Windows Sidebar: Quick Tour
First impressions of Windows Sidebar
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 by Island Dog | Discussion: Windows Sidebar
Windows Sidebar in Vista has had a lot of attention over the past year or so. Some people seemed to hate it, and some people seemed to love it. Some are even using DesktopX to create their own version of Sidebar so it they can use it on Windows XP. I never personally liked it much during the testing process, but I believe that was due to the fact that I had a smaller monitor and that it just took up too much desktop real estate for my liking.
Now
that I have widescreen monitors I have grown to like the Sidebar more, and with
the ability coming for
DesktopX 3.5 to export to Sidebar Gadgets, I find myself using it quite
often now. My biggest complaint so far is there is no way to auto-hide the
Sidebar. It would be nice to be able to activate it on mouse-over, but
that is not a feature available, and Microsoft told me there is no immediate
plans to do so.
I think most people know what the Sidebar in Vista is, but if not it's basically a pane on the side of your Vista desktop to keep your gadgets organized, and gadgets are mini-applications that can display information such as weather, CPU usage, news feeds, etc. We have already added a couple of galleries to WinCustomize for the Windows Sidebar, one for Sidebar Gadgets and one for Sidebar Styler. Sidebar Styler lets you customize the appearance of the Windows Sidebar.
Adding a Gadget to the Windows Sidebar is pretty simple. Gadgets have the file extension .gadget, and the two best places to get new gadgets is from WinCustomize.com or the Microsoft gallery. Once you download a gadget simply double-click to install, and it should show up immediately in your Sidebar. If you click the "+" button at the top of the Sidebar it will bring you to your installed gadgets, and from there you can search, add/delete, or find out more information about an installed gadget.
I just wanted to give a quick tour of the Sidebar, and I will visit it again after more extensive usage, and I'd also like to hear your views on it as well. So what is your opinions of the Windows Sidebar? Do you use it, and do you plan on creating some gadgets for it?
Reply #2 Thursday, March 1, 2007 7:05 PM
Reply #3 Friday, March 2, 2007 5:24 AM
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Reply #1 Thursday, March 1, 2007 3:42 PM