eclectic-tech wrote:Good call on those pesky tooltips
I especially like the "color under cursor" feature! It is a thousand times better at seeing the current color versus the "
old" magnification technique.
Thanks for sharing!
Magnification has some charm, but hard to implement in this environment.
I can have the plugin get an area around the cursor, say 50px by 50px, and zoom in on it by some factor, but the issue is what to do with that. It would by its nature create a bitmap image in memory in the C++, but then what? None of the options are pretty.
I can just display it as a floating area around the cursor itself, but I have found that that can hurt as much as help in finding the spot you want, it's not that easy to have a "window" follow the cursor around in real time, and there are real-estate issues if you are at the edge of the screen.
I can put the magnified area somewhere else on the screen, but that has complexities with moving it out of the way if the spot you want is under it, and it's a bit awkward to have to look back and forth between the cursor and the magnified area somewhere else on the screen.
The best option is to have the magnified area in the skin itself, but that isn't easily possible. It would mean just hammering the hard drive to save an image file every few milliseconds, and having a skin Update that is very low, to I can display it in an Image meter in the skin. Not thrilled with that idea.
What I'd really like is a change to the Image meter in Rainmeter that could could use an inline Plugin section variable to get the contents of the "bitmap" from the memory of the plugin, and treat that as an "ImageName" for purposes of the meter. That's a pretty hefty bit of coding change for the Image meter, and has a very limited audience.
So unless I have some epiphany, I think we live without magnification for the time being. Being able to see the color that is under the cursor at all times does help.