Too many bugs/problems, no way to turn it off, having to uninstall.

from Stardock Forums

I was excited to see Groupy announced but for me it's just not working well or properly. I appreciate it's in Beta, but I've had too many bugs and problems in the first hour that I'll just have to give up.

Can't find a "Quit" anywhere even after a restart, guess I'll have to dig into Sysinternals' Autoruns to actually turn it off, but think uninstall might be best until this is out of beta.

I'll stay for the moment with TidyTabs which does the same thing and works (for the moment) much better (for me at least).

My system is a well established Win7 Ultimate install, still running just fine since 2010 despite all the stuff that's been thrown at it in all those years! Also running Stardock's WindowBlinds (Sabertooth Mac Skin), Fences, WindowFX, ObjectDock

A quick run down of what I spotted:

  1. On initial grouping of my first two windows I saw a message that said something like "Can't group with a Window that's not responding", tried it the other way around by altering which window I'd drop on the other, but same message. The windows were fine and working and they did combine,
  2. Grouping Thunderbird and Chrome browser didn't work well, tabs set to be "above" yet Chrome kept wanting to be "below", as did Opera and Vivaldi, all three clashing with the tabs or whatever (those three are totally excluded in WindowBlinds). Thunderbird was the only one that worked/moved its tab above when clicked on.
  3. Groupy's  settings window always goes under my grouped Thunderbird and Chrome group when the settings are opened (instead of being visible!).
  4. When the tabs are set to be "above" (when they actually do so!), a long translucent continuation of that tabbed bar goes all the way along to the right edge of the program (obscuring things unnecessarily).
  5. No systray icon, can't turn it off at startup in settings, no way to deactivate.
  6. The setting to turn off the dots menu (to the right of tabs) didn't seem to work.

Didn't try any other programs, the problems I read of Adobe menus not showing worries me.

Hope you get things working better, I love what Stardock has done to graphically make my system nicer so I'm looking forward to seeing what Groupy becomes in the future but it must have a way to quit it (at startup as well as quick quitting) before I try it again.

Many thanks.

groupy
4,884 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Were you running the latest version of WindowBlinds as that may well have been causing some problems if not.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

Issue 4 on your list is not an issue, the translucent bar is added automatically by default, but you can disable this by clicking the colours... dropdown and unticking the option for that.

The issue with positioning of tabs is highly likely to have been caused by excluding those from WindowBlinds.  Groupy was detecting WB but not always taking into account if the window was excluded from WB.

Issue 6 looks to be linked to using WindowBlinds too.  The setting is designed to hide the button but still make it function on mouseover.  But with WB running in combine mode the background for it is still painting.

The not responding message means the window did not respond in the expected time frame.  It may be that once this has been shown on a window it is not always refreshing the message next time, but the message was accurate the first time it showed.

I would like to think the bulk of your issues with be addressed with the next update.

SoundPackager - Customize the Windows sound scheme
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Thanks for the replies.

Just for the record, I believe I do have the latest WindowBlinds installed:

Windows 7 Ultimate (7601.win7sp1_ldr.170913-0600)
WindowBlinds 10.65 (048 - Windows 7 Edition) - 64 bit OS
Window titlebar blur features are enabled on this operating system
        Wblind.dll                2017/09/05 14:42:33
        Wblind64.dll              2017/09/05 14:42:00
        Wbsrv.dll                2017/03/28 13:53:46
        WB10Config.exe            2017/09/05 14:42:09
        Wbload.dll                2017/09/14 20:51:13
        Screen10.exe              2017/03/28 13:53:17

 

I wonder what that message about Titlebar blur features being enabled means? - I hate blurr/aero/translucency and as far as I know and can check I have all that turned off.

 

With regard to the WB excluded browsers causing the issue in Groupy that I see, enabling them to use WB skinning never seems to be an option, they just become problematic due to the way they do their own thing with title bars and all sorts of visual glitches occur. Maybe it's an effect of the WB titlebar blur? Vivaldi may not be suffering but I excluded it the other day because of some weird flashing message I was getting on the top bar (it didn't stop after WB exclusion), but certainly Opera and Chrome suffer with WB enabled on them. All in all though, if Groupy can't handle WB excluded programs it doesn't seem much use - The TidyTabs I currently use for tabbed programs works on everything for me and is easy to use with no issues at all across all my three screens.  

Will you be adding an option to Groupy so that it can be quit/not started on boot? Should I be able to see and icon for it in systray? I'm not sure how I'd get back to settings if I did manage to disable the dots menu to the right of the tabs as this seems to be the only way to interact with Groupy. 

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

Groupy also has its own start menu entry for the config and as I say you cannot actually ever disable the dots.  They can be made to hide, but will show on mouseover regardless intentionally.

The WB issue seems to be a particular issue on Windows 7 where the WB build doesn't work quite the same as on Windows 8/10.  This is being addressed for the next Groupy update to detect that version correctly.

For the system tray entry, this is likely to be an option soon.