We all develop our own ways of doing thins, especially when it comes to any form of layout or design however that presents itself.

Thanks for the lessons @Jorge.

I have found for just me, that I agree with @Picco14 in a lot of things and also with @Nexter- That basically, there are not a lot of situations where the amount of information available is needed.

I am going with the simplest approach I know will work 100% of the time. It works for my needs in themes as a skinner. In this case, less is more. Double-clicking and mouse-overs bring up everything. I have tried a multi and a different gauge. Picco14 I think is right, it responds similarly to a Net meter but for me it is too much even though I like gauges and meters. I think it would need to be by itself with no information and no icon to work and feel right if I do one, and be larger (Padding).

Anyway, I doubt I will use more than two pieces of information in any module for the most part. Below suffices for me for the most part. from the Dragon theme.

Another option which will work in different theme scenarios.

Well if there are no more changes I will finish off the remaining 60% of my themes.
I 'ramble' too much anyway. I've pretty much got it other than changing colors of the disk drive letters

Cheers

You should probably use more frames because of the smooth meters feature: I used 25 frames for the %used space graph in the CoreDisk theme, which is what enables that initial "filling up" animation.

If smooth meters is on - and it is by default - instead of "jumping" from one state to the other every second, during that second the application cycles through the in-between frames in what is supposed to be a smooth animation. Too little frames and the animation becomes jerky.



It could work, but it's probably not ideal... I would use two individual bars like in the DarkTech network module, but that decision truly is up to the theme author.



Yes, that will happen with some drives. The disk meter tries to get this info in all the standard ways, but some drives (especially those behind USB bridges) have proprietary protocols.

Applications like AIDA64 are able to get that info because they reverse engineered the protocol and have a hardware database of hundreds of "exception" cases. Even AIDA64 required an update before it could read SMART data for my USB Samsung T7 Touch, for instance.

Up to you as the theme author, but keep in mind that one of the biggest advantages of a free form desktop module is the ability to display more information than it's possible using the iconic format. Display basically the same information and the user might as well not show the desktop module at all.

I can see your point. Temperature is not readily available normally and many people like to know how much space they have left.
Every piece of information is available on double-click and mouse-over tells them Volume, File system, drive type as well.

Also keep in mind that while I certainly have themes that can accommodate plenty of room to have every single piece of information as well as graphs, multi's and gauges, some cannot. Nature of the beast (theme).

I enclosed two I just finished. I did one with everything and while I can fit it in, it does not look right with the rest, whereas this does. I could add Drive type in and I can even do the multi like the others very easily. I am also very conscious of 'overkill' too. In the Emojis theme, I actually used the same 3/4 circular multi and got the R/W working - it was overkill with the others... for me that is...I probably have gone overkill in some themes... maybe I became more aware of my own shortcomings as I did more, or got better with practice, who knows?

Additionally, I also have a couple where the horizontal has only two and the vertical is decked out with information including R/W. This is because it simply worked better with the theme. I agree functionality is important, but there also has to be a balance wouldn't you agree?

I do not disagree with you Jorge - I am assessing on a theme by theme basis which I believe is practical.

for example - the two below... the second is based more on information.





P.S - The reason it was overkill Jorge in the Emojis theme is because to get it to look right requires two of the 3/4 circle multi's - In horizontal they have to sit under each other to look right (one for each) and side-by-side in verticaL. It was too much. It looked ok, it just became too big even with only the two bits of information that you see above. This is because while this image only has 4 drives, that is eight meters. On someone's system with 10 or more drives, it would be massive.

Huge modules are not desirable either, but keep in mind that modules can be scaled DOWN as well as up (although scaling down a desktop module, unlike scaling up, uses CPU resources, kind of negating all the optimization I did for the disk meter module).

When I create a skin and test it is at 100% and I scale it down to 70% to see if ii is still readable. Some fonts, 7 seems to be the smallest, others it is much too small.

I used to do a 90% but that's unproductive because it is not a true indicator.

User selectable
Larger graph and R/W info Horizontal or
The user can select more compact vertical.



I will do on a few depending on theme. There is one particular them I will do a multi, gauge and histogram much to people's wishing I would avoid it. I have to do one... then I can at least say I have done it.



Anyone wishing to test their read graphs etc out... just run an 'analyze' in defrag will get the read happening.
If you want to see both work hard, run a full defrag on non-SSD's.

Ok have a rhythm now. I am staying away from any gauges that are not obvious.. I have enough things I do to think outside of the square.
Changed direction in the disk in this one completely. This is about as much as i will put in any module.

Just a general observation of something I noticed in the last few themes. I think this is probably a limitation of the mod itself - the multi histogram shows both read/write in the same colour, which seems utterly pointless as you can't tell at a glance which is which!

Spot on with the colors but the fault lies with me Nexter...

I haven't finished all of them. For the greater part this is the last step. I also am testing it with defragmentation for adjustments in where each graph line sits, so they can be seen separately. I am testing thinning/thickening simultaneously so I need to focus only on that and why I left until the very last.
It's me, not Jorge. As I believe I have mentioned, I do not mind showing my development stages in skinning.. nicely picked up though.