Vista Sidebar Gadgets

[tigerboyce]

Jast wanted to find out what gadgets people are using and which ones do you reccomend (obviosly not the standard ones) i really like the MultiMeter and the piano one, which you can drag onto the center of the screen and have a peiona to play on

Which ones do you use and reccomend?

[TiG]

I hate vista's sidebar with a passion. It did nothing but annoy the hell out of me, it has been permanently turned off.

TiG

[dangel]

I never got the whole hatred thing - it's sat behind other windows by default and you can even hide it and still have gadgets on the desktop (which is what I do). I like the rev-counter alike memory and cpu monitor, the dilbert gadget, clock and weather gadgets. I've been looking for a multi-clipboard gadget (like there is under yahoo widget engine) for a while (perhaps I should write one).
Different strokes..

[Splash]

I have the multimeter one, the clock, the RDP and a speedfan one which shows temps. All sat across on my second monitor so I can monitor stuff like CPU load and temperature while gaming on my main screen.

[tigerboyce]

i also use the Xenography gadget which is a language gadget where you trace the letters, usefull to top up on my japanese learning

[Blademrk]

I've got a Clock, HDD monitor, GMail Monitor, MSN Live monitor, and a Standby/Switch Off/Reboot gadgets. I've been looking for one which ties into X-box Live so I can see if I've got any messages or who's online without having to resort to logging into Xbox.com.

[lanceuppercut]

i've never found any useful sidebar gadgets that i would use. clock sidebar, whats the point, there a perfectly good one in the systray, cpu usage, again task manager does a good job, theres nothing that special i cant do with a shortcut, firefox extension or that is already built into vista..

[rox0r]

Absolutely love sidebar, I came from the Samurize camp though so it's second nature for me.

I use a nicely configurable simple clock, multimeter, a calculator, a top process jobby and the network utilization one which is just the dog's knees.

Oh and the UK radio one, marvelous is that one!

[Andy3536]

I really like the idea, and i use the clock, C2D meter, Latest news (although it's mostly from US or Microsoft), Radio which is good when web browsing and the weather channel one which gives you 3 day forcast. Also seen many sporting results such as baseball and would hope that by the time the new premeirship season starts they've got one of those made up!
Go Arsenal

[ajbrun]

What's the name of the radio, and what does it play?

[Andy3536]

It's called Uk radio player, it will play all national and some local radio stations (not local to me though)

[Parm]

Thread resurrection going on here.

I quite like the sidebar gadgets in Vista, they could be quite useful. Could has got to be the key word here though, does anybody know of any useful gadgets? I've used a few of the gadgets mentioned above but find a lot of them offer nice looking stats and such, but not much valuable or usable info. It'd be great to have gadgets that tied into other desktop apps.

Development on the gadget front seems to be slow and I'm surprised Microsoft aren't making more of their own to push it a little further. I've got a Radio Player gadget and I use WebGuide but other than that, it's pretty baron. Unless I'm looking in the wrong places.

It's also a shame that you can't customise the sidebar a little more. It'd be nice if you could keep individual gadgets on top of all windows.

/rant.

[Blitzen]

Im using this one at the moment

Full system spec information one

[s_kinton]

I use:
Clock
Multimeter
Wirless signal
Weather bug
Radio player

Dont really fin any of them essential, just nice to have really. Alot more could be done with the sidebar.

Dreamscene is still in beta and looks like it will be forever, so I wouldnt expect too much on the development side from MS. The so-called windows ultimate extras are terrible.

[this_is_gav]

Dreamscene is still in beta and looks like it will be forever, so I wouldnt expect too much on the development side from MS.

Erm no, it was released as final in September - I rather like it, and given the right hardware and choice of scenes it has next to no impact whatsoever.

[ikonia]

Windows Live Gallery


a fantastic tool