7+ Taskbar Tweaker is ten years old today!

Exactly ten years ago, 7 Taskbar Tweaker v1.0 was released (changelog).

Five years ago we remembered how the first version looked and where it all started. This time, there are two presents for the occasion:

Happy birthday!

Posted in Software, Updates by Michael (Ramen Software) on September 30th, 2019.
Tags: ,

36 Responses to “7+ Taskbar Tweaker is ten years old today!”

  1. VEG says:

    Hooray! Thank you for all this work. It advances usability of Windows to next level.

  2. Dagni says:

    I have been using it for years. It’s one of the best tools in the universe. Thank you so much for keeping it up and for everything RaMMicHaeL!

  3. parmentier says:

    quand je lance le logiciel il me marque impossible de charger la bibliothèque et aucune fonctionnalité fonctionne ! que faire

  4. Adee says:

    Wow, 10 years already. I’ve put off upgrading Windows partly because of the stupid taskbar redesign by Microsoft. I’ve held on to Windows XP as long as I could, and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker made the leap bearable. I’m glad it also worked in Windows 10.

    I would almost never touch a Windows machine without 7+ Taskbar Tweaker installed. Thank you for your great work and fast update (stupid KB4517211 update).

    I wish I could thank you in person.

  5. Kriss says:

    I would like to thank you as well. I woke up today and started going insane trying to find my programs and windows in the task bar. I really could not live without this app. Thank you so much for all your hard work all these years.

  6. anon says:

    Open sourcing it is a great news!

    I hope you’ll fully open source it, as well as 7+ Taskbar Numberer, the day you don’t feel like maintaining these anymore. 😉

  7. Anon says:

    I really appreciate your work which makes my and probably so many other lifes a tiny bit easier every day! Greetings from NRW 🙂

  8. Andy says:

    Any chance to make it fully open source? This would strengthen the project by offering other people possibility to contribute.

    You shouldn’t be worried about cloning the app, it wouldn’t make any sense moreover that sort of C source code is a disaster to support without the author.

    • For now, I don’t plan to release the complete source code. People still have the possibility to contribute to most functionality, being limited by testing and debugging on Windows 7. Not perfect, I know, but not impossible either.

  9. Great upgrades. Donation made. Many thanks for all your W10 work!

  10. Nor Treblig says:

    I’m glad this tool exists!
    Have you considered using Patreon?

    • No. In fact, while I’ve heard of Patreon, I’m not really familiar with it. What are its advantages comparing to a donation option like the one I provide?

      • Nor Treblig says:

        For me as a “patron” (donator) I can easily make automatic monthly donations.
        The big advantage is that I and other patrons can support many different patreons using rather small individual donations.
        E.g. I can support 100 different ones with $1 each, but since they are paid monthly at once there won’t be all those per-transaction-fees I would get with individual transactions.
        The same applies to the patreon (creator), if there are 100 patrons the patreon will receive the money as a single transaction.

        Patreon also provides other additional services which are useful especially for content creators (art, YouTube videos etc.), but those won’t really apply to you.

        You can have different patron tiers. You can send them messages and give all patrons or some at specific tier levels e.g. early access to content (could be art or beta versions in your case), or it could be exclusive content.
        Instead of a monthly subscription model you can also use a per-content one, e.g. web-comic creators can create comics in irregular intervals and patrons only pay when there is a new one released.

        For me this platform makes it easy to support a lot of people.
        Disadvantage of course is, that they take a percentage for providing their services.

  11. Pablo says:

    Hey congratulations for having reached all this way with this amazing project! Please keep on it as it is a must have for all of us.

    Just need to say that on build 19013 the only version of 7TT that works is 5.7.0.4 beta. Any newer version fails to load.

    Thanks!!

    • Thanks for the feedback.

      Just need to say that on build 19013 the only version of 7TT that works is 5.7.0.4 beta. Any newer version fails to load.

      There shouldn’t be a difference between v5.7.0.4 and the latest v5.8.0.2, at least on Windows 10 20H1. I did a quick check, and both load when all of the options are off, but crash on some options (I saw “don’t group” causes a crash). I’ll look into fixing it.

    • Please try the newly released v5.8.0.3 beta. I didn’t test it thoroughly, but I think I fixed the most incompatibility aspects and most options should work.

  12. wszhao says:

    Congratulations! IT‘s the first time i got here。
    I’ve just known 7+,for the function that can caprate excel in the bar and Adjust the order(many excel Windows are needed at work ),IT works!

