DriveSpace Widget

[DavidRGreen]

This is one of the Widgets that were the driving force to get me into these exercises.

DriveSpace Mk2
It is called Mk2 to align with the Widget of similar functionality I built under the XWidget engine a while ago.



The widget is self adjusting vertically as it detects drives being added or removed, or hidden via the configuration panel, keeping the drives in order from C through to Z.
The ability to "Hide" a drive may seem odd, but sometimes certain drives serve on a specialised function and are not needed for 'day to day' operation; for instance, my drive D:\ is a recovery drive for when the computer is to be re-imaged back to factory settings, not the kind of drive I would need to access or monitor. I also hide 'back-up' drives.

Thanks also to yincognito for direction to the solution to get the bar colour to transition based on usage.

DriveSpace Mk2_1.0.rmskin

Ideally, it would be better if the optical drive bar size and capacity values could reflect "real" values. But that is out of scope for Rainmeter currently. It does, amusingly, fly in the face of convention to show a full bar on a zero value…

[balala]

Very good work, congratulations. I like it very much. The Settings tool is working well, as well and it might be useful at least in some cases. For instance I excluded my optical drive (yep, I still have one, even if lately it is less and less used), because as you said, it is not useful to be shown.
One single remark, even if not related to the skin. In Rainmeter those are not widgets, but skins. Please use the proper name, don't call them widgets, because they are not.

[DavidRGreen]

Thanks balala.

Okay, I'll try to remember that these "widgets" are called "skins".
I thought skinning was the process of changing the appearance of UI elements in Windows.

[balala]

I thought skinning was the process of changing the appearance of UI elements in Windows.

In Rainmeter environment skins are those elements created with a text editor (Notepad, Notepad++, or whatever), which are loaded by Rainmeter and with which (at least in most cases) you have a visual relation (for instance showing the weather condition - well, maybe lately this isn't the best example!). In not official terms skinning could be the process of writing / creating / editing the codes of these skins.
Sorry if this is not entirely correct, my English limits me, but in Rainmeter the elements are skins, not widgets. And this for sure.

[samlrs]

I also want to say that you've done great work and also ask one simple question - why when you click on the first screenshot your disk E shown as completely empty?

[balala]

why on the first screenshot your disk E shown as completely empty?

Probably because it's an optical drive (a CD/DVD), at least based on its icon. For this kind of drives, Rainmeter (and its FreeDiskSpace measures), only returns its type and label, nothing else. So Rainmater sees these drives as being empty (Note here).