Shy and quiet new member. Intimidated. Sheepish .. even.

[Double D]

..

Hi everybody!

I'm new here and when you come to a new community .. you don't know the people or the ropes .. and you are kinda worried about getting jumped on or screamed at or something bad. So, I'm hoping that doesn't happen here. I'm a pretty good dude .. I'm pretty smart .. and if ya help me out a little, I bet I'll be a good member here and can maybe return the favor someday to somebody new like me.

OK .. here's the deal .. I'm kinda overwhelmed by this whole circumstance but ..excited .. enthusiastic about the possibilities for creating something special. For me. Maybe not for everyone but .. if I can take some time and learn this .. it would stay with me for the rest of my life. So, please give me a hand if ya can.

Here's who I am and what I want to accomplish: I'm a radio announcer in a major market in the United States. I tell you this only so you can understand what I am attempting to accomplish with Rainmeter. In my interface .. when I log on .. I'd like a series of things to be on my desktop and create the environment I work in for computing purposes. I just recently came to Windows 7 from a decade of Windows XP so I'm enthused about what is possible here.

One thing about radio announcers .. we have to be tuned in to what is going on in the world right now. So, I'd like to implement an RSS feed of news headlines that would display when logging on to my computer. Then, a live weather app .. or gadget or ..widget .. or whatever they call them. Pretty accurate one because this information would be doled out to a couple hundred thousand people over the next several hours. And .. other things which I am not aware of and *YOU*, personally, think may be kinda handy or cool for me to integrate in to my "theme" or .. *meter* .. or whatever it is called. I told you I'm new!

As for how I would like it to look, again, I'm looking towards you for advice. I'm a child of the seventies and really, really dig Pink Floyd and old Genesis and Rush .. I'm really in to space and planets and such. Not that I know anything about it .. I just think it looks cool. I like that real "cutting edge" look .. like this is a computer in 2070 .. you know what I mean? And being that I'm on the air, I need things to be intensely fast as possible because things are happening all the time and ya gotta be on it .. ya gotta be on time.

So .. how would I get started? Have you ever seen anything like what I am describing and can maybe say, "You know, XXXX had a cool theme that is a little bit like what you are talking about" and point me in the right direction. Or maybe say, "OK .. if you go here, you can get this .. and then you do that .. but stay away from this and this because it doesn't work too well. You get those, and avoid that, and you're on your way." It's all just your personal opinions I'm looking for.

Maybe I can't do this and am not smart enough to encompass the concept. Maybe I'm wasting my time.

Your responses, or lack thereof, will let me know if I should continue on down the path at Rainmeter and pursue this vigorously or not at all.

No response is wrong or not what I wanted. And all thanks for your time and input are given generously right here, right now. Thank you so much, in advance.

DD

..

[FlyingHyrax]

Hi Double D, welcome to the forums!

I would start in The Manual, at Getting Started. If there's one thing I know about Rainmeter, it's that as far as open source projects go, the documentation is fantastic. The getting started section will introduce you to some of the terminology, show off how to use the program (it's not always intuitive until you work with it a bit), and mentions some of the limits of the application. (You can do a whole lot of different things with Rainmeter, but it isn't meant to do everything, and in your case it sounds like it would be a good idea to know going in.) If you're interested in writing some of your own skins, or even just tweaking other people's, then that Getting Started section can also get you going on writing some basic skins.

I'd definitely check out the gallery of the Rainmeter group on DeviantArt and the "Share Your Creations" section here on the forums - in my opinion most of the skins worth having can be had from those two places, but of course you can find Rainmeter skins all over the place (Customize.org and WinCustomize come to mind). The DeviantArt group especially might give you a good impression of how most people use the application, and if you are looking for a particular type of skin, the moderators over there have been working hard to categorize the skin uploads into folders by type. So for instance, there are Weather and Feed Reader skins galore.

If/when you get stuck, we're really pretty good about answering questions over here. The ONE rule (well, not really, but you get what I mean) is to do a search and check the stickies to see if some one else has already asked your question and been answered. We're all pretty friendly, but we can get grumpy when we have to repeat ourselves too often.

Edit: Just looking around for feed reader/weather stuff, since you asked:

• Kaelri has a really sharp Lua script that will parse any RSS/Atom feed you throw at it; no need to write a different RegEx for every feed that's formatted slightly differently.
• Moshi and JSMorley have done some interesting work recently using a Yahoo! API called YQL to normalize feeds, and also combine/sort/select items from feeds.