Forums Bug Reports Vista and aero glass

Hey,

I'm not really sure if this can be considered as a bug or not, but I think this is the best place to post this. I tried finding if anyone else had reported this, but couldn't find anything.

I recently upgraded to Vista, and I have the aero glass effect enabled (eg. title bars of windowses have the blurry, transparent effect). This works fine on mIRC when the child windowses (channels, private messages, etc.) aren't maximized, but when they are maximized so that the title bar of the whole client becomes the title bar of the active window, the aero glass effect shortly disappears, and mIRC uses the Vista Basic look.

Would it be possible to have aero glass enabled while still having mIRC's child windows maximized within the client?

Thanks.

While this particular situation may not have been reported, there have been a lot of reports regarding problems between Vista and mIRC. A search for the term Vista will bring up some (or all) of the topics.

This is a bit or a useless troll post, but the plural of window is windows nor windowses. (yeah, im bored, and since it was spelled that way multiple times i assumed it was not a mistype)

On the original subject, could this be caused by the different titlebar update procedures used between a regular titlebar update (rare as it must be user initiated), and one where the child window has to append and refresh all the time.

What happens if you use a script to change the titlebar text periodically (quickly or slowly) using the /titlebar command?

I'm not entirely sure if this is the issue but:

if you maximize a window, the titlebar looses it's aero glass look. I believe this happends to every application you maximize (at least it did with RC1...)

so it might be a feature of vista and not a bug in mIRC?

The glass effect is dropped but the style of aero is kept when maximized. I am not usre how child fullscreen windows are suppose to look tho as there is no examples I know of inside Windows itself.. Maybe I'll install office 2007 and see what it does.

I'm unable to test aero glass currently, however my guess is that mIRC can't influence how Vista applies aero glass features to maximized MDI windows. It may be an intentaional behaviour in the way Vista handles maximized MDI windows or it may be a Vista bug. Does the same thing happen in other MDI based applications?

Right, I was able to test mIRC under Vista with aero glass, however I was not able to reproduce the issue you mention. When I run mIRC under Vista Aero Glass, the mIRC titlebar is translucent as expected. I then maximize windows inside of mIRC, eg. the status window and the mIRC titlebar is still translucent.

Are you able to reproduce this with a new cleanly installed copy of mIRC, and just by maximizing the status window? Or is it only happening in other situations?

I can't seem to reproduce it with a clean install of mIRC. I'll try to find out exactly what causes it on my other client and post if I'm able to figure it out.

Okay it seems that I found out the cause of it. If you maximize the MDI window(s), and switch the active window to a channel with unicode characters in the topic, the translucent effects disappears. This only happens when there's unicode characters in the titlebar, for all other channels/windows with titlebars that didn't contain any unicode characters the bug doesn't happen.

Note. If you set a topic with unicode characters, you have to switch to another window and back before the bug occurs.

unicode chr's did it, i was able to reproduce the issue on vista. it seems that the font of titlebar is also changing, ( not much, but noticeable change of lettering )

That sounds like a bug in Vista rather than mIRC. Vista (or at least Aero Glass) may not be entirely unicode compatible.

I thought about that possibility as well, but Unicode works on title bar in various different webbrowsers, such as IE 7, FF 2 and Opera 9. Just search any Japanese site from Google to verify that.

So I can only assume it's mIRC.

Hm... ok, that could be true, then. Unicode support is still relatively new in mIRC, so maybe the titlebar support isn't ironed out yet.

it can still be vista + midi windows, u'd have to use something that uses the same thing. like word.

Well, I quickly coded a small test app to test that possibility (I don't have Office installed).

Here's the result:


As you can see, works correctly.

yes. and atm mirc wont switch back to aero glass and i dont want to restart it, even the close buttons are in non-aero mode, and stay that way if i stop and start aero. this is soooo odd.

well, i restarted it and did some testing. it seems that if u use /titlebar it wont do it tell you make mirc change the titlebar, like taking a mdi window out of maximize. or setting it while the mdi windows aren't maximized.

Right, that's because mIRC uses it's own custom routines for displaying unicode text in the titlebar, since mIRC is not a unicode application. I'm not sure how easy this will be to resolve. It should be possible if Vista allows access to its theming APIs. Making mIRC custom draw titlebars under XP themes was tricky, so let's hope Vista APIs are better documented...

Seeing as 6.3 still has this issue, is a solution in the workings or should we just get over it for the moment? (Just curious, not trying to be pushy)

I've spent the last day or so looking into this and so far I haven't been able to find a solution. The Vista theming examples I've found indicate that it shouldn't be that difficult, unfortunately no matter how I implement it, Vista always reverts to a non-aero-glass theme. I have fixed a few display glitches though, so it's not all a total loss :-)

When can we expect these fixes to be released? Or better yet, when can we expect mIRC to become real unicode application?

1) Eventually.. mIRC usually has about one release per year, sometimes more. The last one was in November, so statistically speaking, there should be a release within the next few months.

2) Not within the next year at least. mIRC hasn't even started making changes to the underlying scripting engine which is *completely* unicode unaware, and the script support features far outnumber the UI features. It will be a gradual change, but for the most part Unicode should be at least *usable* by now.

Fixes are released whenever mIRC's next version is release.

And having mIRC become a fully unicode application is not a simple matter. Don't expect it to be fully unicode anytime soon. More likely, it will be at LEAST 1-2 years before it is fully unicode. That doesn't mean improvements won't come in the meantime.

This bug still there in mIRC 6.32.

It seems that there is no easy solution to this bug, as Khaled himself wrote in this thread about 9 months ago. This probably won't be fixed until mIRC goes completely natively unicode, since that's the heart of this issue and is likely the only real solution. Assuming Khaled exhausted all options, it seems as though Vista does not expose enough API to do anything about this specific issue. Frankly, I would say that this is really a Vista bug, not an mIRC bug since there is no real reason why it would revert to a non-aero theme in this situation (edit: It may not be logical, but Microsoft may have intentionally changed the way to custom draw the titlebar in Vista).

edit:
Perhaps some references on the issue might help K find a solution, since others have indeed had this problem and (I assume) solved it:
http://www.ureader.com/msg/14721474.aspx

how hard can it be to use iconv to convert all window titles to utf-16 on win >= 5.1

hello ^^

isn't it possible to desactivate the unicode in the titlebar, or simply desactivate the display of the channel's topic in the titlebar, in order to have the Aero glass again ?

thank you