I've been waiting for a chance to announce this for a very long time now. My pet project of two years, CustomBar, is finally out!

What is CustomBar you might ask? CustomBar is a bar that is always visible, much like the taskbar. Unlike the taskbar, you can put pretty anything you want on it. This is accomplished through a scripting/plugin/skinning system that I dare say is powerful enough to create some basic apps in (additionally the ability to write C++ plugins extends CustomBar's capabilities almost limitlesssly). Here's the bar in action:

http://www.custombar.net/images/screenshots/sa_1.png

CustomBar comes with a whole lot of things that you can put on your bar right from the start. The BarCreator allows you to select from this list and to build up your bar using it. People can also create their own additions that can then be downloaded and added to your bar. The hope is that a large community will grow around user-created add-ons.

http://www.custombar.net/images/screenshots/s5.png

Tour of Several Features

The feature that prompted me to spend two years of my life writing this thing is the Winamp controls. CustomBar began because I wanted to see what song is playing without having to click Winamp in the system tray, look at its display, and then minimize it again. Furthermore, I wanted an easy way to control Winamp and to select music from my song collection. The results:

http://www.custombar.net/images/screenshots/sa_5.png
http://www.custombar.net/images/screenshots/sa_2.png

Another extremely popular feature is the ability to easily search your favorite sites. The search edit box can be right-clicked to display plenty 5 more search boxes.

http://www.custombar.net/images/screenshots/sa_2.png

You can also place system stats, shortcuts to applications, menus of shortcuts, quick recycle bin emptier, buttons that copy templates to the clipboard (highly useful for programmers that paste a comment header to each function ;)), volume controls, shortcuts to special Windows dialogs, a miniature notepad, and lots lots more. You really have to try it to get the full experience. Coincidentally, there's a free time-limited trial at http://www.custombar.net ;)

An insanely long beta testing period (217 days) has shown that people that use their computers a lot quickly suffer withdrawl symptoms when they lose their bar (the beta releases expired, and I didn't always have new ones up in time). Just released the product today, but so far it's doing well.

www.custombar.net

Neat product. I'll dig deeper in to it tomorrow, but I've yet to find my must have reason to switch from what I have now (see attached screenshot). My Task bar with address bar and craploads of icons with winamp floating above everything has done me well for the past several years, but I'll give it a chance. Some initial thoughs:

- Multi-monitor support would be nice, as it likes to stick to my main monitor.
- Being able to drag new icons of programs (shortcuts) in to the "dead" space would be handy
- Curiously I got all 0's for my network usage, and I'm on a LAN downloading through my firewall/router.

Seems pretty neat so far. Just downloaded it. Found a typeo in your help doc

"all in a tiny bar similar to a tasbkar"

I've downloaded it and I'm trying it right now.

One of the first things I noticed is that it took quite a while to load... Maybe it's just the first time after installation.

I don't like the Google Search showing up in an already open window. I would like it to open a new Explorer window and show the search results there. I've gone to the Bar Creator and checked 'Show in New Window,' but it didn't change that behavior.

Also, I think you should be able to move up and down the list of elements in the Bar Creator using the arrow keys.

I also get all zeroes for my network traffic despite being downloading data using my ADSL modem connected to a network card.

Other than those things, I like the bar so far. I'll keep testing it for some time and post my experience.

Originally posted by Night Elf
I don't like the Google Search showing up in an already open window. I would like it to open a new Explorer window and show the search results there. I've gone to the Bar Creator and checked 'Show in New Window,' but it didn't change that behavior.

Oh! So, you need to click 'Launch Bar' for the changes to get applied... I found that out after trying to set other things and getting no response. I strongly believe you should make that automatic.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. The feedback I'm getting from people is overwhelming and at this stage I think it's safe to say there will be many future versions ;)

As for "must have reason" this is different for all people. Personally the Winamp controls, the search box, the web browser with right-click to paste a url, the recycle bin, and the ability to see free hard drive space are what do it for me. Explore and see what fits your fancy. The cool thing about CustomBar is that it's value will increase over time, as more and more people add functionality to CB. It's quite possible your one "omg can't live without" feature isn't available right now, but someone else will make it. People are already having a ball with this stuff and some user-made creations are awaiting posting. If you are an "SA goon" pm me as there's a special prefab for SA.

