Rainmeter is a free, open-source platform that enables skins to run on the desktop. Rainmeter allows you to display customizable skins on your desktop, from hardware usage meters to fully functional audio visualizers. You are only limited by your imagination and creativity.
Rainmeter is the best known and most popular desktop customization program for Windows. Enhance your Windows computer at home or work with skins; handy, compact applets that float freely on your desktop. Rainmeter skins provide you with useful information at a glance. It's easy to keep an eye on your system resources, like memory and battery power, or your online data streams, including email, RSS feeds, and weather forecasts.
Many skins are even functional: they can record your notes and to-do lists, launch your favorite applications, and control your media player - all in a clean, unobtrusive interface that you can rearrange and customize to your liking. Rainmeter is at once an application and a toolkit.
Rainmeter is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 license.
About Rainmeter 4.3:
- Direct2D and Hardware Acceleration. Rainmeter 4.3 has changed entirely from using an older GDI+ graphics engine in Windows to the more modern and capable Direct2D (known as D2D for short). Not only does D2D offer additional capabilities we will be taking advantage of in the near future, but it also allows us to optionally support hardware acceleration. (known as HWA for short) This means that some of the processing, and the memory used, can be offloaded from the CPU to the GPU, and things will be rendered or "draw" significantly faster.
- Hardware acceleration defaults to "off". This to help us to identify general issues that might come up with the conversion from GDI+ to D2D, and isolate any problems that are strictly related to hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration can be turned "on" in the Settings dialog, and we recommend it. Future versions will change the default to "on" in Rainmeter.
- Hardware acceleration and Intel HD integrated graphics: There is a known issue with certain Intel HD integrated graphics chips, often seen on laptop computers, and hardware acceleration. This is due to a bug in the drivers for these chips from Intel, and the problem can generally be solved by updating your system to the most recent version of the graphics drivers from Intel. Details and suggestions for this issue are at: Intel HD Graphics drawing issue(s) with hardware acceleration
- Reporting problems with Direct2D: We would be very interested in anything you see that is "different" for you when using Rainmeter 4.3. Things that looked different in Rainmeter 4.2. The goal here is to ensure that we fully protect backwards compatibility with existing skins in the change from GDI+ to D2D. Any skin you run in Rainmeter 4.2 should look and work exactly the same in Rainmeter 4.3. Please report these issues in this forum area: Rainmeter 4.3 D2D Issues.
- New Container Functionality. Added a new Container option to all meter types. This will allow you to place the contents of a meter inside another meter, acting as both a "container" and a "mask". See the documentation for important details and a .rmskin with several examples.
Download: Rainmeter 4.3 Build 3298 | 2.4 MB (Open Source)
View: Rainmeter Home page | Rainmeter 4.3 Release Notes
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