Mirage

[jsmorley]

Just as an aside, I have removed support for the deviantART bbcode when posting. This called a Flash-based widget on the deviantART site, and no, Flash is as dead as the Passenger Pigeon. Most modern browsers will fight you tooth and nail to even enable it.

Hopefully they will come up with some more safe and modern approach to inline linking to submission previews.

[jsmorley]

Also note that you must have and be logged into a free account on deviantART in order to download from there.

[balala]

Note that you must have and be logged into a free account on deviantART in order to download from there.

If you are not, when clicking Download, DeviantArt ask you to log in.

[balala]

Since wxdata has been deprecated in January, and the Weather skin of this suite used that service, I have to rewrite the appropriate skin, as many (well, for now most of them) authors have rewritten their weather skins. I am working with it and it practically is more or less finished, but the skin and the appropriate Settings are quite complex, so rewriting and (double-) testing everything takes a lot of time (which I have too little).
Soon will be released, I hope. Stay tuned, if interested.

[balala]

Since wxdata has been deprecated in January, and the Weather skin of this suite used that service, I have to rewrite the appropriate skin, as many (well, for now most of them) authors have rewritten their weather skins. I am working with it and it practically is more or less finished, but the skin and the appropriate Settings are quite complex, so rewriting and (double-) testing everything takes a lot of time (which I have too little).
Soon will be released, I hope. Stay tuned, if interested.

Finally finished rewriting and testing the Weather skin. I also identified a few other issues, which also have been fixed. I fixed the followings:

• Rewrote the Weather skin, to get it working with weather.com
• Fixed some issues on Calendar / TodayEvent
• Added indication of Today event / Every year event / Holiday on Calendar, when it's the case for current day
• Fixed the missing thousands and decimal separator substitution according to the current language, into the Mirage\Process\Process.ini skin
• Added current operation confirmation message in Mirage\Power\Power.ini
• Rewrote the Settings.ini skin, to get it working with weather.com and make the appropriate settings for the above skins

Added the download link to the first post of this topic.

[balala]

The newest version (1.2) of the suite is available in the first post of this topic.
The things which have been fixed this time:

• Added current operation confirmation message in Mirage\Power\Power.ini.
• Rewrote the Weather.ini skin to use the Weather.com website V3 JSON data to provide weather information.
• Rewrote the Settings.ini skin, to get it working with above, new version of Weather skin.
• Added the Mirage\SunMoon\SkyChart\SkyChart.ini skin, to show the current sky chart, through the Mirage\SunMoon\sunMoon.ini skin.
• Added the Mirage\Games\EggHunt\EggHunt.ini game.
• Removed the Mirage\Settings\Browse\Browse.ini skin, which has been replaced by the FileChoose.dll plugin.
• Added Solstices and Equinoxes calcualtions to the Mirage\SunMoon\SunMoon.ini and Mirage\Calendar\DayMonth.ini skins (through lua codes).
• Some other minor fixes.

After a discussion here on Rainmeter forum, I realized that for instance virustotal.com indicates some viruses into the package. The culprit is the included NirCmd.exe addon. I can assure everyone, it has no viruses, it is absolutely safe to use it. Locally ran antivirus doesn't indicate virus at all in the package (checked with Eset InternetSecurity 14.0.22.0). For the next release I'm gonna try to completely get rid of this addon.

[balala]

A new version, 1.3 available in the first post.
Improvements:

• Most important - completely got rid of nircmd.exe addon, which caused VirusTotal.com to report the installer containing viruses (has been a false positive, but the report was there) - issue has been reported in the previous version, 1.2 of the suite.
• Fixed some minor issues of the Calendar.ini and Weather.ini skins.
• Fixed an error in the Disks.ini skin, which didn't let the drive indicators to repositioning when a drive has been attached or removed.
• Minor improvements.

The installer has also been improved to get back the settings made onto previously installed versions of Mirage.
Thank you if you try this out and post some comments.

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[Yincognito]

Thank you if you try this out and post some comments.

