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25 October 2009

Meter Migration

I had always used rainmeter ever since I found out of its existence. It was a rather helping tool in telling me which programs suck up resources once they start running though sucking a little resource itself.



Ladies and gentlemen, the rainmeter I used. It has a very basic interface really. I simply turned the default image it came with into gray-scale and removed some useless things while adding time and date into it. Nothing too fancy.

But then, during one fateful night, I stumbled upon samurize, which proved itself to be a little more interesting than rainmeter. So, I gave it a shot.



It was not bad at all. Though this time, I didn't simply modify the default skin. Instead, I made my own from scratch. The skin editor was surprising simple and had a nice GUI unlike rainmeter which was limited to only editing everything on notepad.

I made it based a lot on rainmeter, taking out what I find irrelevant and placing some extras that I have been unable to do on rainmeter.

While I liked it much better, some things of it bother me. For one, I can't seem to make it fade-out. Hence, I made it transparent and binded some hot-keys to hide it completely when necessary. Seeing to as I would most likely continue to work on it, I also binded another hot-key to refresh it instantly.

Despite the minor inconveniences, I do prefer it over rainmeter for several reasons:
- It has a very friendly user interface for skin making
- It is definitely less complicated when stretching the limits of what it can do (plug-ins and whatnot.)
- It uses less RAM than rainmeter (in comparison with my configurations.)
- Did I mention skin making from scratch is surprisingly simple?

Do give both programs a try if you find it interesting and do tell me about it.

Links:
Rainmeter
Samurize

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