Make a standalone skin (without Rainmeter).

[DKPhantom]

Hello,

I have been working with rainmeter for a couple of years now and I have made a few small skins for it, and published a bigger one (a text launcher of sorts).

I want to update that launcher but I find myself hindered by the way of making rainmeter skins, since my ideas on new features are now more complex than basic text links that open programs and do various stuff. I have been getting, more seriously into programming the past 7-8 months (attending a ECE uni) and now I can more fluently program in C and Java. As a consequence my old Rainmter knowledge and my new object oriented programming don't synergize that well. I have all these ideas on how to implement new features but I find myself unable to translate them into Rainmeter code, or actually don't want to bother with it because I think that there is a better way, that suits me better.

So here is my question. Can I make a project that is written on a programming language (like Java/C++/C#) that draws behind the desktop icons (with good performance), like rainmeter does?

Maybe Rainmeter's integrated Lua scripting is the answer (I haven't got into Lua Scripting+Rainmter that much to know for myself)? Or should I "force" myself to work the regular way?

[jsmorley]

I would recommend taking a look at the Rainmeter code at https://github.com/rainmeter/rainmeter. My gut reaction to your question is "Sure, why not?". If we can do it, so can you.

Lua, at least not our implementation of Lua, is probably not a good answer, at least not at the base of things. C++ is going to be much stronger for doing the graphics and integration with Windows. Lua might not be a terrible idea for "scripting" the user-facing part of things, although I'd be tempted to do some kind of XML, maybe even something CSS / HTML5 in nature. The goal I would think would be to make the back-end as powerful and fast as possible, using the least resources, while making the front-end as easy for a user to wrap their heads around as possible.