Plugin: Chameleon

[Socks the Fox]

I have wrapped up on Chameleon 1.6.1! I didn't quite get to the streamlining I was aiming for (was going to be a bit more of an undertaking than I was originally expecting, since I've just been tacking on to the same code I've had since 1.0 without paying too much attention), but I'll certainly be doing it for an eventual 1.7 release, along with hopefully some performance and resource usage improvements.

This release fixes a few minor bugs, as well as makes cropping work like one would expect on the desktop. It also adds the ability to set a custom context-aware color region instead of just "what does this skin cover" so that groups of skins can share a region and therefore end up with the same colors. This can be set with the "ContextX/Y" pair and "ContextW/H" pair for position and size (like cropping), respectively, and is based on the overall Windows Desktop layout (i.e. also like cropping).

As usual, it can be downloaded from my website at https://software.socksthefox.net/chameleon/

[jsmorley]

Seems really good!

[jsmorley]

ChameleonTester_Jan 3 2020.rmskin

1.png

Drag AreaDynamic around on your desktop to see Chameleon in all its glory...

[eclectic-tech]

Nice example!

I think the desktop color awareness is a nice addition for skins, and works really great!

One issue for me is that a suite of skins should have a consistent color theme, and while desktop color awareness is great for individual skins, I find it a bit unsettling when applied to all skins in a suite of skins.

Thankfully, it can be disabled with a simple keyword value setting in the measure.

[jsmorley]

Nice example!

I think the desktop color awareness is a nice addition for skins, and works really great!

One issue for me is that a suite of skins should have a consistent color theme, and while desktop color awareness is great for individual skins, I find it a bit unsettling when applied to all skins in a suite of skins.

Thankfully, it can be disabled with a simple keyword value setting in the measure.

Agreed. I think the color awareness is really good for a smaller individual skin, so you can react to what is directly under the skin, particularly the relative darkness or lightness of where the skin is sitting. For a suite, where you want to tailor the color selection to the overall scheme of the current desktop wallpaper, I would turn off color context awareness.

Worrying about the relative brightness of where a skin sits is mostly going to be an issue when you don't have a solid background on the skin, but just have some text floating alone. When you have a skin background, then you just need to be sure the content color sits well on top of the skin background, and it doesn't matter as much how bright or dark the desktop is.

There is no way anything that "picks" a color scheme for you is going to have the kind of aesthetic judgment that you will have yourself. It's interesting to see it try though...

This is one insanely clever plugin.

[ryanchuang]

Hi,
I have one question is that how do I make skin/Chameleon to catch the background color (wallpaper) as quickly as possible?? More often that I have to move the skin around a bit to take effects. Which parameter I need to amp up the value?? Thanks in advanced.

[Cariboudjan]

Thanks a lot for your work, Erich. I just donated $15 to your paypal. Keep it up.

Also, I'm confused about what "context-aware color choice" means as opposed to cropping an image. I assumed ContextAwareColors=1 toggled CropXYWH on and off, but I don't seem to understand what the option actually does. Also CropDesktop 1/0 doesn't seem to toggle cropping either. Is there a way to toggle full-desktop color & crop-desktop color?

Also there seems to be an issue with this version where, especially if changing desktop images quickly and sometimes randomly, that the colors do not update at all when changing wallpaper images. They stay the same as the previous image until the wallpaper changes again or rainmeter is reopened.

I've tested between 1.3.1 and 1.6.1 and I can confirm with the only difference between the two is the versions of the plugin that the problem only occurs in 1.6.1. The measure values just don't change after some wallpaper changes. There doesn't appear to be any specific trigger. It happens at random.

[Cariboudjan]

Chameleon 1.6.1 crashes Rainmeter when KeepOnScreen=0, the skin's window is slightly below the bottom of the screen, and the skin is loaded and/or refreshed. If SavePosition=1, and the skin crashes this way, it makes Rainmeter unusable as the app will crash on load.

This will also happen if the skin is moved between one monitor to another in a multi monitor setup.

So far I've only observed this behaviour on Windows 7 as I have no other PC to test with atm.

[Cariboudjan]

Socks, any word on this problem? It's a pretty devastating bug.

[ryanchuang]

Also there seems to be an issue with this version where, especially if changing desktop images quickly and sometimes randomly, that the colors do not update at all when changing wallpaper images. They stay the same as the previous image until the wallpaper changes again or rainmeter is reopened.

I've tested between 1.3.1 and 1.6.1 and I can confirm with the only difference between the two is the versions of the plugin that the problem only occurs in 1.6.1. The measure values just don't change after some wallpaper changes. There doesn't appear to be any specific trigger. It happens at random.

I have exact questions as these issues. However,when I moving around the skins,it does change immediately though.