SOLVED: Who is Rainmeter's target audience?

[jumper77]

I've been thinking about writing my first skin. A friend suggested a good place to start is HWINFO. To use it, you must install the software and the Visual C++ 2013 runtime. That got me to thinking. Who is Rainmeter'l target audience? Is the the casual guy that just wants to spruce up his desktop? Or is it people like us?

Edit: I've been thinking. I don't like the idea of installing software that's needed to make the skin work. And I now think I feel this way no matter who the audience is.

And for the last... How to mark a thread as solved? I checked the green arrow icon because I don't know anything else to do.

thanks

[Aethrios]

I've been thinking about writing my first skin. A friend suggested a good place to start is HWINFO. To use it, you must install the software and the Visual C++ 2013 runtime. That got me to thinking. Who is Rainmeter'l target audience? Is the the casual guy that just wants to spruce up his desktop? Or is it people like us?

I think you're pretty much nailing it with "people like us" - most people that I've seen using rainmeter, or who have been open to using it, are willing to tinker a little with the skins to get them to do what they want. I mean, the Iron Man/JARVIS full on UI replacement skins are popular, sure, but I'm not sure how many people actually end up using those in the long run.

Edit: I've been thinking. I don't like the idea of installing software that's needed to make the skin work. And I now think I feel this way no matter who the audience is.

This might just be my bias, but generally in order to make skins do interesting things, you'll need a plugin. I use MSI Afterburner, Speedfan, and CoreTemp, to name a few, that are mandatory to make my default UI run the way it's supposed to. That's not to say that you need to use something like this in order to make a practical or useful skin, but I think that in order to make something that a lot of people will be interested in using, you'll be using some kind of plugin measure, whether it's something that's bundled by default now (audiolevel comes to mind!) or something that's depending on an external program. Those Iron Man skins have a whole lot of requirements, usually, and they still seem to top a lot of popularity charts.

And for the last... How to mark a thread as solved? I checked the green arrow icon because I don't know anything else to do.

In my experience, the check is enough.

[jumper77]

Thank you so much for your reply. I needed the voice of experience to set me straight about things. I was thinking that it "was" people like us being the audience. After all who would appreciate it more? Guess I need to start thinking about plug-ins. I know about speedfan and the other because I used to use them a long time ago. I'm going to have to look up MSI Afterburner and see what it is. I figure if you use it then it's worth taking a look at.

Where can I find what's bundled with Rainmeter? I'm using the beta version. I would like my first skin to be something a little different. There are enough clocks and ram and cpu skins out there. If you have any thoughts about that, I'm open to suggestions. I use the RSS feed skin and it really works great. To me at least, that's something different.

And thanks about the check mark. I'm on a programming site and they have a thread tool pulldown that you can select "solved" and it automatically puts the "solved" word in the subject line.

Thanks a bunch.