Modern UI

Introduction

Modern UI is an user interface that improves the visual of the NSIS installers to look like the wizards from recent versions of Windows. It was the first such enhancement for NSIS, as it was released to the public in 2002 with the NSIS package.

Modern UI uses some features from NSIS 2.0. Some of those are the use of a dialog resource file to modify the controls' positionment and style, the painting of controls, and the manipulation of some window features via the SendMessage instruction.

History

When it was first released in 2002, the Modern UI was difficult to use because it required more code in the main script than expected in order to work. Gradually it improved, thanks to the enhancements done to NSIS.

For a long while the Modern UI had no competition; as long as it looked nice, people used it. In December 2004, the ExperienceUI was released. The ExperienceUI looked like the more recent InstallShield(r) installers, and it provided a few new features and more pages. Shortly thereafter, the UltraModern UI and the InstallSpider UI appeared, each with their own differences from the Modern UI.

Obtaining the Modern UI

The Modern UI is included with all releases of NSIS starting with version 2.0 alpha 4*. To use the Modern UI, see the documentation page. This documentation is also available from the contrib menu in Start Menu->Programs->NSIS.

Notes

*I think this is correct but I'm not 100% sure

Ironically, this article was written by the lead developer of the ExperienceUI.

--Dandaman32 11:31, 3 January 2006 (PST)

Light Modifications to Code

There are some light third party changes to code to implement extra to or improve some features of Modern UI. These changes are not directly mergable - you need to merge them manually. Also, these are not supported by the authors of Modern UI in any way as those are not related to them, and are not in any way the original version that comes with NSIS. Some of them are the following (search NSIS Forums for more):

Modern UI 2.12 - Added MUI_WELCOMEPAGE_LINK define - add feature to have a link in the Welcome page:

Nsis-2.12 mui-1.74 nicode.zip (8 KB)

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