Ideas
Posted: September 3rd, 2021, 11:21 pm
I'd do this myself but after my wife got done with me after my last project, this is gonna be on someone else Besides, I barely have the skills to customize skins for myself. If these things are already available, I'd sure like to know where. Anyhow, here you go:
1. A hideable grid overlay that can be adjusted from say, 1/4-3/4 inches for the purpose of giving the viewer reference while setting up more complex layouts evenly. It could even be tied to whatever Rainmeter uses when you click on "Snap to grid"
2. A way to change individual items in a batch. For example, I have the Neon Space skin and it uses visualizers, both bars as well as individual lights and when the music plays, they pulse in order. What I want to do is shut off the pulsing in the singles but not the bars. That's all fine and dandy but I've got like 25 little lights dancing all over the place. A global setting perhaps? I looked and managed to stumble across a setting somewhere that stopped all reactions but like I said, I want the bar to keep going.
3. I know the author of Neon Space and maybe others I'm not aware of did this but it should become standard practice to create GUI's for the purpose of altering color schemes, fonts, location, file paths, etc. Make it once and it's yours forever. In fact, make it native to Rainmeter. maybe one global GUI for the basics like name, location, file paths, fonts/size etc. can be set and more personalized ones for the skin in question. It will, of course, have to be dynamic in nature as not all skins have the same amount of tabs but could be done. Perhaps by having Rainmeter have a dropdown list for, say, 40 tabs, buttons, etc. When a skin is loaded, Rainmeter polls it to see how many it needs for the whole layout and the unused ones are either greyed out or hidden. Further dynamics are needed to accurately poll layouts utilizing multiple skins from multiple themes. Lastly, if it doesn't yet exist, a universal naming convention would need to be established as well. Otherwise, name variants will have to be accounted for. For example, if I call a widget a widget and you call it a wudgit, the GUI needs to be able to accurately account for that. Rainmeter is an incredible program but it is geared toward programmers. Now I admit to being a noob here but I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to learn how to change things and after it all, I finally figured out that I could have done all of them at the same time if I'd understood that there are global variables. Still have no clue how to edit them for my own benefit If the user experience could be made user friendly, just imagine how this product will explode in popularity! They have to be complete as well so that for every skin, all colors, fonts, font size, etc that you intend for the end user to be able to tweak. Anything too intense and they have to know how to code like the rest of you. For example, on Mass Effect launcher, at first look, one may not realize that while there appears to be 10 buttons, there are actually 24 if I counted my toes right. Three on each of the corners and two on each of the side tabs. It wasn't until I went to edit it that I found the rest. I then had to figure out how to replicate, place, and rename the pertinent NameButtons and other information. Things got really sideways early on when, though I'd never done something like this before, I decided that I wanted the orange buttons to either show up only as that button is moused over or show up in sequential order, either direction would have worked. It would have been nice to have been able to set things once for all the included skins in a nice, simple yet comprehensive GUI. In the example I gave, I would make everything I just described available through such an interface except for changing how the buttons show up. Really, that's a personal problem and not one the dev should have to worry about...although it would be cool if they did. It's a lot, I know, but maybe the work could be farmed out in sections and it gets done as a community. Think of the possibilities, guys Heck, I'd settle for a handwritten how-to to be honest.
1. A hideable grid overlay that can be adjusted from say, 1/4-3/4 inches for the purpose of giving the viewer reference while setting up more complex layouts evenly. It could even be tied to whatever Rainmeter uses when you click on "Snap to grid"
2. A way to change individual items in a batch. For example, I have the Neon Space skin and it uses visualizers, both bars as well as individual lights and when the music plays, they pulse in order. What I want to do is shut off the pulsing in the singles but not the bars. That's all fine and dandy but I've got like 25 little lights dancing all over the place. A global setting perhaps? I looked and managed to stumble across a setting somewhere that stopped all reactions but like I said, I want the bar to keep going.
3. I know the author of Neon Space and maybe others I'm not aware of did this but it should become standard practice to create GUI's for the purpose of altering color schemes, fonts, location, file paths, etc. Make it once and it's yours forever. In fact, make it native to Rainmeter. maybe one global GUI for the basics like name, location, file paths, fonts/size etc. can be set and more personalized ones for the skin in question. It will, of course, have to be dynamic in nature as not all skins have the same amount of tabs but could be done. Perhaps by having Rainmeter have a dropdown list for, say, 40 tabs, buttons, etc. When a skin is loaded, Rainmeter polls it to see how many it needs for the whole layout and the unused ones are either greyed out or hidden. Further dynamics are needed to accurately poll layouts utilizing multiple skins from multiple themes. Lastly, if it doesn't yet exist, a universal naming convention would need to be established as well. Otherwise, name variants will have to be accounted for. For example, if I call a widget a widget and you call it a wudgit, the GUI needs to be able to accurately account for that. Rainmeter is an incredible program but it is geared toward programmers. Now I admit to being a noob here but I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to learn how to change things and after it all, I finally figured out that I could have done all of them at the same time if I'd understood that there are global variables. Still have no clue how to edit them for my own benefit If the user experience could be made user friendly, just imagine how this product will explode in popularity! They have to be complete as well so that for every skin, all colors, fonts, font size, etc that you intend for the end user to be able to tweak. Anything too intense and they have to know how to code like the rest of you. For example, on Mass Effect launcher, at first look, one may not realize that while there appears to be 10 buttons, there are actually 24 if I counted my toes right. Three on each of the corners and two on each of the side tabs. It wasn't until I went to edit it that I found the rest. I then had to figure out how to replicate, place, and rename the pertinent NameButtons and other information. Things got really sideways early on when, though I'd never done something like this before, I decided that I wanted the orange buttons to either show up only as that button is moused over or show up in sequential order, either direction would have worked. It would have been nice to have been able to set things once for all the included skins in a nice, simple yet comprehensive GUI. In the example I gave, I would make everything I just described available through such an interface except for changing how the buttons show up. Really, that's a personal problem and not one the dev should have to worry about...although it would be cool if they did. It's a lot, I know, but maybe the work could be farmed out in sections and it gets done as a community. Think of the possibilities, guys Heck, I'd settle for a handwritten how-to to be honest.