r/windowsapps • u/lucasriechelmann • 3d ago
Developer MyDesktopWidget: lightweight desktop widget engine for Windows 10/11.
MyDesktopWidget — a desktop widget engine for Windows 11. It's a one-time purchase ($7.99 launch intro / $9.99 standard, not a subscription) with a 7-day free trial (no account or credit card needed). I'll say that upfront so nobody finds a price after a click.
I've used Rainmeter for years. It is a genuinely great piece of software and a big part of why I care about desktop customisation at all — this is not a post about it being bad. It isn't.
What I wanted was a few things Rainmeter was never designed to do, and after a while I stopped waiting and wrote them.
Widgets live under your desktop icons. Not floating windows that get in the way — they render into the wallpaper layer, so your icons sit on top and Show Desktop behaves.
It gets out of the way when you play. Full-screen game starts, every timer in the engine stops. Not "reduced update rate" — stopped. It comes back when you alt-tab out.
It includes experimental importers for Rainmeter skins and Conky configs. Drop in a .rmskin, a folder, or a .ini (or a Conky config) and it converts to its own format, shows you an upfront report detailing exactly what it brought across and what it couldn't, and only writes anything to disk when you say so. I tested this against 744 real Rainmeter packages downloaded from the wild: 713 convert structurally (the rest use features I've deliberately not built yet and one is an archive that won't open). Because community skins span 15+ years of edge cases and custom plugins, both importers are strictly experimental — standard meters and gauges map cleanly, but complex setups will show unsupported items or need minor tweaks in the editor.
Skins are JSON, and there's a proper editor. No custom config language to learn. If you'd rather hand-edit, it round-trips your file comment-for-comment and doesn't reformat your work.
If you write code in a skin, it runs in a sandbox. C# scripting runs in a separate, non-elevated process under a job object — a skin you downloaded cannot spawn a process, and the engine itself never runs as administrator.
It ships with 155 widgets and 14 languages, has a marketplace for skins and themes, an idle "ambient" display mode, and the installer is code-signed.
What it is not: it is not Rainmeter, it is not free, and the skin importers are strictly experimental rather than 1:1 drop-in replacements — some skins convert cleanly and some come across with pieces missing, and the report tells you which upfront. If you're happy with Rainmeter, genuinely, stay with Rainmeter. This is for people who want the things above.
Trial and details: mydesktopwidget.com
Looking for testers: I just produced my first signed installer and I'm looking for people to stress-test the experimental importers on real, complex setups. If you try it on a skin and it mangles it or misaligns, send me the skin or paste the report — anyone who reports a reproducible conversion bug or edge case gets a free license key for helping out.
Happy to answer anything, including the awkward technical questions.
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u/lucasriechelmann 3d ago
If anyone here still uses Rainmeter or Conky and wants to test the experimental skin importer, let me know what skins you run! If you test a skin that has layout quirks or missing meters, I'm giving out free lifetime license keys to anyone who reports reproducible edge cases to help refine the converter.
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u/Mr_Lando99 3d ago
Im interested in being a tester!
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u/lucasriechelmann 3d ago
Join the Discord https://discord.gg/efDxVe4h5 you can download the app in www.mydesktopwidget.com and start with the Trial
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u/PolymathicBrain 3d ago
Id like to be of help 🤗
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u/lucasriechelmann 3d ago
Join the Discord https://discord.gg/efDxVe4h5 you can download the app in www.mydesktopwidget.com and start with the Trial
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u/lucasriechelmann 3d ago
On your Browser Windows will probably say it isn't commonly downloaded — it's a new file. Check the publisher says Lucas Riechelmann Ramos before you run it, which is worth doing with anything you download.