There have been a lot of important changes and improvements in recent weeks. We are highlighting some of them below, and be sure to see the "Change History" to see all changes.

- Two new bangs, !SetOption and !SetOptionGroup, to change properties on almost any meters or measures. You can now directly modify fonts and colors, resize images, update text, change calculation formulas, even create new button actions - and you don’t even need dynamic variables! This is a much cleaner, faster, and all-around better way to bend your arsenal of meters and measures to your will. (More.)

- To complement this, Lua for Rainmeter now includes a GetOption function to retrieve properties from meters and measures. This means that, using Lua, you can send and receive information about your skins’ properties without having to use any intervening measures or variables as a workaround. The whole skin is now at your fingertips. (More.)

- In the past, you could only send a bang with the value of a variable, not the literal “#variable#” tag. As of now, this is an option: by placing asterisks inside the tag, as in “#*variable*#”, you can escape variables and send the literal tag as a parameter. You can even use this to set “stacked” variables. The same feature also works with dynamic measure names! (More.)

- Not only can you now use substitutes on all measures, but we’ve also added regular expressions in substitutes. This incredibly powerful utility - the same as we use to retrieve information from complex webpages and RSS feeds - is now at your disposal for literally any data that goes through a Rainmeter measure. (More.)

Along with our universal NowPlaying plugin, support for Aero blur effects, and our continuing (and numerous) speed and performance improvements, Rainmeter 2.1 is shaping up to be a pretty delicious release!

Rainmeter 2.1 beta is fully backwards compatible with skins written for any version of Rainmeter, and you need only install the beta on top of your existing installation. No need to uninstall 2.0 or worry about overwriting changes you have made.

Added the NowPlaying media player plugin by developer and overall Rainmeter superstar poiru.

This is a new plugin to support multiple media players, with full support for AIMP, Foobar2000, MediaMonkey, MusicBee, iTunes, VLC, WinAmp, and WMP, and more! Partial support is also provided a bunch of other players such as Spotify. See the documentation at NowPlaying Plugin for details and usage instructions.

Added support for Aero Glass "blur" effects on skins!
This will allow you to have the Windows Aero effect, where your desktop background is "blurred" behind your skins or parts of skins. Windows Vista or Windows 7 is required or the new settings are ignored by Rainmeter. See Aero Blur for details and an example skin.