Starting with V0.9.7, &xwp; contains a replacement to &warp4;'s WarpCenter.
This is called the "XCenter".
Technically, this is not a WarpCenter replacement... it does not replace the
"SmartCenter" WPS class, since that class is completely undocumented in the first place.
Instead, the XCenter is a new implementation from scratch. It is not compatible with
the WarpCenter and does not take over its settings, but it can do pretty much the same...
and more.
Compared to the WarpCenter, the XCenter offers you the following advantages:
- It is fully configurable. You can add items to the XCenter at your free will,
while the WarpCenter will always contain fixed items at fixed locations.
The items in the XCenter are called "widgets". You can add widgets to the XCenter
in any order.
See "Adding and removing widgets" for details.
- You can have more than one XCenter on your system. Each XCenter stores its
widgets and their settings separately so that they will never conflict.
- The XCenter offers you more display styles than the WarpCenter. You can drag
and drop fonts and colors onto the widgets, which will retain these settings
individually. Besides, the XCenter has an "auto-hide" option so that it will reduce
itself to a tiny bar at the bottom of the screen, similar to the task bar on
Windows 95. You can set those display options in the XCenter's settings notebook.
- The XCenter supports plug-in DLLs. Any programmer can add new widget types
to the XCenter by writing a DLL and put it into the
plugins\xcenter
directory of the &xwp; installation directory.
See "About plug-in DLLs" for details.
- The XCenter runs on a separate thread within the WPS and can thus run with
a higher priority than other programs. You can set the priority in the XCenter's
settings notebook.
While this cannot fix the PM single input queue (SIQ) problems, this can still
give you access to the XCenter if some program uses up all CPU time. For example,
I have found that Netscape tends to do this at times.