As some forum members have noticed, it's been awhile since I've had a chance to read the forums or work on StrokeIt. I'm not dead, and I thank everyone for their concern.
Although StrokeIt is a very stable and feature rich program, there are two issues which affect its performance under Vista and I hope we can come up with a solution to at least one of them.
1) Line drawing is slow and choppy if you're using anything anything above Vista Basic and have Aero enabled. Obvious workaround: turn off line drawing.
2) If you have UAC enabled, Vista will not allow SI to control protected programs. This is exactly how Vista security is designed to behave. Obvious workaround: turn off UAC if you need to control protected programs.
Problem 1 arises because Microsoft redesigned the way that programs interact with the screen. The simple breakdown is that rather than having all of the windows share one "page" which they can each modify, Vista puts each window on it own individual "page" and then pastes each of them onto the visible desktop. Because Vista has each window on a separate page, it has the ability to do all of those pretty effects that we all love. Unfortunately, this means that there is no "main page" that SI can draw its lines on. There is some rough backwards compatibility for drawing lines the old way, but as all StrokeIt users have noticed, it's completely unusable.
Problem 2 is a design issue in Vista. With UAC enabled, there are different levels of programs, and a lower-level program cannot modify a higher-level program. Arguably, it would be possible to rewrite StrokeIt so that it runs in a higher level and is able to modify all programs in the system, but because StrokeIt is able to do anything to any window it would be opening up a huge security hole and making StrokeIt a vector for targeted attacks. Users who aren't concerned about security can turn off UAC, the rest of us will just have to live without being able to use SI in certain applications.
I've taken a quick look at how Aero draws windows, but I haven't had the time to come up with a way to draw lines in an efficient manner. If anyone here has experience with line drawing in Vista, I would love to hear from you.
Thanks again for all the concern,
-- Jeff
