Well due to the desktop thread and the discovery of RainMeter I've been looking at creating some nice throw togethers so to speak though right now I'm just playing with the options. Currently I"ve only made one so far.

http://users3.ev1.net/~amfest/SMRrainmeterNetHD.jpg

Though all I did was edit and copy stuff over .. yea it is rather large towards the top but I have it set to lowest transparency (wish it could go to 0) and Fade in so i just have to move my mouse over it to see it. I was going to put a 13th drive but it's just a portable anyhow so I decided the 12 would be alright. At least now I don't have to worry about running out before my downloads finish

Anyone else made one? Created custom graphics?

Pretty cool work amfest! That's a lot of drives indeed!

I saw Drake edited the Ayuka skin for Rainmeter. Looks like he did a great job on that. I tried working with it too but I can't figure out what characters I need to change to get English text (no Japanese character support in my Notepad so I just get symbols I can't make out).
Drake, could you tell me what lines I need to change for that?


I'm currently using this "To heart 2" skin on my desktop.
I've modified it to display what I want, with UL & DL instead of Date and Uptime. And that one seems like it will be really convenient to make some new .png's of other characters and insert those. (Maybe I can create several skin packs, with each having a couple of rotating character from a specific anime?)
It's so handy that you can control the basic Winamp functions from it.


I've also tried the Suigetsu skin, that one's pretty nice. I also liked the Round Happines! skin, but that one tends to use 8% of CPU power constantly when using the higher speed animation or its Winamp controls.

humm I dont really know for the to heart skin cause I didnt download it,but if it's the same thing as the Ayuka one it shoul be easy
actually you just to try and change all the things written in japaneese (or the symbols) in the bloc note page you have when you want to edit skin and see where the characters you entred goes
so for the winamp thing I changed this one:

to have the currently playing and the "master drake" (god I like it Xp)
I also changed the suffix and prefix to make add the litte stars in the beginning and the end of the music played
like here:

as for the rest I didnt finish to try all the combinations,but just try change all the messages and see what you'v got ^^

I'm having a problem too. help required.

here's what I have so far.


sorry, Smithy I used the pic Kozue from your Mahoraba wall(it was the best pic of Kozue I had. T_T), quick/crappy edit in PS. -just to test out if it can work, and it does! I'll change it to my Chiyuri vector soon.
and I dropped the widgets for a while.
the pic of Saki before was a picture frame widget. but I've found something better with rainmeter.(Thanks to Fuwari) now I've got 7 for the price of one! At least this way I can see what pics I have on a reg. basis.

My problem is that, i think that it uses winamp. Is there a way to make this work with any other player?

EDIT:
We can't lose the links! If the desktop thread get's cut, it might be a pain.
rainmeter: http://vapaa.dc.inet.fi/~rainy/
rainmeter skins: http://sk2b.hp.infoseek.co.jp/

hmm yea a mahoraba skin that changes to different versions of kozue depending on time of day would be nice

I'm not sure how that would work but I know we can set it for a click event like click on her bells and a new image is reveleaed or something. Although clicking in certain locations to change images gets the ecchi wheels of BURNING turning

x_x

Especially with the playable audio files you can link in @_@

*cough*

I'll contiune my search though for random refresh that loads images so I can get eye blinking going on >_>

nice mahoraba skin solwyvern ,we can easly see the big fan here,as for you problem,I dont think it can work with any programm other than winamp since it's programmed to work only with it,so unless you change all the codes you have to use winamp ^^
oh and talking about winamp
for people who are searching for REALLY ABSOLUTLY BEAUTIFUL winamp skins you have to go see this webesite
http://blog.livedoor.jp/k_chitose/
there are real treasers there ,you just have to search a bit ^^

I translated the Ayuka skins; if anyone wants them, I'll send them however you want to transfer them.



Rainmeter can use other players; I've seen some skins that use the Lilith player. If you tell me what media player you're trying to use, I'll see if I can get it to work.



You could make it so that it changes both automatically and through a button event. I'll try making a basic skin like that.

actually there are other program things you can . . .there is an RSS feed thing you can use and recieve updates and such so yea you should be able to but I believe it works with some other install of something.

So if you can find a plugin for the player you want to use to control then there shoudn't be a problem or if there is a command line type command you can send you can use the !excute command

if you never noticed on Drake's maid if you click on her tie she changes to a different hairstyle and such.

