c2walter

Join Date 01/2009

OD 1.9 Issues

Hello.

Help would be appreciated. I just installed the latest version of OD. So far so good but I have found two issues that I cannot find a resolution to.

1) I have set the effect to "swing" but on my XP SP2 box, this does not seem to work. The other effect works fine. Interestingly enough, on my XP SP3 box at home, it does work correctly.

2) On the same XP SP2 box, I cannot simply add an icon to the OD panel. I thought that this was allowable and iirc that is the way I first populated the panel. I hear tell of a switch to lock the panel but I cannot find it to verify whether it is switch on or not.

Thank you.

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Philly0381

Join Date 11/2004

+844

Is this ObjectDock or ObjectDock Plus?

If plus, Zoomer or Tabbed Dock?

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Not Plus; just OD.

Thanks.

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Philly0381

Join Date 11/2004

+844

Other then one computer has SP2 and the other SP3 are there any other programs that might be interferring with OD on the SP2 computer? In other words is there a program on the SP2 computer that is not on the SP3 computer? I wouldn't think that the Service Pack would be the problem.

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Thank you for responding. I understand your question but, with all due, respect, it is impossible to answer that question fully. Aside from the difference in ServicePacks, the machines are vastly different. But the fact that one has Photoshop installed on it and the other has Altova XMLSpy but not vice versa should, to my thinking, not necessarily have any relevance to why one feature works on one machine and that same feature does not on the other machine. As to the possibly interaction with OD, how would I even know? That is why I am here asking !!

As to your statement that the SOPs have nothing to do with this, it seems too premature. Service Packs could change the underlying services and features available to the programs residing on it and a some publishers rely on that difference. Photoshop, in upgraing to CS4, requires SP3 and will not install on SP2.

My impression was that, in spite of the cost difference OD was a supported product as well. Finding the answer to my questions, for a knowledgable support staff, should not be that difficult at all and if it is a difference between OD and OD+ that I am encountering, that should be well known and trivial to answer. Also, telling a user that he/she must uninstall and re-install an application (which I have read about in this forum) when the CS agent doesn't know the answer to an issue is always a cop-out and almost always betrays a CS agent's lack of knowledge on his product rather than the increasingly rare situations were systemic conflicts require a do-over.

Thanks again for you help.

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Philly0381

Join Date 11/2004

+844

Just so you know, I'm a user of the software just as yourself. The community members try to assist others if we can.

It sounds then what you need to do is email support@stardock.com and start a ticket I would include a link to this thread and let them know what actions you have taken to trouble shot and fix the problem.

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Thak you for your reply. And I do understand that you are a user such as myself. I have been participating in forums such as this for a very, very long time.

Your suggestion with respect to emailing the support staff seems to be spot on since it apppears that they are not chiming in on this thread. It has been my experience that support offered through these forums are much more efficient in disseminating information to all users than dealing directly with support one-on-one. After all, I did search this forum to see if my problem had already been posted and resolved before I bothered anyone with my trivial foibles.

Thanks again.

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ZubaZ

Join Date 11/2001

+917

Hi.

In this case while support is the logical next step I think it's fairly likely that the problem is somethng local to your PC and that a reinstall might fix whatever issue there is.

The problem you are describing is not common and is even unique to only one PC.

In regards to support following this thread . . we all do our best to keep up but there are a lot of threads. And while I had looked in on this one in particular, I thought philly was asking good questions. Oftentimes one customization app will conflict with another.

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Hi Zubaz.

Thank you for your comments. And of course you are right. The thing is (and you have no way of knowing this) but I am a computer professional and have been in the business since 1971. After the problem arose, I certainly uninstalled the application, made sure that it was a copmplete wipe in both the file system and the registry and reinstalled it again. My first inclination (and this is just me) is that I did something wrong and I try to correct it.

As to the problem I am having, I defer to you when you say it is not common. I did search the fora to see if this existed before and could find no mention. This does not mean that the problem does not exist; just that it has never been reported before. However, the symptoms I am describing deal with specific areas of the application and I need to know what mechanisms are in play in those areas so I can determine why they are not functioning. To me, the first obvious discussion point were the different Service Packs. Both machines I am dealing with are development workstations with gaggles of small, medium and large applications installed.

Truth be told, trying to determine whether OD is incompatible in a system running SnagIt, for example, XmlSpy or various versions of Visual Studio is a thankless task which I will not, can not, undertake. As the last belle to the ball, if OD does not work, it will be discarded and another application (albeit one not as nice or useful) will be used. OD seems to be a useful tool, certainly woth the pittance that is being asked for it and woth my spending some time trying to get it straight. If I unwittingly discover a "feature" that the authors didn't mean or want to include, the better for all of us.

Lastly, and I base this on over 40 years in programming, in this day and age, if one customization app conflicts with another (especially if they are not dealing with the same features or services) one or both are sloppily written and should not consider itself a viable commercial product.

But I will get off my soapbox now and thank you for your comments.

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Just as an addendum, I believe that I have an answer to my two issues....and came up with a third.

The switch I was looking for that prevented me from dragging object onto OD is nowhere in the OD Properties dialog box. It seems to live solely on the Right-Click menu and is only accessable if you Right-Click on an area on the dock where there are no icons. Someone did not spec out the feature before they started coding, methinks.

As for the fact that the swing effect does not work, I think that I have figured that out as well. It seems that the issue involves intself, not with the outside world, but with the items in the Properties box entitled background an the Appearance tab. Selecting a certain background motif and/or heightening the level of transparency of that motif both contibute to the failure of the swing effect. For certain backgrounds, like Glass Bent or Glass Copper, the effect does not work at all. For others, the effect works but if you raise the transparency to full, the effect ceases to function. My supposition is that the coding for the Swing effect tries to determine when the mouse moves from the background of the dock over one of the icons. If the background is transparent, as in the glass backgrounds, the code does not look to what is seen through the dock to see the transition between non-icon to icon; it just does nothing. This says more about quality assurance testing than anything else but I will leave it alone.

As to my new issue, I dragged two icons onto the dock. One was for Visual Studio 2005 and the other was for Visual Interdev, an earlier version of the same application. Both have the save executable name but arise from different locations on the file system. On the desktop, they have similar shaped but different colored icons. On OD, the icon representations are the same. If I change just one, both change. I conclude that the application is using the name of the executable to identify a docked item rather than any other means. Therefore, if one wanted to load three different versions of a program (that could possibly do three widely different things) and one had the captioning turned off, there would be no way to differentiate between the three. A minor bug to be sure but a bug nevertheless.

Thank you for reading.

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ZubaZ

Join Date 11/2001

+917

I'll forward the three issues to the dev. Thanks for the thourough report.

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