request - fullscreen wallpaper skin

[Cerebralcow]

In short I have my desktop extended over 2 monitors and I want one monitor to always look the same and the other to cycle through a set of wallpapers, like its already doing. I figure the easiest way to do that is to cover one of the monitors with a rainmeter skin as big as the screen.

I don't really know anything about how to make a rainmeter skin so this is pretty much a request unless someone already knows of such a skin. I'm running windows 7 on my laptop and I cycle through a set of wallpapers with the windows 7 personalization software/tool. Most of the time I have my laptop plugged into an external monitor on my desk. I have it set to extend my desktop onto this monitor and it copys my wallpaper onto it also. I would like to have this monitor have a set wallpaper tho, so that I can put more skins ontop of it and have it always look the same. I figure I could do this with a skin that displays an image as big as the screen's resolution, set it to the desktop or bottom position, and set it to not stay on screen (so the position doesn't change when I don't have the monitor plugged in)

Is this possible? Is there already a skin that does this?

I realize I'll have to set some of the parameters, like the image name and the size of the skin, I'm pretty confident that I can do that as I've already done some basic editing on a couple rainmeter skins. I just don't know any of the coding.

[MerlinTheRed]

Any skin, no matter what position you set it to, will always cover your desktop icons. Other than that, it's about as easy as this:

Code: Select all

[Rainmeter]
Update=100000

[Image]
Meter=Image
ImageName=path\to\image.jpg
X=0
Y=0
W=#SCREENAREAWIDTH#
H=#SCREENAREAHEIGHT#

Then set the skin to be click-through and you should be set.

[Cerebralcow]

Is that all the code I need? I copied another skin file moved it to a new folder and replaced all the code with what you have there. I set the values to the resolution and copied the image into the folder with the skin but it doesn't do anything when I load the skin. Can I use a jpg file?

[Kaelri]

Make sure you're using the actual image name. ;) For example, if the image is called "MyWallpaper.jpg", use:

Code: Select all

ImageName=MyWallpaper.jpg

[MerlinTheRed]

Is that all the code I need? I copied another skin file moved it to a new folder and replaced all the code with what you have there. I set the values to the resolution and copied the image into the folder with the skin but it doesn't do anything when I load the skin. Can I use a jpg file?

Normally you don't even need to put the resolution in there. #SCREENAREAWIDTH# etc. gives you the actual screen size. It's a built-in variable.

[Cerebralcow]

That worked, but my 2nd monitor is uding a different resolution. Its not widescreen whereas my laptop is, so the wallpaper isn't covering the whole screen.

Does that mean I need to use an image formatted to that aspect?

[Cerebralcow]

That worked, I changed the resolution of the wallpaper image and now its perfect. Thanks for the help.

[MerlinTheRed]

Normally the image should be stretched to fill the entire screen. If the screen you use the skin on isn't the primary monitor, try using #SCREENAREAWIDTH@2# where the 2 is the number of the monitor as shown in the windows monitor manager thing. See here for reference: http://rainmeter.net/cms/Settings-MultipleMonitors_beta

[Cerebralcow]

ok thanks