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LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Thu May 03, 2018 8:24 pm Post subject: %ww[casts_shadow]

Paul,

I wonder if you could take a quick look at the %ww option casts_shadow
please. I have a clear recollection that in Windows XP it was translucent, but since Windows 7 it has been a very solid black. It's not 'mission critical'.

In Windows 10, the drop shadow disappears when you move the program window but reappears when movement stops. The Window anyway has a sort of translucent drop shadow to which the Clearwin+ shadow is an add-on. Obviously the disappear-reappear business doesn't happen if the window is volatile and has no caption.

Eddie

PaulLaidler · Posted: Fri May 04, 2018 8:38 am Post subject:

Eddie

OK. Thanks. I will take a look.

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Sat May 05, 2018 8:58 am Post subject:

John,

The change happened after XP, and when I have access to an old XP computer I'll try it again. It was originally a lot prettier than it is now, but as I said, it isn't a showstopper.

Eddie

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 9:25 am Post subject:

Thanks John. The disappearing shadow while moving doesn't bother me, but the dense black does - at an aesthetic level. It only crept into one of my programs when pop-up menus didn't work (now fixed), but a volatile, borderless, drop-shadowed, window allows more options than a pop up menu, and so the original workaround stayed.

I suppose XP is 'Windows classic'.

Eddie

PaulLaidler · Posted: Tue May 08, 2018 6:51 am Post subject:

John

Just for the record, I did not write %ww nor indeed a large majority of winio@.

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Thu May 10, 2018 8:32 am Post subject:

I've had another look, and as I'm using the drop shadow with some volatile windows, I can probably draw a translucent grey box offset right and down, before the window itself (written in XOR and removed in the same way), but I still think that the effect with the standard casts_shadow is rather crude. The work-around will be subject to a lot of issues with font size (the dpi business). I may not even need to remove a self-drawn drop shadow as I can simply redraw the underlying screen contents.

In any case, the status quo can be tolerated - I did say it wasn't 'mission-critical' as a hint that I wasn't expecting Paul to drop everything or waste a lot of time on it.

Eddie

PaulLaidler · Posted: Thu May 10, 2018 9:58 am Post subject:

Eddie

I have managed to change the colour of the shadow from black to grey.
It is still rather dark so I have reduced the width of the shadow by 50%.
You get the grey colour when using a white brush so that's the best I can do with the existing coding.

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Thu May 10, 2018 4:15 pm Post subject:

Hi Paul,

THat's great. Thanks.

Regards

Eddie

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Mon May 14, 2018 3:34 pm Post subject:

The Windows XP style is shown here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8bopeqlf1awxa6a/ds.bmp?dl=0

and is a sort of chequerboard pattern. This has the sense of transparency as the background shows through. My memory was broadly correct, but not perfect.

Eddie

EKruck · Joined: 09 Jan 2010 Posts: 224 Location: Aalen, Germany

Under Win7 64 bit %ww[casts_shadow,... creates a nice grey window in the right size, however, in a wrong position 1,1 on screen, and only for a short moment - may be a tenth of a second.

PaulLaidler · Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2019 6:30 pm Post subject:

More recent versions of Windows have messed up the display for this option. I did some work on it and the result was an improvement but not a good fix. If you have the latest version of ClearWin+ that will show the result of the fix.

I am not sure that this option remains useful since more recent versions of Windows already gives you a good shadow.

EKruck · Joined: 09 Jan 2010 Posts: 224 Location: Aalen, Germany

Paul,
my version is 8.40; the DLLs in my directory for my programs are dated Nov. 2018. I do not need a fix; I removed cast_shadow.
Erwin

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:30 am Post subject:

Thanks for the effort Paul.

Some differentiation is required if a window is captionless and volatile, but unnecessary for standard dialogs.

I started using drop_shadow for such things when pop-up menus didn't work with %gr areas, and stuck with them after that was fixed (partly because there wasn't much of a fanfare, but also partly because i found that you could have all sorts of extra things like data entry boxes that you couldn't with a pop-up menu).

The answer might be some other effect than a drop shadow, maybe even a different colour, but a drop shadow is effective - it needs to be denser than a Windows standard drop shadow, but the latest Windows versions render this rather crudely. Perhaps MS don't intend drop shadows to be used and this is their way of telling us.

I suppose that my solution is to experiment.

Eddie

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Sun May 15, 2022 7:50 pm Post subject:

Is it just my imagination, or have drop shadows in CW+ when using Win 10 got even less useful recently?

I found this on the internet:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/Windows.UI.Composition.DropShadow?view=winrt-22000

but as it is dated May 24-26 2022 and today is only May 15, it left me even more confused than MSDN normally does!

Eddie

PaulLaidler · Posted: Sun May 15, 2022 8:48 pm Post subject:

Eddie

cast_shadow is no longer supported and is no longer useful in ClearWin+.

It is native to ClearWin+ and unrelated to the supplied link.