#5 Fast shift between virtual desktops results in orange highlights on the taskbar

[Glenn]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for an amazing program!

When you shift between virtual desktops too fast, some of the icons in the taskbar begin to flash orange. The orange flashing don't stop before to you return to the virtual desktop of the corresponding window.

It is not clear that VirtualDesktopGridSwitcher not is responsible for this behaviour. However, it is quite annoying and a way to stop the appearance of these orange markings would therefore be very nice.

Kind regards,
Glenn

[Simon Liddington]

You are very welcome.

Yes, it is very annoying and I have tried to stop it doing this but failed. There are supposed to be some settings in the windows registry that set timeouts for this but they haven't worked since windows 7! What happens is as you go through a desktop without stopping it activates a window on that desktop which then flashes to say it is active when you get to the next one.

I also want to fix this and have some ideas which I plan to try in the near future.

One thing that may reduce this a little is turning off the default browser activation if you use chrome or firefox - especially if you go a little slower so it has time to fully activate the last active window before moving on;-)

Simon

[Glenn]

Dear Simon,

I also tried the registry changes but whitout sucess. But thanks for the advice, I will give it a try.

/Glenn

[Simon Liddington]

Hey Glenn, good news!

I just uploaded version 2.2.3.0 which should fix this. Let me know what you think.

It defocuses the active window before switching to the next desktop and this seems to solve the problem

[Glenn]

Great! I will give it a try and return after a few days when I have testet it.

[Glenn]

I can confirm that the problem definitly is reduced and the speed you need to shift between the desktops for the orange flasthed to occour are increased. However, under my normal use, orange flashes still occour from time to time.

[Simon Liddington]

Yes, I still get the odd one too but can't go fast enough to do it by switching - I do sometimes get it jumping back to a previous desktop - I think I might need to buffer switches to avoid this i.e. detect 2 switches in a row and just jump directly instead of via the intermediate desktop.

There are some cases where it is legitimate - it's supposed to indicate a window which has finished some operation you asked for but is not allowed to or not necessary to steal the focus from the current active window.

[Vernon Mauery]

I have a 3x2 grid and I see the orange highlights every time I switch past one workspace to another. I have hotkeys set up for left, right, up, and down workspace via "ctrl-alt-(up/down/left/right)". To go from workspace 2 to workspace 6 (right then down), I press ctrl-alt and then while holding those, I press right and then down in rapid succession before letting up on ctrl-alt. Like I said, this causes a highlight on the taskbar every time using version 2.3.3.0. Well, almost. It seems that some apps are more likely to blink than others. Calculator and Lync do not ever blink for me. But Outlook, Foxit, and Chrome do every time.

[Simon Liddington]

Hi Glenn and Vernon,

Version 2.4.0.0 hopefully puts this all to bed finally.

Please let me know either way.