Skin mode - Laggy UI

Hi,

I've been using FLB and then TLB since late 2005 and I'd like to thank the developers for making such a great product.

Now then, ever since I installed the TLB 4.x beta on my Windows 7 laptop I've noticed that the TLB menu UI is particularly laggy when in skin mode, right now I'm using the stock Windows 7 skin. I've got a menu with 32x32 icons in "Default" view mode (i.e. Icons with Text) and the selection indicator lags behind the cursor pretty obviously when I move the cursor up and down the list. The lag also applies to the icons that appear in the taskbar to open the menus.

When I disable the skin (and use "<default skin>") the menu and icons in the taskbar is snappy and fast.

Today I upgraded to version 5.0, but disappointed to see the slow performance is still there.

I'm not using Aero Glass or transparency (they're both disabled) so there aren't any obvious causes.

I've released True Launch Bar version 5.1 This version must be much faster.

I've released True Launch Bar version 5.1 This version must be much faster.

Thanks, I just upgraded and performance is a lot better. I can still feel a tiny bit of lag compared to no-skin mode, but it's still a lot faster and responsive.

I'm a developer myself, I'm curious if you could explain why skin painting was so slow and what you did to fix it? Thanks!

I'm a developer myself, I'm curious if you could explain why skin painting was so slow and what you did to fix it?

I've used CxImage library to draw the skins. It was too slow. I've tested the FreeImage library but it is slow too, especially the resizing operation, that very critical for TLB performance. So now I'm using FreeImage for loading skin images and converting them into 32 bpp bitmaps and I wrote own optimized code for resizing and other operations with bitmaps. All these working much faster.