- Furyfire, I don't know if that is true or not but I will be devil's advocate and disagree. I run Objectdock at under 2500 K on average, and one of it's many highlighted features is it's ability to magnify upon mouseover of the png images of both the background and icons that it supports.
CD Art Display runs less than 5000 K on average for me and it overs a similar feature on mouse over.
If these programs with all of their features can pull it off, i don't see why rainmeter can't.
yes i agree with you.., but if the rainmeter works with ini files , then there would be lot of code for it to process making it resource hungry!!! its the same with the 'dock' link u gave., the processor is used for every update , so more updates=constant and higher cpu usage!! so., i would prefer new features like extending the functionality and making skinning more easier (less code n stuff)., and i would be happy to use my regular dock software ., i think an amalgum of different softwares can give me a much better look than one software doing it all!!! ( cause all can't be achieved with a single programming language!!)., right now rainmeter is awesome , i can decorate my desktop and at the same time have useful resources shown and with very less cpu usage!!! ( its a super cool package) .
You won't get an argument from me on the variety of programs, but it boils down to some of what is offered respective to other similar programs, and I use Samurize as the primary competitor. And the fact that something like samurize can do those things makes some of what rainmeter lacks seem inferior in some ways. Out of all the things I mentioned, it would be nice to at least see a non-cpu consuming animation feature. And you point out the main thing it updates in such a way that it eats up CPU, but can it do it differently so that it doesn't like Objectdock/rocketdock. I'm not a coder and I don't know the guts, but that's a reason for pointing out features that I would like to see. It would be worthwhile to know or have it communicated what we can expect in the future of Rainmeter. Rather than get my hopes up to expect a bad ass new an improved version, it will just be a bug fixes to what it should be doing for update OS platforms. :geek:
vistasimplex, the link from that post seems to be dead, but from the sound of it, it is not the method I'm using. The way I have worked out only causes a small spike while the animation is playing.
I thought my way was a little cumbersome, but this is a lot more involved. I need to study it a bit more but it definitely uses more resources than what I made.
That's good to hear, I would be interested in seeing a less resource intensive method of doing animations. Please do keep me posted on that. And thanks for the responses and continued dialogue, I hope some attention is afforded to the other things I mentioned.
What would be neat, just to get the idea out there, would be a transitions option, where certain actions on a plugin activate a transitional overlay, while the actual redraw is occurring in the background... transitions would be defined by a scripting language like LUA, so there could be custom transitions...
Just to Clarify... This is not on my to do list until I understand a LOT more about LUA and rendering to screen...
Basically, on activation of a transition, the program pre-caches a current static version (think 32Bit+Alpha PNG) of both the initial and final state of the transition, then substitutes the cached initial state for the actual config, runs the transition to the cached final state, then substitutes the real final state.
...if i'm thinking right, it would open a bunch of doors to a polished gui.
