Rainmeter Skin

I know I'm behind the curve when it comes to desktop eye candy. I've never really had much use for it in the past so I never kept up on desktop widgets-gadget-doohickeys. But when I fired up my Vista Laptop for the first time I couldn't help but noticed the Windows sidebar gadgets and after checking the task manager how much resources they use. I promptly disabled them. For me when it comes to computers function comes before form.

Fast forward a couple months and I still hadn't given the subject much thought until I was browsing www.deviantart.com looking for cool desktop backgrounds and I stumbled upon Rainmeter a very light and skinable alternative to Windows, Yahoo, and Google desktop candy that has been out since at least 06. On the Left is a bank of skins I made wednesday night, which includes a date and time display a CPU and RAM monitor a Hard Drive monitor a slide show and a RSS feeder.(the iTunes now playing display is a skin I made for CD Art Display, another really cool and skinable little program that works with iTunes, Winamp and Foobar) All up they use less than 5MB of RAM compare that to windows gadgets with similar functionality that eat up around 30MB of RAM and Rainmeter is a winner to me.

There are a couple draw backs to using Rainmeter though the first of which since it's free and no longer in development there is not really any help to speak of, your pretty much on your own. And the second is that although you can find a lot of different skins online that are pretty cool, if you want to make one on your own, again since there isn't much help you'll pretty much have to figure it out.(I managed to so it can't be that hard right?) A skin for the most part is just a background image and a .ini file that tells Rainmeter what and where to display. A good starting point is to download a skin that has the functionality you want and play with the code and see what it does, that's what I did. The code is pretty simple once you catch on. The only real problems I had was figuring out the RSS feeder.

If you are even slightly computer savvy and have a little artist flare Rainmeter might be some thing you could have fun with.