The Winstep Nexus dock is a FREE dock for Windows. Every feature you’d expect from a dock, including widgets, mouse-over effects, skins, drag-and-drop, and many others not available in most other docks, such as live icon reflections, in-dock system tray, blur-behind effects, and much more. Completely customizable, with thousands of different backgrounds freely available online, Nexus is fully compatible with skins for all 3rd party docks.

Supported Languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Farsi (Persian), Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brasil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish.

Nexus runs on the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7, 8.x and Windows 10.

v16.5 is a major release, with many changes, additions and fixes. Focus was once again on adding stability improvements, but with even more functionality and eye-candy features thrown in for good measure.

What's New? Highlighted Features:

• Universal (UWP) Windows 10 Apps are now handled like normal Windows applications.

UWP/Universal apps are alien to Windows. They are so different that Winstep applications previously showed a 'generic' box app icon for any running UWP apps.

With v16.6, running UWP apps now show the proper icon, can be pinned to the dock, are properly grouped together, can display a customized icon, and will even show a running indicator when pinned to the dock if the App is running.

In other words, UWP apps are now handled like any other Win32 applications, which makes Nexus the first (and so far the only) dock able to pull this off.

• New Fast Boot startup option.

Enable Fast Boot and Nexus will be there already waiting for you as soon as you see the Windows Desktop. Yes, the difference is that dramatic.

Nexus is a program launcher and a Windows user interface add-on. As such, it should be available to you at the same time as the Windows Desktop.

Unfortunately every version of Windows since Vista has been making 3rd party applications take long and longer to start, and Winstep applications were no exception. This is because the OS is cheating to make itself look better: Microsoft makes Windows deliberately delay the loading of 3rd party applications for the Desktop to be displayed faster - thus giving the ilusion that Windows is booting faster too. And no, we are not making this up.

Why isn't Fast Boot enabled by default? For two reasons:

First, some security applications such as WinPatrol might prompt the user when this option is enabled. This is because the method used to make the Winstep application start faster is sometimes also used by malware to run at Windows startup.

Second, although it has no side-effects, we are using a method which was not designed for this purpose. If every application did the same (and some have a truly misplaced sense of self-importance) we would soon be back to square one.

We therefore feel that this is the type of decision that should be left to the user. The user (NOT the application and NOT Microsoft for them) decides what he wants to boot faster.

• Now compatible with Stardock WindowBlinds themes and Windows color schemes.

Colors on the User Interface of Winstep applications were, until now, hard-coded. Since many Winstep users also run WindowBlinds, this could lead to some unexpected results where the Preference dialogs of Winstep applications would only be partially skinned, sometimes with pretty horrific results.

We're happy to announce this is no longer the case:

Yes, this last WindowBlinds theme hurts our eyes too, but it proves a point.

• Wallpaper hot-track now also works with the Windows 10 wallpaper slideshow.

In the previous release we got the wallpaper hot-track colorization feature working with the Windows 7 wallpaper slide-show. But we goofed up, sort of. Only after the release did we become aware via user feedback that the feature was still having trouble on some Windows 10 systems. All fixed now.

• Many additions and tweaks to the User Interface on high DPI systems.

With ever increasing screen resolutions and the arrival of 4K monitors, high-DPI systems are becoming a lot more common. Version 15.9 added high-DPI support to Winstep applications and since then we have been constantly improving on it to try to make it as perfect as possible.

Among the many User Interface tweaks in this release, which you may or may not notice, is the use of Segoe UI instead of Tahoma when the screen DPI is higher than 100%. Although we feel Tahoma is a still a better choice than Segoe UI when running at 100% DPI, it becomes a bit too bulky (almost as if Bold was enabled) at higher DPIs.

• Effect and other persistent bitmaps moved from the main EXE to separate resource DLLs.

This is not something you will notice now, but you definitely will on the next update as it will reduce the size of future updates by at least half.

• Fixed major potential memory leak introduced in v16.2.

More Information:

Winstep Web Site:
http://www.winstep.net

More information about Winstep Xtreme:
http://www.winstep.net/xtreme.asp

More information about the Winstep Nexus dock/Nexus Ultimate:
http://www.winstep.net/nexus.asp