ChaosApostle

I haven't been on my account in a long time. Not sure I plan to do anything new. Been busy with life / work. Time will tell if I come back or start something new even. I bought a WACOM pen tablet, my tower is fair enough, and I'm looking into potentially getting UltraFractal, so I could expand out more. Just not sure what I wanna do yet. I'm likely to create an entire alt account if I do. Getting really bored anymore and tired of not having artistic outlets. Harshin'.

We'll see how things go.

My PC had finally decided it wanted to do random shut offs a few months back and had to replace parts. I've been kinda on/off enough that I fully got out of sync with anything art and just got myself absorbed in life.

Not expecting to release anything more this year. I've yet to stumble on to too much art here lurking the few times I've returned.

Thanks anyone who finds anything to add, and anyone I missed to reply back that they were welcome for add/watch/comments.

peace

So yeah, I've kinda gone and dropped away once again.

Friends coming back from college and stuffs (Oblivion; Life) has as usually made me forget about the projects I had in mind.

I have been looking for a transparent glass texture for my rainmeter project.

I learned that the Windows 7 taskbar may be actually using Active X to create an active refraction of the image behind it.

I discovered this after stumbling across a how-to about making your own glass textures using refraction, and noticing changes in the taskbar as I switched between backgrounds over the past few years of having 7.

So yeah, I'll be likely to cycle back into rainmeter soon.

MTG + Oblivion + RL has me otherwise. lol, sorry.

It seems I'll be getting back into Rainmeter this year.

I also think I figured out why my first super huge project failed... I tried to integrate too many configs into one huge config, and it caused a bunch of errors.

If any coders ever read this, Rainmeter needs a program to check syntax of Raincodes in INI files and report back what issues are going on (sort of like HTML/JAVA code syntax/error check programs).

Not sure if that's way extreme a request, but yeah, it is something it could certainly use.


Anyway, I've been working on a new skin suit project just starting out as of last week: chaosapostle.deviantart.com/ar…

...and I'm additionally working on chaosapostle.deviantart.com/ar…, which I may also integrate into the aforementioned project.


Either way, it looks like I may get back into a sort of pace of submitting things. It may be a little erratic, but we'll see how it all goes. I mean, I did kind of drop out, come back, drop out again, and then now back again, so... who knows?


Peace!

I figured I'd talk about this, granted I've been focusing more time on my own desktop recently.

I've been watching the rainmeter deviations for a while now, and I notice a few things.

Mainly that many of the works posted are either individual works, or an entire suite of works.

Yet, also that there is a general abundance of rainmeter skins taking up the majority of the end-user's visual desktop space.

I've notice that this has spurred the use of three countermeasures:

1) Horizontal taskbars that condense several meters into it, either built into a single vertical meter or you have to pick and place the meters over the bar

2) Launchbars that toggles visibility of available meters, but needs to be altered to support the meters that the user wishes to toggle, (IE: They don't want a certain app launcher, or they want the HDD meter toggle to show a 3 HDD meter instead of a 2 HDD meter).

3) Meters that can be hidden off to the edges of the screen, sort of like tabs, or condense themselves to a smaller form when you toggle them.


Yet, those three measures are not implemented often enough.

The thing is, when customizations are not adaptable and flexing to the end user, it lowers the quality of the work, because that quality is equal to how well it can satisfy the end user, and be an effective enough work that several end-users will use it without saying, "I like it, but I'm torn as it clutters my desktop/does not go well with my desired wallpaper."

Most rainmeter skins have yet to show the full potential of the adaptability and power of rainmeter, specifically that it can do it all with out obtruding the vast majority of the user's desktop, and still be easy to manage and operate. Probably because it requires a lot of organization in the coding, time, or simply patience and persistence to see a vision through.

Yes, I'm saying that for the time being my spark to create meters is starting revive, and I may take another swing at the project that has been sitting... in fact, I now have a new, but somewhat similar idea inspired by what I had accomplished and what new works of others that I've had the chance to experience using.