Windows users have been a little left out of all the recent API fun. I myself don’t use Windows, but since it’s クリスマス today I figured I would download a trial of Windows 8 and port my WaniKani + GeekTool desktop widget to Windows.
This version looks pretty much identical to the Mac version even though it was rewritten from scratch. The most noticeable difference is that it uses Segoe UI instead of Helvetica Neue as default typeface. Also, it relies on Rainmeter instead of GeekTool. Rainmeter is in most ways vastly superior to GeekTool, and makes the installation process much simpler for the end user.
Here are the steps to follow: 1. Download and install Rainmeter 2. Download and install my Rainmeter skin: http://cl.ly/0u0L1R3Y001l 3. Right click the Rainmeter icon on the Taskbar and select “WaniKani” -> “Edit Skin” 4. Go to http://www.wanikani.com/account, copy your API key, and paste it on line 13 of WaniKani.ini after “APIKey=”. Save the edited file. 5. Right click the Rainmeter icon on the Taskbar and select “Refresh all” (or wait 5 minutes for the skin to refresh automatically). 6. Move the skin to where you would like it to be by clicking and dragging it (but make sure to click directly on the text or icons, or it won’t move).
Optionally, you can customise many things, such as the colour of the text and icons, by making very simple edits to the code in WaniKani.ini. Most of what you might want to change is located in the top 30 lines of the file, and I’ve added comments to make things easier. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. A good website to find nice colours and their RGB values is http://www.colourlovers.com/.
The icons I included are from the Iconic icon set and are licensed under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence. Here’s a link to the author’s website: http://somerandomdude.com/work/iconic/.
Hope you enjoy! (=^ェ^=)
Edit: Posted a slightly improved version which displays the current time instead of the time obtained from the API request for “Next Review” when the next review is available now. Since the skin only fetches new data every 5 minutes (so as not to overwhelm the WaniKani servers), this meant that the Next Review time displayed was in the past four minutes out of five when you had reviews available now.
Edit 2: If you decide to install Rainmeter in portable mode, check out Psycoder’s extra steps (third post on first page).
Edit 3: If you want to display a 24h clock, replace the timeConvert.lua file in C:\Users\Your_Username\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\WaniKani\ with this one: http://cl.ly/code/2l0Y0Q321Y0m/timeConvert.lua
If you install Rainmeter in portable mode (as opposed to the standard install mode) there are some slight differences: 2.5) To install a new skin, open the Rainmeter install directory and run SkinInstaller.exe to find and install the new skin (since the rmskin type will not be registered by any program) 3) The skin will not be installed in the users directory but rather as a subfolder to the Rainmeter install directory 3.5) If you need a text editor, you should get Notepad++ (ok, this is not really necessary for the install but it is a great text editor)
If you install Rainmeter in portable mode (as opposed to the standard install mode) there are some slight differences: 2.5) To install a new skin, open the Rainmeter install directory and run SkinInstaller.exe to find and install the new skin (since the rmskin type will not be registered by any program) 3) The skin will not be installed in the users directory but rather as a subfolder to the Rainmeter install directory 3.5) If you need a text editor, you should get Notepad++ (ok, this is not really necessary for the install but it is a great text editor)
Thanks for the additional instructions! I personally like Sublime Text more than Notepad++ (and I usually work on mac or Linux), but it isn't free (nor "free") software. The trial never expires though, it just asks you to consider buying it every once in a while. If you use it a lot I'd definitely recommend buying it just to support the developer, though. It really is a fantastic piece of software.
scottwuzhear said...I'm actually working on a Windows 8 Metro app for WaniKani. I should have a release in a week or so.
I look forward to seeing that! I don't know C# or C++, so that wasn't really an option. I'd never written anything in Lua either, but it's more similar to the languages I'm used to working with.
finnra said...
Oh boy! You've saved me the effort of making this, if I could have even. I hate Regexp.
Here's what it can look like if you already have a system set up, and yes, it was very easy to modify how it looked:
xkcd.com/208/ Rainmeter is all about customisation. Post your desktops, I want to see what you come up with!
Thanks! Finally a good reason to start playing with rainmaker, and it was very easy to setup with your small tutorial Hopefully it helps me to keep on track with the reviews
