2016 JDO Rainmeter calendar planning

It's that time of year again when I ask everyone what kind of calendar they want for the upcoming year. This thread will be used for all stages of planning, including design plans, volunteer sign up, etc. So, let's get started. The first thing that needs to be addressed is what style calendar should be made. I have a few examples:

And here's what the current 2015 calendar looks like.

If you find a rainmeter style calendar you'd like that's not above, please feel free to suggest it! As of right now, I still have plenty of time to write to required code. Suggestions for possible features (I.E. the notepad) can also be suggested now since those will most likely impact to type of calendar(s) that can be made.

 

That's deferentially an option. Having the text like that is a big space saver too. I like.

 

I like option D
its different, If you could, could you incorporate the weather, disk / mem usages widgets into it???

Also I have all kinds of images to offer, I can get you what you want.

 

Disk and RAM are easy. Weather will require an outside source, but there's plenty of documentation to accomplish this, so yes, this can be done as well.

 

Thanks. I like multifunctional rainmeters

 

....ahhh I remember 2013 that was a fun time!
I like calenders with more room for designs like A and B
I see it as lazy and not creative to just place a render and be done with it, I can give you 12 renders right now and boom 2016 is done!

 

This is part of why I'm gathering ideas. I know, design wise, some are simpler. As for the code I have to type, it all depends. Option D for example, requires a hefty amount of code in comparison to C. I'm not saying less code is better. The more I add, the cooler the calendar/desktop widget (since it looks like I'll be adding this kind of stuff).

 

*Peers around*

Okay, so my thoughts...

Template A: No good, too bulky and rather time consuming to make - Limits community participation or makes them feel like it is too big, as we found in the first year.

Template B: Lots of room for customisation but a bit too bulky still.

Template C: Simpler and rather smooth but ideally needs some rescaling or else it will take up too much room (or the info will be too small in relation to the image)

Template D: By far the most apt of the 3 due to size and scaling of information and image, buuuut, whilst practicality is nice, it has the problem of not offering much room for community interaction and customisation.

A few current thoughts: Needs to have scaling, that makes it less intrusive to the desktop and takes up only as much room as the user wants - The last years one was rather apt at doing this I find in my uses of it and I would hope others agree since that was the main aspect of my design for it - Though on a side comment the text area felt a little... clunky and needs refinement. This is likely a flaw on my side as I wasn't too specific with Kiri on it and gave them minimal information around it.

COMMUNITY! This is a massive part of the Calendar and due to time constraints and a few others reasons, sacrificed last year - This is something I would like to avoid again.

Over all, we need a template that is streamline, fitting and displays the info and image with good scaling. The images need to be community created and creative. One idea is submitting a bunch of images and dividing them over the year or to create image packs and themes. Could also submit images for each month and arrange them based on that - Some months may have more images than others, but would create more openness for the community to do as they like. We also need to consider themes; use them? Don't use them? Perhaps more open monthly themes would be best or as mentioned before 'theme packs' so you can pick and choose, buuut again, perhaps not most ideal as having all images available would be nice.

A few other thoughts; multiple designs and themes for the template? Choose between colours and designs? But this makes more work for Kiri if they code it.

For now, this is just a few thoughts and considerations to go over.

 

@Sporadic Sadly, it's been the opposite, for a few reasons. The main one is, though, that I want to make the calendar/desktop app that the community wants. I don't mind if it takes me for time to code and debug. Sadly, there's been very little input as to what people want to see. Some have spoken here or to me directly, but not enough to where I feel comfortable even making a concept in Photoshop. I can make Rainmeter do just about anything I tell it to. I can make each month look very different (to an extent) if that's what's wanted. Ideally, I'd like to know and have my concept image done my the end of this month. Then November would be any community work (I estimate ~12-30 images will be required depending on design), followed by December having myself coding everything together.

Spoiler: The other reason

The other reason is I've lost a good chunk of my data. I off-loaded the data from my OS to my 3TB external HDD, reformatted my PC, only to have my external drive become un-mountable. While trying to resolve this, the GPT get messed up, destroying the data. I had not choice by to remake the GPT, thus formatting the drive. So everything that was on my PC (the backed up data) and originally on the external both got lost. PSDs, documents, etc. I'm just glad I keep additional could backups of my critical data.

 

I'd suggest option D since you're looking for more opinions from the community.