How-To: Deck Out Your Desktop with the 12 Best Rainmeter Skins

Posted 01/25/2010 at 11:00pm | by Paul Lilly

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RainBrowser

There's so much you can do with Rainmeter, it's easy to get overwhelmed, and that's where the RainBrowser helps out immensely. If you open up the Start menu and expand the Rainmeter folder, you'll find a shortcut to the RainBrowser. Or you can right-click the Sidebar or any of Rainmeter's applets and navigate to Configs>Manage Skins.

RainBrowser packs a bunch of useful information into an easy-to-navigate window, and if you're ever in doubt an applet's function, this is the place to look. Listed in the Active tab are all the active applets currently running. When you highlight an entry, the associated .ini file will be listed in the bottom box under Skins and Variants. If you click on this, RainBrowser's main box window will list out the configuration file's vitals, such as a description, instructions on how to use it, who designed it, the version number, and more.

Underneath this section you'll find two different sets of actions you can perform, one for just that applet (called a 'skin'), or global actions for all loaded applets. If you've made changes to an applet's configuration file, you'll need to Refresh Skin before the changes take effect, and you can do that here, among other self-explanatory actions (Unload Skin, for example).

You can also make visual changes to the applet by clicking on Edit Skin. Doing so updates the main window with different settings, allowing you do things like adjust the transparency, configure an applet to fade in, out, or hide when mousing over it, whether or not to make it draggable, and a few other options.

RainBrowser isn't required to manipulate a skin; you can make the same changes by editing the associated .ini file. To edit Enigma's Notes applet, for example, you would locate the .ini file on your hard, which is located at:

C:\[USERNAME\Documents\Skins\Enigma\Sidebar\Notes

Alternately, you can right-click the Sidebar and click Config>Edit Skins' Folder and navigate from there. Once there, double-click the Notes.ini file (or any other configuration file you want to alter) to open it up and edit as desired.

It's important to remember that everything that appears on screen is a skin/applet. This includes the Sidebar itself, which is nothing more than a vertical bar. Other applets that appear on the Sidebar aren't actually attached to it, they just sit on top of it. If you wanted to, you could move the Sidebar around your desktop and leave it unoccupied, or cover your regular desktop icons with.

By playing around with the Transparency and Fade In/Out settings, you can piece together a really slick looking desktop that will be the envy of any who see it.

RSS Feeds

One of the best ways to utilize Rainmeter is by setting up RSS feeds so you're constantly updated on whatever interests you -- be it world events or tech news -- no matter what you're doing. Setting them up, however, can be a little trickly, at least at first.

If you're running the stock Enigma skin-set, click the middle mouse button on the Sidebar to bring up the EnigmaConfigure window. You'll see three entries for RSS feeds, each of which can be customized. Highlight one of them and enter in the RSS URL you're interested in following. For Maximum PC, the URL is http://www.maximumpc.com/articles/all/feed. Press Set to save the change.

Next you need to enable the RSS feed to show up in the Sidebar. Simply right-click and navigate to Configs>Enigma>Sidebar>Reader>RSSReader and check ReaderRSS.ini.

There are two things to note here. First, any changes you make to each RSS's URL field won't be reflected until you refresh Enigma. Right-click and select Refresh All, and all of your applets will be updated with any new info. Secondly, if you want to give your RSS feeds a more descriptive title than 'News,' you'll need to poke around the actual .ini file. In this case, you can find them at:

C:\[USERNAME\Documents\Skins\Enigma\Sidebar\Reader

You'll see three folders here, RSS-Reader, RSS-Reader2, and RSS-Reader3. Each one contains an individual .ini file, so to change the title of the first RSS reader, open up the folder and double-click/edit ReaderRSS.ini. It may look a little confusing at first glance, but scroll down about halfway until you see:

[Title]
Meter=STRING
MeasureName=Feed
Text="News"

The Text entry is the one we're after, as we want a more descriptive title than just 'News.' Change this to something like Maximum PC News, and be sure to enclose the title in quotes. Save your changes, and then refresh Enigma as shown above.