The Gay Meter

Messing with Samurize continued when a certain someone asked me what are the capabilities of it. After checking back with its website, I came to realize that it can potentially be used to replace my current shell, or at least, be integrated into a much less RAM intensive shell. (Litestep anyone?)



The new meter, dubbed 'The Gay Meter' by a certain someone yet again, has more function than my previous meters. This time, including volume control and indication, shortcut links to a number of commonly used programs, a text pad, and a feed that shows the latest forums topics on the right.

The primary meter is located at the bottom left of the screen, hiding the text pad and feed outside of the screen. By pressing the light purple button, the meter would either slide sideways or upwards to reveal the extra meter. The middle light purple button hides the taskbar.

The thing I like more about this meter is that it has more moving parts. Not only does it have a meter indicating the CPU usage, RAM, and disk space available, it also has three additional bars indicating seconds, minutes, and hours (in sections of 12). a meter for battery life has also been added.

Although unable to autohide, it can be right-clicked in the middle whereby it will disappear and be replaced with a 5 x 5 pixel black dot on the top left corner of the screen.

With an addition of a menu to pull up commonly used folders, this meter has successfully replaced Rocketdock though not having as much eye candy.

This meter was created with replacing the shell in mind. Therefore, an extra meter was created to load the taskbar. However, after managing to compile a very simple program to automate the meters on startup, running without the windows shell proved to have some bugs.

While I consider this meter to at least be a success, the next phase of this project is to create a new meter entirely that integrates the taskbar emulation AND the functions already in this meter. When that is done, adding lots of extra eye candy and functions is a must.

This meter currently runs at 2-3 MB of RAM on idle and can use up to 6 MB of RAM when constantly being used. The target RAM usage for the new meter is expected to be the same.

One thing I noticed with Samurize is that its autohide docking seems a little buggy. I noticed this in particular when using it on my taskbar meter. There is a workaround for this but it DOES make the meter a little more complicated.