YGKtech

About 8 months ago I said I was going to start uploading my photos to DA.  What happened instead was that I continued to take a ton of photos and only upload them to facebook and Flickr.

I've just uploaded a small sample of my work (like 30 or so of the 1,700 images I've released).  If you've found your way to my profile and want to see more of my work, the best place to follow me is on facebook:YGK, or on Flickr

Sometime in the near future I'll be uploading a lot of new content to this profile.  For those of you that have followed me since I started releasing Skins for the Rainmeter platform, you should know that this new content will not be anything related to desktop modification, it will be photography, specifically Cosplay Photography.

Originally this account was just for my Rainmeter work, but for the last few years I've just been providing support for my old skins, not creating anything new.  But I've reached a point where I need to start promoting my photography on more sites, and I believe DA has a fairly substantial appetite for Cosplay Photography.  I could create a new profile, but that would make it more difficult to watch for comments on my Rainmeter work, which I still get questions about.

If you follow my page and are not interested in seeing my photography, you may wish to stop watching my profile, I probably won't be uploading new Rainmeter content any time soon.  If you enjoy Cosplay Photography, or aren't sure whether you'll like it or not, you can check out my work here: www.facebook.com/YGKphotos/

I'm not sure when I'll start uploading my photos to DA, I'm in the process of editing a few shoots right now, and I have about 20 galleries from the past year to upload.  I'll probably only upload a few select images from each shoot to DA, but that could still result in hundreds of images, so if you continue to watch my profile, prepare for your notifications to be flooded.

    I realized I hadn't updated this page for a year or two, and the project my last post covered has died, so I figured it was time for a new post.

    Since I got my current job a couple years ago I haven't been very active on this site, I've only gotten busier since then and don't really expect that to change any time soon.  Right now I'm finishing up a degree in computer science, working part time, and doing some academic research, all of which involve some amount of programming, so it's tough to motivate myself to sit down and work on a rainmeter skin.  I still like creating interfaces, and have no shortage of ideas for cool skins, but for now I'm just helping out whenever someone asks me a question, not really making any new contributions.

    I keep an eye on my DA messages, so if you ever need help with a skin I made, leave a comment and I'll try to get back to you quickly.

For the past couple months I've been working with the creators of a new site called ScreenSuit.  The site is a host for all forms of customization work (screenshots, skins, themes, etc...), and in time will include social networking tools as well.  The long-term goal is to build a community centered around customization, which will motivate designers like myself to make more and better customization tools, and make them more accessible to everyone.

While the site isn't about Rainmeter, a lot of it's early content is coming from the Rainmeter community, myself included.  At the moment, the site has a modest selection of skins, but it grows every day, and as more people visit the page more designers will upload their work to the site.

The website is free to use, ad-free, and easy to navigate.

P.S. All of my future skins will be released on ScreenSuit a week before they are released on DA, and once the site is large enough, I will make them ScreenSuite exclusives, (at least partially because uploading a skin on DA is much harder than on SS, and your skins are more or less invisible until the rainmeter group accepts your invite, ScreenSuit doesn't have that problem).

I sat down today and decided to start making a resource monitor.  Lacking any inspiration for style I was just working on the foundation, learning my way around the various measures and plugins I would use.

That lasted for about 10 minutes.

I quickly decided I would want a lot of information displayed, more for aesthetic reasons than anything else.  But I still needed a good way to display that information.  It couldn't be a block of text or it would be useless, I wanted something small enough that I could have it stay on top of any open windows on my secondary monitor, and most importantly; it had to fit the style of Project Ghost.

Flashing back to before I was making my own skins (a brief 2 week period between installing Rainmeter and publishing my file browser XD) I remembered the shapes of organiC.  And just like that I had found my inspiration.

MOAR HEXAGONZ!!!!!1!1!!

Drawing on the geometry I learned from Hexagonads 2.0, I will make an array of small hexagons, each displaying a different statistic.  Beyond that I'm not quite sure, I have a lot of ideas floating around right now and I'm not ready to commit to decide on any of them yet.  But I have some ambitious features in mind, this should end up being one of my better skins.

A quick look at the skin is available here, this is just the beginning but it gets the idea across well enough.