Download Rainmeter 2.1 r790 beta

Recently, a beta of Rainmeter 2.1 was released. Rainmeter is a program that allows you to customize the desktop of a Windows PC. For example, it is possible to display all kinds of information as a kind of overlay, such as free space on the hard disk, network activity and whether there is new e-mail. Functional applets can also be used to, for example, make notes or send tweets. The release notes for version 2.1 look like this:

What’s new in Rainmeter 2.1

• Added support for Aero Glass “blur” effects on skins!
  This will allow you to have the Windows Aero effect, where your desktop background is “blurred” behind your skins or parts of skins. Windows Vista or Windows 7 is required or the new settings are ignored by Rainmeter. see Aero Blur for details and an example skin.
• Improvements to FolderInfo plugin.
  FolderInfo now returns size in bytes. If using InfoType=FolderSizeStr, (which until now autoscaled the value internally) AutoScale=1 should be added to the meter(s). While this does change the behavior, it allows for the use of Scale, NumOfDecimals, etc. that weren’t possible prior to this change without an extra Calc measure.
• Fixes InputText plugin failing if a “config name” folder had a space in it.
• Fix for the CoreTemp plugin to address a mutex handle leak.
• Added image caching system to the internal Rainmeter code.
  Reduces memory resources when a single image is used repeatedly in a skin. For example, you might create a single image with multiple areas, and use ImageCrop to display some area based on the value of a measure. Rainmeter will no longer load the image multiple times in memory.
• New option for Uptime meter
  Setting added to disable the addition of days to hours when days (%4) is not specified in the Format= setting. Use AddDaysToHours=1/0 to control this option.
• Some bug fixes and improvements to VirtualDesktops plugin from Patrick at Dexpot
• “Silent” installation of Rainmeter now available.
  Instructions and settings available at Rainmeter Installation.
• Rainmeter development environment updated to Visual C++ 2010.
• Rainmeter now requires WinXP SP2 / Win2003 SP1 / WinVista or Win7.
  Support for Win2k (Windows 2000) is not provided in the new VC++ 2010 development environment.
• More changes coming soon! Check back once a week on Sunday for the latest version.