So you just set hte first initial image then set the 2nd image but put it as hidden and in the case of the maid the code is



So I threw this after my base image



So if I click towards the top of my hard drive info my c-drive folder opens up. Set path to a program exe and it'll open the program. I'm not sure if commands like .exe -window sorta commands work but if your program can use that you can always make shortcuts that do it or batch files. *scratches head* I guess I'll have to contiune to read more on it. It's pretty interesting though I got ahold of a vector based 2d animation program so I"m not sure where my time is going >_<

O the quote plugin sounds interesting



I wonder if you can set a refresh on that so that after a certain amount of time it'll automatically choose a different image so you can have your different versions of a character load up

After another close read . . .what you're looking for is Windows Messages. But you need the codes and parameters to send to it so in the case of winamp you have to read the sdk to get that info

Thanks for the screenshots drake, now I can see where that text is. I just couldn't figure out where the Japanese symbols all exactly were in that skin since it came out as 'rubbish' text in my Notepad.
No I can find it and change it, thanks for your help, I appreciate it!



I think I can get it to work with drake's above explanation, but if you're willing to send a full english version to me, that'd be cool.



No problem, hey do you want the full size .psd cut-out image of Kozue only? It's 30MB large though...
It looks pretty good with that skin. Maybe I'll convert it to a smaller size and save a .png version of it to use in Rainmeter skins...

That would be great! please tell me what I need to change.


I'm still using Windows Media Player ver.10. If anyone can suggest a better player, that would be great. just not winamp. I don't really like it that much. *bad first experienceT_T*
and can somebody tell me please how to read the 4-set number colors?



That's alright. as you can see.

welp

Shuu Shuu RSS rainmeter feed

http://users3.ev1.net/~amfest/rainmetershuushuu01.jpg

I'll most likely adjust it and add some stuff.

damn......i have know idea how to make those things....can some one make a ruri hoshino one and send it to me PLEEEEEEEASE!

Well depends on what you want . . .

Why not start by downloading that maid one everyone has for winamp . .you know the one drake modified. Then just go to the folder in the skins DIR and Open up Ini and look through the images that are there. You can see the maid image .. actualy there are 2 of them with different hairstyles . you could just take a picture of ruri . . . cut her out nicely with transparent background . .save as png into that folder . .then open up the ini file for that skin and find the original image names and change them to your new image of ruri. Then slowly do that for other images. Then slowly see what they use to show info and just keep going from there

I'd help you but I'm not really an image guru >_< I'm just messing with trying to build up skins from a semi-scratch by looking at code from other skins and slowly adding/adjusting it in for my purposes. Need to put a refresh and a up and down arrow for the shuu shuu rss feed then it's off to make icons for shortcuts to the image board options and forum ^^

Well if you don't mind it . .i got bored found a pretty much already cut out ruri pic and switched it out on the rm_ayuka skin though I didn't adjust the japanese text and such . . .



Though I suggest changing out the menu background and maybe coloring the buttons to match.

You can grab that here

http://users3.ev1.net/~amfest/Ruri%20rm_ayuka.rar

Does your bad experience relate to the current -or previous version of- Winamp or to Winamp classic (meaning the fairly old 2.9 Winamp).
Because I use Winamp 2.95, a really old version, but it beats the hell out of all other mp3 players I tried. It's light, fast and uses little resources.

(I used TheCoreMediaPlayer for a while but it didn't perform very well.)



To quote Chiyuri-chan: 'good job'!

My E-shuushuu skin:


I have yet to work out the non-wallpaper format pictures. They're not very pretty like that.
On the bright side, it gets the 7 most recent pictures and puts them in a variety of formats (the SlideChange formats), with several shown there. It updates once an hour. Clicking on the pictures will open them in whatever's default on your computer. There are three buttons; one opens E-shuushuu, one manually refreshes the computer, and the last minimizes it to show only one picture.



You need to add in these lines of code:



(The third group of code refers to the specific button actions; you'll have to customize it for whatever skin/buttons you're using.)

These are the basic controls. Play and Pause do the same thing, so if you have separate buttons, they'll function the same. Unfortunately, WMP isn't well documented, so I don't know if/when I'll be able to get any more advanced features.



They're red, green, blue, and alpha (transparency).