My Thing About Enhancing Widget plus Pc Personalizer with Rainmeter
By: Vlad Vistac
Submitted: 2010-08-25 12:49:48 | Word Count: 510
Enhancing Widget plus Pc Personalizer with Rainmeter
With its first major updaet in over three years, a rather
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exciting development is coming for the desktop customizign world, Rainmeter is actually lastly appearing out
of epxeriment with. As well as, amiongst other things, it's a new Enigma
up grade built correct within. Amongst Rainmmeter 1.0's severl
improvements: the built-in theme manasger, RainThemes, to save and load
your setrups; toatl compatibility with Windfows Vista as well as
7 (your computer data is not trapped in Program Files, whiich removes
issuse with UAC); new visible options, such as tetual cnotent hsadows, change matricees as well as enhabnced anti-aliasing.
The tool runs from the system tray. To get started you'll need to right-cliuck Rainmeter's systray icon and choose an option from the Configs menu. The choices for
system meters (under the Bar and System config menus) look good, and offer useful info such as CPU, memory and network usage, along with
drive space monitors.
However otgher choices rewally feel unfinished. For instance, you can't add your own weather, you can only choose from four cities. And if you chooose to Edit Settings by right-clicking a displayed Rainmeter wiget, you'll see the raw opions file
displlayed in Notepad without any clues as to what changes what.
Rainmeter alllows its usaers to add as well as idsplay a number of
modules on the desktop such as a time, the date, CPU load, Really
simpy syndication feeds, as well as currently playing tune; in
addition to customizable cutting corneers in order to inastalled porgrams. Desipte the fact that this is ergarded as "less geeky" within the sese which
customization doesn't include tinkering with pieces of softwaer
as well as codes, first-time cusomers may really feel overwhelmed by everything. Theer are so many things that you can do within in the Rainmeter whih you may not understand where to stat.
You'll see the Enigma Home menu, upon installaation. This is where you can gain access to
Rainmeter's settimngs incluiding Theme Manager, Configuration, The PDF
Instruction, and Skin Managger. By
double-clicking on Rainmeter's Sidebar or Taskbar this Home menu can be accessed anytime. Taskbars are at the top and bottom, while Sidebars are located at the sides
of the screen, as the names suggests. The number of accessible sidebars and taskbars will
depend on which Rainmetr theme that you use. Click on the Theme icon witjhin
the Home menu in order to open the Rainmeter Theme Manager. There are usually four default themes that come with the installer: Enigma, Enigma Preview, Lightning Sunsset, as well as Wing Firefox. You
could additionally change the theme quickly via the right click menu. For those who have a big screen, you miight want to try Enigma Previiew as this thee gvies the most information about your system, however it is also the most
crowded.
I personally think that the cloock from Wing Firefox
theme is awesome, as for the coolest. You can show this clok in any tehme by right clicking on the bars and choosae: Configs > Arcs >
Arcs.ini (or Dark Arcs.ini). All of the theems work best with a dark background/wallpaper. The openness associated with the bars
and the wihte letters make the informatin hard in order to read having a light bacxkground. You can adjuust the transparency by right-clicking on
the taskbar/sidebar and choose Skin Menu > Transparency > (the percentage of transparency), if you rally love your brigght backgrouund. The
lower the number, the darker the bars will be. Please note that you have to perform the
adjustment for evewry and each bar separately.
But all the seroius stuff are in the Setttings mennus. This is the place where you inpuut all the essential information to show on the sidebars, such as Yahoo Weahter code for
your place, the accounts information for your GMail and Twitter, RSS feeds, Application paths and labbels, and
whoel lot of other information.
Go through the items one by one, enter the correct information, and click Set. Aftewr you've finioshed, don't forget to save the
settings. You don't need to fill in all the information, but the more informaiton
you provide the better. Aother things that
you can adujst is the position of the elements. Right-click on a bar
and make sure that the option Draggalbe is chceked. Then you can
freely drag and drop each and eveery element of the bars - including the bars themselves - to any position that you prrefer. don't foret to click on "Snap to Edges", if you want them
to align neattly with the scrreen edges, You can show/hide any elemenbt in any theme by right-cicking the bars and going to the "Configs"
menu.
Verdict
you prefer a great resource masure utliity as well as do not need
much otheerwise, Rainmeter might be that which you are after. But if
you also want customizable weather or other wdgets, you'll probablpy end up being better off going with Gooogle Gadgets (available whenever you
install the Google Desktop) or even anothher widget program.