Regarding the upload/download problems, there's two known issues:

- Doesn't work with XP SP2 at the moment
- Will never work with Win98/WinME

The standard plugins are open source (source is installed by default with the app) so hopefully if I don't find a fix for the SP2 issue someone else will :)

Edit: also having CustomBar instead of a double barred taskbar saves you height, since CB is only 18 pixels high ;)

Some more feedback:

- It does take very long to load. I just thought it was a one time thing, but it isn't.

- It would be nice if the Audio Control wasn't bound to Winamp or any other external program for that matter. I know that wouldn't be too practical as you would have to code a full media player...

- If the Winamp bind is a must, I would prefer if I didn't need to have Winamp running to use the Audio Control. Maybe you could make the Audio Control automatically launch Winamp.

- When I'm running Custom Bar, and run the game I'm working on in full screen mode, when I exit the game all my maximized windows are resized to the size the screen takes when inside the game. (Of course, this doesn't happen when Custom Bar is not running.) Then I have to click once to restore and once to maximize. This makes it impossible for me to use Custom Bar, as I can't waste time restoring all windows each time I run my game in full screen.

That window bug is very strange. Does this happen with other fullscreen software on your computer? It could be some general incompatibility your game and appbars.

This is Microsoft's sample appbar app. Could you run it and see if the same problem occurs with it please?

http://www.lizardsoft.biz/temp/sample.exe

Edit: load time and comp specs would help too.

The bug happens with other full screen games too and also with the MS sample bar.

Custom Bar took 1' 6" 28 to load this third time I ran it, quite a lot IMO. I think it took longer the previous times. I'm using the default skin and controls.

My system specs:

Processor: Pentium III @ 800 MHz
RAM: 256 MB
Video: GeForce FX 5200, 128 MB VRAM
OS: Windows XP Pro (with all patches up to date)

1' 6" 28

I'm not sure I understand this time format? A little help here please :)

If the MS sample bar has the same behavior, I'm afraid there's something about your system that doesn't like appbars. This is the first time I've seen this behavior and unfortunately until I can find more people with the problem I don't think there's much I can do. Do you run any Windows tweaks, have multiple monitors, use the nVidia multiple desktop utility, or anything of that sort?

Originally posted by Lizardsoft
1' 6" 28
I'm not sure I understand this time format? A little help here please :)
1 minute, 6 seconds and 28 hundredths of a second.

Originally posted by Lizardsoft
Do you run any Windows tweaks, have multiple monitors, use the nVidia multiple desktop utility, or anything of that sort?
No, nothing out of the ordinay.

Originally posted by Night Elf
1 minute, 6 seconds and 28 hundredths of a second.


No, nothing out of the ordinay.

WOW. Well can you please attach CustomBar\Logs\CustomBar.log.txt and maybe modules.log.txt?

That is 1 minute, and 4 seconds longer than it takes to load here!

Very nice piece of software! I use WinAMP every day, so I especially like the integrated WinAMP controls. One problem I encountered is that the browser launch button failed to launch the default browser. My default browser is NetCaptor (www.netcaptor.com), yet the browser button on the sample bar launches Netscape instead. However, the Google Search feature correctly launches NetCaptor for the search results. You might want to correct this, since there are other browsers besides just IE and Netscape.

Thanks Steve. Do you have Open in New Window setting set differently for the launch browser and the google search? Also launch browser has two parts:

left-click: opens browser
right-click: opens an address bar that you can type a url to launch

Are both launching Netscape incorrectly?

Here are the logs.

I also included a screenshots of how the bar looks for quite a while when loading. The components appear one by one until it reaches the look you see in the screenshot, then it sits there for a long time.

Originally posted by Lizardsoft
Thanks Steve. Do you have Open in New Window setting set differently for the launch browser and the google search? Also launch browser has two parts:

left-click: opens browser
right-click: opens an address bar that you can type a url to launch

Are both launching Netscape incorrectly?