Just tried your suite to compare my globe with yours in terms of CPU usage and bugs (of Rainmeter's animations, not the skins themselves), and the Settings skin hanged Rainmeter 3 times, in various tabs. The hangs seem to happen randomly, because at one time it worked to set the weather location (just one of the 3 examples, the other I can remember was when trying to Browse folders for Slideshow images) and another time a similar attempt hanged Rainmeter.

Also, not sure if it's the intended behavior, but when clicking Apply in the same skin, the BrokenDesktop skin is loaded automatically (it was a bit annoying and strange, since you'd expect a "positive" feedback when applying some settings, not a "broken desktop", LOL - though the skin itself is nice on its own).

Lastly, it seems you improved the overall suite performance, but there are still 2 or 3 skins that take some CPU usage (Calendar, Slideshow - despite not having any images loaded, see above, and some other I can't rememer). I sort of understand why, I also have skins that take more CPU than the others, but it was unexpected to see the Calendar skin being more heavy than others (I would expected it from the Slideshow one, not the Calendar, even with all sorts of events and all).

Just thought you should know. Otherwise, it's very beautiful (including the Settings skin) and probably works as expected, as far as I could tell. Nice work, and sorry for the delayed feedback.

[balala]

Just tried your suite to compare my globe with yours in terms of CPU usage and bugs (of Rainmeter's animations, not the skins themselves), and the Settings skin hanged Rainmeter 3 times, in various tabs. The hangs seem to happen randomly, because at one time it worked to set the weather location (just one of the 3 examples, the other I can remember was when trying to Browse folders for Slideshow images) and another time a similar attempt hanged Rainmeter.

The Settings skin is by far the largest skin I ever wrote. The appropriate .ini file is around 1.5MB, so quite enough. Probably on just a little bit slower machines is can cause troubles. However note that the folder setting (done through the Browse button) uses a plugin, the FileChoose and as such it shouldn't hang Rainmeter (never did on my side, even if the skin itself did a few times).

Also, not sure if it's the intended behavior, but when clicking Apply in the same skin, the BrokenDesktop skin is loaded automatically (it was a bit annoying and strange, since you'd expect a "positive" feedback when applying some settings, not a "broken desktop", LOL - though the skin itself is nice on its own).

The Broken Desktop, if loaded, runs in background and in most cases you don't even see it. However from time to time it activates, "breaking" the desktop. This is not related to the Apply button, but clicking it can activate the skin. In fact both buttons, the OK and the Apply refresh the skins of Mirage (and only those) and this can lead on activating the skin, which is driven by a Random function, within a Calc measure (the [MeasureLoad] measure of BrokenDesktop.ini skin). If you don't want the skin to be activated, you can uncheck the "Enable Broken Desktop skin" checkbox on the Launcher tab of Settings.ini. This way the skin is unloaded, so never activated anymore. In fact unchecking the checkbox you won't be able to activate the skin anymore, not even manually.

Lastly, it seems you improved the overall suite performance, but there are still 2 or 3 skins that take some CPU usage (Calendar, Slideshow - despite not having any images loaded, see above, and some other I can't rememer). I sort of understand why, I also have skins that take more CPU than the others, but it was unexpected to see the Calendar skin being more heavy than others (I would expected it from the Slideshow one, not the Calendar, even with all sorts of events and all).

These, besides Settings.ini, are the more complex skins of the suite. They are quite "hungry" / "expensive", requiring a lot of resources, if are used. The Calendar skin uses more resources because it has a quite large "note" side, where you can add notes / reminders / holidays to any date, shown only once, on the appropriate day or repeated year by year, on the same date (set up by click for reminders and right click for holidays, on the day). This requires quite many measures, which are quite expensive in terms of resources.

Just thought you should know. Otherwise, it's very beautiful (including the Settings skin) and probably works as expected, as far as I could tell. Nice work, and sorry for the delayed feedback.

No problem, such messages are always welcomed. I'm glad if you find it useful and well looking. Currently I'm working on adding a scaling possibility to the skins, to can easily resize them, throguh a single variable. But on some of the skins I encounter problems and takes a lot of time to fix. And unfortunately the time is the thing I have the least these days.