowSize and TextGlowIntensity.

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Great work. I'll give this a shot, though, I'm not a fan of Windows Vista/7 "Glass" cough ...

ps. Microsofts idea of "glass" (imaginary glass - someone at Microsoft never visited a glass manufacturer to see what real glass looks like - glass doens't have "rounded" corners, glass is tempered which then is shaped to have round edges due to the laminate and heat added to the product which adds strength properties, but then as all glass manufacturers will say its not "glass" it is "tempered glass" ... there is a ginormous difference!! "glass" is raw and has very sharp defined edges. You can cut an artery on that!)

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Thanks, Marco993. I had forgotten that aerohost.exe is started by a scheduled task so forgot to delete the task (the xml file in %systemroot%\System32\Tasks being the duplicate file).

Edited by DrStrange
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I don't think it's possible to set the DWORD Hi and Lo value using vbscript in a HTA, please BM give the new setting it's own value TextGlowSize.

It should be pretty easy to multiplex two different values into a longword with basic math. Something like...

Longword = FirstShortword * 65536 + SecondShortword

Getting the two back separated should be similarly easy...

FirstShortword = Longword / 65536

SecondShortword = Longword - (FirstShortword * 65536)

I'm not sure whether this addresses what you're struggling with as I haven't been following your work closely.

-Noel

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I'm seeing a problem with captions. Using the Snowy8 theme with dark captions, without aero glass works as intended. However, the moment I launch aero glass all captions except for the explorer one turn white. Why?

edit: it seems it's somehow the theme's fault, default aero theme retains the black captions even with aero glass on.

Edited by Soukyuu
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