Archives

The send later queue manager

A new feature that has been dormant in TabSRMM 3 for a while is now complete enough to be ready for some basic testing.

Unattended send framework

It allows you to send messages, which cannot be delivered immediately for whatever reason, delayed and automatically. It is also used to re-implement the multisend ability which was available in TabSRMM 2 in a slightly different and hopefully more reliable way.

The WIKI article describes it with a bit more detail and you really should read it before using the feature. My advice is to use it only for testing and not for important messages at this time - this is fairly new and there are possible issues lurking under the hood.

Also, it is not yet complete - a few minor things are missing, mainly better integration into the existing message window UI and a service API for developers. I'm still considering to move the entire thing into a independent plugin so that it could be used without the need to install TabSRMM as your message window plugin.

Availability

This is available, beginning with version 3.0.0.26 (not yet released - there will be a separate announcement).

Update for the switch bar

New build and this one has, surprise, surprise, a new feature. Two new switch bar layouts were added. They provide larger buttons and can therefore show the avatar. Both vertical and horizontal buttons are available.

Please not that the switch bar is still not complete. It misses a few features, like drag & drop reordering of buttons or a context menu like you can find on the normal tabs.

In skinned mode, the switch bar drawing was slightly improved and there is a new skin item for the switch bar background. Some minor visual glitches are still possible with the switch bar in skinned mode.

Other noteworthy changes in this build

• fixed possible crash when AVS plugin was not installed
• fixed problem with info panel configuration dialog popping up after right-clicking a link in the message log (this only happened, when the info panel was disabled).
• attempt to fix a few rare drawing errors in the tab control

As always with TabSRMM 3, the build should be considered ALPHA quality.

Download from my googlecode site

Switched to Visual Studio 2010

Effective by April, 20 2010, I've switched from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010 to maintain the projects for TabSRMM 3 and. Other projects like clist_nicer will follow.

The new project files are:

• tabsrmm_10.sln - solution file
• tabsrmm_10.vcxproj - the project file

All other project files should be considered deprecated with the exception of the Visual C++ 6.0 projects (.dsw/.dsp files) which are maintained for the x86 ANSI and UNICODE builds.

Read more...

Obviously, still an alpha/preview quality build. Some things are missing. Development goes slow for recent weeks, but eventually, it should get there. The build can be considered feature-complete (no other major additions for TabSRMM 3), but not all features are completely implemented and working.

Both versions are compiled with the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 toolset (but using Visual Studio 2010), so you need the runtime, as always. There is no ANSI build for this test release and TabSRMM 3 will no longer run on Windows 9x. Windows XP is the minimum supported operating system, but it should work on Windows 2000.

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I have uploaded new alpha builds of TabSRMM 3 to my Googlecode site. Only Unicode builds are available at this time, for both 32- and 64bit Windows. The builds are compiled with Visual C++ 2008 and come with debug symbols (.pdb format).

If your Miranda cannot load it, you are probably missing the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 runtime.

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I've put a new article into the Wiki which describes, in detail, the available options to format the title bar of a TabSRMM message window. People have been asking frequently and this wasn't documented anywhere for any recent version of the plugin.

So here is the link. The information is current for development builds of TabSRMM v3 and not all variables are available in the older versions. Especially %t and %T are new.

Some updates regarding skins

In TabSRMM 3 the way to choose a skin has changed somewhat. Previously, you had to select the .TSK file from a normal file selection dialog and it was possible to have skins in any possible folder location. Because this can cause quite a few problems with relative path names, I've changed this behavior in TabSRMM 3. Read more...

Aero support in TabSRMM

Aero UI

One of the bigger new features in TabSRMM 3 is its ability to use Windows Aero for some UI elements. Like you can see in the screenshot, some areas of the message window can obtain the typical transparent look when running under Windows Vista or Windows 7 with the Aero theme enabled.

The Aero Glass UI is clearly better than the somewhat bulky and not very pretty standard UI in Windows XP. Whether Aero is useful or not is debatable, but it does look attractive and gives Windows a fresh and clean UI design.

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TabSRMM Version 3

Development for TabSRMM Version 3 has started quite a while ago and is currently still in an early stage. There have been 1000's of changes in the code and while the major rewrites are more or less finished, there is still quite a lot of work left.

Version 3 will be quite different from previous versions in many ways. There are a few new features and many changes to existing features. Also, TabSRMM 3 has been optimized and major internal changes will make it work faster while using less resources at the same time.

A few features were removed from the plugin in order to clean the code up and remove redundant or poorly implemented code.

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