AERO DWM for rainmeter backgrounds

[fediafedia]

I think it's about time Rainmeter takes advantage of Vista/7's aero technology. IMO this would be extremely useful in skins which have large backgrounds. I'll try to demonstrate it on my iphone clock skin:

As you can see, on the second image, the background can have aero colorization with blur and stripes (stripes not visible coz its my custom theme mod). Rainmeter skins could have synchronized colorization with the system settings, like graphite, teal etc. Also it would be very useful on skins such as Enigma while using busy wallpapers, the blur would make everything more readable.

This should be REALLY simple to do, I've seen some programs having this sort of thing, including miranda, firefox etc. The code includes just a few commands which call the dwm background. The ini config could be DWM=1 and DWM=0 or something.

I'd love to see this feature in rainmeter, hope it gets added

[gschoppe]

Rainmeter has always valued low resource usage, so I'm not certain that the HUGE overhead associated with DWM glass effects are in line with the program's goals, but assuming it was an optional thing, I'd love to see functional glass...

here are a couple of articles regarding GDI+ and DWM Glass... if someone wants to take on this task, these articles are likely a good place to start

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2006/04/18/578637.aspx
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsuidevelopment/thread/9a501b12-e9a6-4d0f-9f22-1ad21a7a4dbf


not sure if this applies to formless windows, however/

[fediafedia]

I don't think it will have a slightest impact on the performance, since aero is a system component which is always running. Rainmeter just needs a command that says to windows "put glass here" :P

[Chewtoy]

And how would this effect us that's still unhappy with both vista and 7 and therefore still run XP?

[bendenfield]

I don't know much about programming, but shouldn't it be possible to blur the background without calling DWM?
I mean, it could be just a simple bang changing the settings of SolidColor and that's it. In my imagination it just needs a bang like "BackgroundBlur=1" to apply that blur to the background SolidColor. But, as I said, in my imagination only. To be honest I don't know anything about things like that. Maybe it is easier to use DWM for it, but a 'stand alone' bang would be much more usefull, since even XP users could use it.

[fediafedia]

@Chewtoy You just wouldn't have the aero feature

I don't know much about programming, but shouldn't it be possible to blur the background without calling DWM?
I mean, it could be just a simple bang changing the settings of SolidColor and that's it. In my imagination it just needs a bang like "BackgroundBlur=1" to apply that blur to the background SolidColor. But, as I said, in my imagination only. To be honest I don't know anything about things like that. Maybe it is easier to use DWM for it, but a 'stand alone' bang would be much more usefull, since even XP users could use it.

Writing a new blur algorithm would make the program heavy...