Version v1.8
————
September 2018
This version represents another not insignificant refactor which allows us to
do a whole bunch of stuff we couldn’t do previously. You should review the
readme.txt, there’s lots of new information there.
There may be things I’ve broken that I haven’t discovered yet. Your current
ini file will need modifications to bring it up to speed but it might be
simpler to just start again with the new one. Let me know if something breaks
that hasn’t been mentioned here.
Change 1: The first upshot of the big refactor is the addition of the
‘display’ template property to every item. This allows you to control how the
data is displayed. See the items section above for details. This also means
the ‘shortdisplay’ property is gone; you set your own display.
Change 2: The second upshot of the big refactor is that many items now offer
multiple values for display. You decide which values you want by using
replaceable parameters in the display template. Not all items have fully
implemented this yet, more to come in future releases.
Change 3: The third upshot of the big refactor is a whole new formatting
system included with the display template. You now have much more control over
numbers, dates, times, bytes, speeds and booleans. See the Formatting
sections above for much information.
Change 4: The custom WMI item has also undergone a major renovation and is
much more useful now. The ‘property’ and ‘format’ options are gone and
replaced with the ‘display’ template option. As with the other items, the WMI
display template option allows you to specify the complete text you want to
display including any and all returned wmi property values. You can add your
own custom text as well as multiple values and formatting. See the Custom WMI
section for details.
Change 5: The WMI item can now display multiple rows. If your wmi query
returns more than one row, additional rows will be added to the display.
Change 6: Added HTTPGET item. This item will make a simple HTTP GET request to
the given source url and display whatever it returns. Useful for displaying
your public ip for example. See the Http Get section for more information.
Change 7: Removed SCREEN and OSVERSION items. They are returning innaccurate
information so we’ll use the WMI call instead. See the ini file.
Change 8: Removed BIOS, OEMPRODUCT, MOTHERBOARD, PRINTER, PRINTERSTATUS,
DEFAULTPRINTER, UTCTIME items. These are all wrappers for WMI calls so now
we’ll just use WMI directly with some nice formatting. See the ini file for
the replacements.
Change 9: Fixed problem reading registry key with a comma in the name. A comma
in a registry key should be preceded by a backslash. See above for more
information.
Change 10: Added FILEEXIST item. Displays whether the given file exists. See
the section above for details and the ini file for an example.
Change 11: Fixed column 1 auto width calculation.
Change 12: Added LOADTIME which is the time of day that Desktop Info was
executed.
Change 13: Changed process priority from ‘idle’ to ‘below normal’. I don’t
expect this to have any impact other than the display refreshes are a little
smoother.
Change 14: Speaking of display refreshes, I’ve hopefully streamlined it some
more to reduce unnecessary redraws.
Change 15: If an item color is not defined it will take on the color of the
previous item. In this way you set the color of the first item in a block and
all successive items will be the same.
Change 16: ALLIPADDRESS now puts one entry per line so if you have multiple IP
addresses, there will be multiple lines. Might have found the bug where it
crashes when a network interface goes away.
Change 17: Added FILECONTENTS1 and FILECONTENTS2 for displaying the contents of
a text file.
Change 18: Removed SUBNETMASK and MACADDRESS sub-items and added them as a
second and fourth value (%2 and %4) to IPADDRESS.
Change 19: Added subnet class as a third value to IPADDRESS.
Change 20: Added subnet mask and class as second and third values to
ALLIPADDRESS.
Change 21: Now correctly resets it’s position when the desktop size changes
(maybe).
Change 22: Added ‘noresults’ option to the language files which is displayed
when a query returns no rows, eg WMI.
Change 23: More improvement in language support. All ‘text’ has been moved out
of the desktopinfo.ini file and into the language files. Each key in the
language file is either an item id or a language id (lid) in the
desktopinfo.ini file. See the section above for more information. Consider the
‘text’ option in the desktopinfo.ini file deprecated.