The Glade 4.0

Desktop skinning, anyone besides me using it?

Current:

I had not heard of this until now. Looks pretty slick, though. Gonna have to give this a try sometime.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Thanks a lot for the heads up on this, Lenas. RainMeter is frakkin' awesome!! So many cool looking desktops out there.

Here's what I'm using right now. It's a combination of a lot of skins.



It's cool as hell, because the circle around his eye is animated. And the circles on the right side represent my CPU/RAM/Network/HDD's and animate according to their activity.

I've still got some tweaking to do, but I just had to share. I think I will be wasting way too many hours on this in the very near future!

_________________
"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Dammit, that is cool as HELL. There goes my free time today!

If anyone else is interested the site is http://rainmeter.net/RainCMS/. I google so you don't have to!

Can you list some of the modules you're using Cal? There are WAY too many out there.

Did some more tweaking, and added a few more apps from other skins. I think it's looking pretty good, now.

_________________
"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Very cool guys. Glad you liked. I'm still sticking with the Windows Phone 7 widgets, but maybe I'll start looking at what else is out there.

The modules won't stick with dual monitors. They keep jumping back to their original positions. Highly annoying.

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

Edited the main ini file and after the X position add @2. Like X=1055@2. Much happier!

And yes Caleria what skins/modules did you add? And where do I get that wallpaper :p

_________________
Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

Aha!
http://wallybescotty.deviantart.com/art ... -160074675

_________________
Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

The wallpaper in the original post? Or the 2nd one?

The original is here. The 2nd one was the result of me editing the first one in PhotoShop. If you want it, let me know and I can get it for ya.

As far as the skins/mods, I got most of them by browsing the deviantART rainmeter group page.

Skins:
Dark Glass [link]
XYZ Rainmeter Pack [link]
Razor [link]
Implosion [link]
Tech Vision [link]
The WinAmp Circles mod is from the Meteor Glimps skin [link]

I think that's all of them that I was using originally. I've changed some things up since then. Sorry I didn't post them sooner. I actually missed where you guys asked for them. My bad.

There are a lot of really, really good skins here. Be careful, though. You might end up spending hours and hours there, like me!

_________________
"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Caleria, please set me up an amazingly badass desktop with all my apps linked.

I will totally thank you.

that is so badass. Sadly, a bit over my head.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I can save my current one as a theme, and send you that. I can also include the mods/skins that the theme uses. The only thing is, you'll have to put all the mods in your skin folder manually.

I'll send ya a PM with a screenshot of the latest version, so we don't clog up the thread with a whole lotta images. Then you can tell me what you like/don't-like in the theme. And we'll go from there.

What resolution are you running at?

_________________
"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Ok, I totally didn't think that was going to work.

I'm running at 1680x1050.

I thought so, too, at first. The best thing to do, is find one that's already done for you, like an entire theme. Then just open up the RainBrowser program, and start editing the ones you need to change. Most of them will work fine out of the box. The main ones you'll need to change are the ones that get the weather forecast, and shortcuts to your programs. Editing the existing mods is not too bad. That's about all I've done so far. I'm not even gonna attempt to make my own meter/skin. I'll leave that to the gurus, heh.

This page has a really good explanation of how to add a new skin, and edit it to suit your own needs. Might wanna check it out. Once you get that part down, then its just a matter of picking and choosing which skins you want, and adding them to your theme.

_________________
"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Did you find a working cpu temp plugin?

_________________
Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

I've been playing around with Rainmeter. It definitely looks really cool and I really like the idea of customizing my desktop to suit my needs exactly... but I'm starting to realize that it's not exactly practical.

I mean sure, it looks pretty cool to have your CPU status and RAM and hard drive space on your desktop... but I don't need it. I don't give a **** how much RAM I'm using or how my CPU usage is changing with time... especially not while i'm looking at my desktop. 90% of the skins are just useless information.

The most practical skins seem to be the ones that display RSS feeds and e-mail and weather and the like... and my iGoogle page already does all of those things in a much more practical way.

The skins that provide buttons for launching applications and opening folders and stuff certainly look cool, but at the end of the day they're just clunky and less user friendly than the functions they attempt to replace in Windows.

So for now I've reduced my Rainmeter theme down to simply a To do list and a 3 day weather forecast. Maybe i'll find some other cool skins to add to it eventually, but I'm not nearly as excited as when I first read about it.

Well, I had a lot more trouble exporting my current theme, and getting it to work properly on my laptop. So I'll just post my background file, and links to all of the skins that I'm currently using. I'm also including a labeled screenshot, so that you guys can see how each skin is placed in the layout.

Background:


Labeled screenshot:


Links:
Dark Glass [link]
Razor [link] (read carefully, there is a file that has to be placed in your plugins folder)
Tech Vision [link]
Large Clean Weather [link]
Senary HDD Monitor [link]
StarView [link]
tech [link]

When I get a chance in the next couple of days, I'll post some instructions on how I changed the icons and links/shortcuts used in the 3 application bars on the top-left. If you guys have any questions or problems, let me know, and I'll try to help.


EDIT:

Nope, I just "rem'ed" out the lines dealing with the cpu temp so that I wouldn't get the error msg every time. It also eliminates that "meter" from showing up in the skin.

_________________
"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Are you using a vanilla windows theme? I like the start button.

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

Vanilla windows theme, yes. But I am using a custom start button that I changed with this. Link is near the bottom.

_________________
"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

just starting to play with this...


After a bit more playing...


How would I go about resizing the twitter updates right on my page? I am also trying to figure out how to put the shortcuts to my apps right on my desktop with this. Maybe stop using my Dell Dock.

Now to configure StarView....

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Welcome out of the Dark Ages, Gentlemen.

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Instead of skinning, anyone ever mess around with getting rid of the Windows shell altogether? I used Litestep years ago, but had no idea 'til just now that there were so many actively developed alternatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell_replacement

I used litestep for quite awhile, but eventually had to switch back to windows for system support.

Really enjoyed running an alternate shell though.

Yeah, I remember running LiteStep on my laptop in 2001 or so.