Help With Chameleon Plugin

[Tezz95]

I emailed Socks the Fox and asked him to come over to this thread if he has the time and interest. We will see.

Hope he will come.

[Yincognito]

I know that ImageMagick and the MagickMeter plugin deal with images and not necessarily with the stuff the Chameleon does, but I can't help wonder if there's a connection between this problem with the Chameleon plugin and the fact that the newer versions of ImageMagick / MagickMeter have somewhat similar problems for some time (I have no idea if those problems are on Win 11 alone though)...

[Socks the Fox]

Heya! Sorry about the delay. I haven't been keeping on top of the forums or doing any updates since Chameleon has *mostly* been working fine somehow despite no real changes since I first updated from Win7 to Win10...

I've been meaning to get back in to poking at some of the little problems but until now nothing has been extreme enough to need an update.

Looks like I'll need to get the insider build for Windows 11 though. I'd bet they broke the desktop sampling API I use. Maybe this will give me an excuse to fix the slow memory leak I've noticed too...

[jsmorley]

Heya! Sorry about the delay. I haven't been keeping on top of the forums or doing any updates since Chameleon has *mostly* been working fine somehow despite no real changes since I first updated from Win7 to Win10...

I've been meaning to get back in to poking at some of the little problems but until now nothing has been extreme enough to need an update.

Looks like I'll need to get the insider build for Windows 11 though. I'd bet they broke the desktop sampling API I use. Maybe this will give me an excuse to fix the slow memory leak I've noticed too...

Outstanding! Glad to see you back!

[Yincognito]

Heya! Sorry about the delay. I haven't been keeping on top of the forums or doing any updates since Chameleon has *mostly* been working fine somehow despite no real changes since I first updated from Win7 to Win10...

I've been meaning to get back in to poking at some of the little problems but until now nothing has been extreme enough to need an update.

Looks like I'll need to get the insider build for Windows 11 though. I'd bet they broke the desktop sampling API I use. Maybe this will give me an excuse to fix the slow memory leak I've noticed too...

Great news, hopefully a potential solution will not require too much of an effort from your part and will last as long as the current version was able to last! Endurance is the mark of a well made software and you should be proud of how your plugin fared so far!

[Socks the Fox]

Finally got around to installing the insider preview. So far it looks like the only thing that has changed is that attempting to read from the shell desktop background "window" returns solid black instead of the desktop background as expected.

The weird thing is attempting to read the final composited desktop "window" works fine, except for the fact that it's the final composited desktop which means it includes all the windows and whatnot so I can't use that.

So now I get to hunt down a way to convince Windows to let me read the shell background again.

Worst case I go back to the old "find out what image file is being used and read that" but that was a mess of edge cases so I'd really rather avoid it...

[Yincognito]

Worst case I go back to the old "find out what image file is being used and read that" but that was a mess of edge cases so I'd really rather avoid it...

I imagine it's also a bit slower than reading the shell background...

[jsmorley]

I can confirm that Chameleon stops working with Windows 11 24h2.

Rainmeter 4.5.20.3803 (64-bit)
Language: English (1033)
Build time: 2024-08-27 15:17:14
Windows 11 Pro 24H2 (build 26100.1742) 64-bit - English (1033)

[Yincognito]

I can confirm that Chameleon stops working with Windows 11 24h2.

Rainmeter 4.5.20.3803 (64-bit)
Language: English (1033)
Build time: 2024-08-27 15:17:14
Windows 11 Pro 24H2 (build 26100.1742) 64-bit - English (1033)

Slightly unrelated, but if you upgraded your system "for real" (and not just testing in a VM), it might worth to test the other most used plugins just to make sure they work on that version. Also, there's a Win+D dissapearing skins topic somewhere, it could be useful to investigate if, besides waiting for a more stable version as Brian mentioned, there are any workarounds to the said issue that can be "exploited" in Rainmeter's benefit.

Just a thought, and only if you want and have time for this, of course - considering your proficiency in Rainmeter and the recent upgrade.

EDIT: Oops, looks like you started doing just that - only saw now your other post in the Win+D topic.

[jsmorley]

Slightly unrelated, but if you upgraded your system "for real" (and not just testing in a VM), it might worth to test the other most used plugins just to make sure they work on that version. Also, there's a Win+D dissapearing skins topic somewhere, it could be useful to investigate if, besides waiting for a more stable version as Brian mentioned, there are any workarounds to the said issue that can be "exploited" in Rainmeter's benefit.

Just a thought, and only if you want and have time for this, of course - considering your proficiency in Rainmeter and the recent upgrade.

EDIT: Oops, looks like you started doing just that - only saw now your other post in the Win+D topic.

Yes, I have officially upgraded to the release version of 24h2. There won't be any more "stable" version...

The only other thing I have seen so far is:

If you use the WiFiStatus plugin in a network skin, that will trigger Window's "Location Services" functionality, and will put a pointer icon on your taskbar. This icon cannot be removed or hidden, short of turning off Location Services for Desktop Apps in Windows Settings, which will impact any sites you connect to in your browser, like Google Maps, or GrubHub, or anything else that is trying to use your location. P.S. The same issue will happen if you try to avoid WiFiStatus by using RunCommand and Powershell to get information like the SSID and / or Signal Quality.

This is a minor annoyance, but I'm quite sure a lot of folks are going to hate it. Microsoft needs to allow you to "hide" this icon, or at least put it in "hidden" area under the caret on the taskbar.