  13. Michał says:

    Hi! Any plans to update 7+ to work with W10 May20? Most useful tool I ever found stopped working after upgrade 🙁

  14. Gaurav says:

    I remember the first version for Windows 7 in late 2009. I was miserable on Windows 7 due to the horrific taskbar changes and no one at Microsoft listening to anything. First I had discovered Classic Shell, then started working with Ivo myself to evolve it. And a few days later, 7TT (as it was called). I have saved most of the versions ever since: https://i.imgur.com/VZy5Rj0.jpg

    Thank you for releasing the source code for the older version. It will be educational for others.

    • Great collection! Actually, a couple of years after the tweaker’s birth, I realized that it would be nice to keep previous versions for reference. I started keeping the versions I release, and got some old versions from various places online, but some are still missing. From your screenshot, I don’t have the following: 1.5, 1.5.1, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1. If you can upload them somewhere, that would be nice.

      And I’m wondering what inject.dll patch.txt contains 🙂

      • Gaurav says:

        Gladly! I uploaded the versions you requested here: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvOMnbjzo1eEkwmnIrfe5Hx39F63?e=SVUjS7 (I think 1.6 32-bit is missing. I must have forgotten to download it then. Sorry about that).

        The inject.dll patch.txt just contains instructions from you about what bytes need to be patched to restore the button animation when a taskbar app is launched (you had briefly removed it before it was introduced as an official advanced option, and another set of instructions for bytes to patch for restoring minimize ability to Taskbar Inspector for windows that normally can’t be minimized).

        Let me know if I should upload or email you any other version you may have deleted as they are just 30 MB total. I wish I had kept all the versions for 7+TN too 🙂 The latest one causes some exception error in Explorer.exe on my Windows 10 1803 Enterprise when logging off/restarting Windows. I am stuck on this old version of Windows 10 because of a multi-monitor bug in all later releases of 10 and 11 that causes the wrong maximized window to be closed if using multiple-monitors and System/System Enhanced DPI scaling (it’s a major productivity issue for me. Since I lose unsaved work every time the wrong window (using App DPI scaling) behind the focused one (using System DPI scaling) is accidentally closed by Windows with the X button) if I click the top right corner (Fitts’s law of usability for corners).

        • Great, thanks!

          Let me know if I should upload or email you any other version you may have deleted

          I have the following versions, and everything that’s newer: 1.1, 1.5 (*), 1.5.1 (*), 1.6 (* x64), 1.7, 1.8.2, 2.0, 2.1 (*), 2.1.7, 3.0, 3.0.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2.1, 3.3, 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.4, 3.4.1, 3.4.2, 3.4.3

          Versions marked with (*) were just added thanks to you 🙂 If you have other versions that are not listed, I’ll be happy to get them.

          I wish I had kept all the versions for 7+TN too 😉 The latest one causes some exception error in Explorer.exe on my Windows 10 1803 Enterprise when logging off/restarting Windows.

          Unfortunately, I don’t keep these, too.

          Can you provide the details of the crash report? Perhaps I can fix it. You can find the crash report in the Event Viewer. Look here for instructions: How do I find event logs when a program crashes?

          • Gaurav says:

            Hi. I managed to capture the error from the Event Log and a screenshot too of the error (it appears only on Shutdown/Restart, never on Exit Explorer or restarting Explorer.exe):

            Application: Explorer.EXE
            Framework Version: v4.0.30319
            Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
            Exception Info: exception code c0000005, exception address 00007FFD80563924
            Stack:

            https://i.imgur.com/fqeO0dl.jpg

            As soon as I remove 7+ Taskbar Numberer from my Windows startup, the error goes away. Let me know if I should provide any more info.

            • The crash happens while trying to remove a hook from one of the functions. It’s most probably a conflict with another program that customizes explorer. Perhaps you can find which by trying to disable some of them and checking when the crash happens and when it doesn’t.

              On the 7+ Taskbar Numberer’s side, there’s not much I can do, except perhaps not unload it in case explorer is shutting down anyway. And I don’t think old versions ever behaved differently in this regard.

              • Gaurav says:

                I tried to troubleshoot but couldn’t determine which programs it conflicts with even if I shut down every app and service running at startup. Anyway, I found 7+TN 10.1.0.0 on one of my older PCs and there is no crash or error with it. But with 10.2.0.0 or 10.2.3.0, there is a crash. Also I observed that when right clicking the 7+TN icon in the tray, it sometimes crashes Explorer. I use this app with the -hidewnd -v5 parameters. Is there a way to capture a dump when Explorer.exe crashes so it can be analyzed – how to do that for 7+TN?

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