I haven't changed any settings -- so everything is whatever the defaults are for the sample bar.

Left-clicking on the browser button launches Netscape. I hadn't tried right-clicking until now, but it appears broken. When I right-click on the browser button, I get the little text area where I can type a search term, but when I start typing, I see a whole bunch of garbage characters appear along with the letters I'm typing, as if the text buffer is already full of junk. I can't seem to clear those garbage characters, and when I hit enter, nothing happens except the bar text clears and is replaced with the text "Address Bar." But nothing launches. The Google Search bar still works just fine though. I'm running WinXP Pro with all the latest patches.

Night Elf: I don't see anything other than the modules list being really really long. I forgot to mention that there's a bar log inside of the Bars folder of logs, sorry. That log details every part of the bar loading.

Steve: you've run into the dreaded foreign characters bug :/ For some reason when I enable the auto URL completion on my edit boxes, if someone has certain characters (eg. Japanese) into their address history then strange characters get randomly inserted into the box. I'm guessing it's unicode related but I have no clue how. You could try pasting an address in maybe. I'm going to have to take another stab at fixing it.

Pasting seems to have the same problem -- whatever I pasted gets surrounded by garbage characters. I was able to get it to accept the URL once though, and it did correctly launch NetCaptor.

Also, just something that would be nice to see would be to have the browser launch icon be the icon for the default browser instead of the IE icon. Since I use NetCaptor instead of IE, when I see the IE icon, I expect it to launch IE instead of my default browser. The fact that it actually launches Netscape is even less intuitive. To me the IE icon means Internet Explorer, not "default browser." If you can't capture the default browser icon, you might consider replacing the IE icon with a more generic icon (like a spiderweb for "web"), or at least allow the user to change the icon manually. I couldn't find a way to do this if it's already included.

For now you can hack the icon in (Prefabs folder has all the prefabs, and the .tds files are text files).

My main obstacle to making it use the default browser icon was detecting the default browser reliably. The code I have right now works 98% of the time, but as you saw with NetCaptor, not always. If anyone knows how to do this 100% I'd appreciate the info. The generic icon idea is neat but I think it would confuse users in the long run. Ideally I want it to show the correct default browser icon.

Tomorrow work begins on 1.1, which will hopefully fix a lot of problems and be out in a reasonable time (a month or two, depending how busy I get with running the site).

You should form a venture with Betty's Beer Bar ;)

pat.

Here's that other log file:

patrox - not sure I understand the reference.

nightelf - okay we are making some progress :)

(9:33:55-14496KB) Loading Element #71
(9:34:42-15948KB) Loading Prefab: SystemStats.UpTime:Verbose

That's where your loading time comes from, as well as a large jump in memory use. It appears to be the CPU monitor, which makes this situation even stranger. Perhaps the performance counter, for whatever reason, is taking a long time to initialize.

Thanks for all the info. I'll be sure to keep this in mind if other reports of slow-loading surface.

http://www.download.com/CustomBar/3000-2343-10300434.html?tag=lst-0-1

Finally on download.com :)

i uninstalled custom bar and it doesnt seem to cleanly uninstall. at windows startup it tries to load custom bar fails and says "init.tds cannot load. reinstall recommended' or something like that. how do i cleanly uninstall this?

thanks.

Hmm... that is strange. Did you by any chance attempt to uninstall it while it was still running?

See if CustomBar.exe is still where you installed it. If so, delete it.

Also this might have messed up the uninstall. I fixed up the script a bit so it shouldn't have this problem anymore, I suggest downloading CB again, installing, and then uninstalling.

Don't take this the wrong way, I'm just curious - did you seed the comments on download.com? You only have 46 downloads and 7 comments already, all positive.

No but CB beta had something like 150 testers, so this doesn't surprise me. Some are very passionate about the program. I'm also puzzled by the low download count, since my stats report significantly higher. Does Download.com only count unique downloads? Or maybe it's just that their download counter seems to get incremented only once every 24 hours.

Yeah, it only updates once per day, so you probably have a large-ish jump coming tomorrow...