sounds intersting. can't wait for more news.

source:
http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/...uly-7-2008.html

nothing interesting

Wow someone made a news article about making a news article later

I've become less and less interested in Paul Thurrott, because in the last few years he has come from pro-Microsoft, to pro-everyything-else. He jumps for joy when Firefox is released, but downplays the importance of the Vista release? What gives?

Ah, Paul Thurrott returns.

NEway, I imagine the removal of the sidebar is because serious work is being done to it, as it wouldn't make sense to remove a feature from Vista (no matter that only a small percentage of people use it). It's interesting that there will be some new themes, though being "Aero-based" are unlikely to reflect the final appearance. Nothing particularly exciting overall, though given the small amount of information available it is still interesting.

I was really hoping for Microsoft to develop a consumer 3D based desktop environment (not just 3D and "glass" effects that aero uses). This again looks like it's going to be a Vista update, which is kind of an odd direction to go in considering how much flaming Vista has been getting for being an "XP update."

I think Microsoft is mostly limited by their anti-trust suits. The bigt thing that Windows needs is some standarized and included software like antivirus.

I'm guessing the gadgets are still there but no longer have the sidebar to be docked to, judging from what we already know about gadgets in Windows 7.

THIS IS NOT NEWS

I'm just getting used to Vista myself, the business version. It works fine. Windows 7 will blow because they are trying way too hard to get it out ASAP.

the real problem is OEM's, in my honest opinion, built PC's with lackluster hardware. MS shares the blame to a degree.

need atleast 1GB ram, alot of systems had 512MB or ram and laptops as well. the release of vista was poor but with the release of SP1, it's all good here.

BUT!, if Linux devs would get off their butts, I'd rather use Linux. my canon DSLR needs linux drivers...badly

Worst News Article EVER


You can't post "A little bit of Windows 7 News" and say it is coming later.

We'll real comment is coming later, this is just a place holder.


what a waste of time. Quick, someone make a "what do you think of Windows 7 RC1" thread before it is too late

Can't wait to see new UI. Longhorn's concept UI spawned lot of good skins and concepts.

This is interesting Let's see how this pans out before we all mash Mr Thurrott.

Yeah, those lazy Linux Kernel Developers only offered free driver writing since Jan 2007.

Um... wait.... Who is it that needs to get off their butts? Oh. Your Canon company, for example.

It would be nice if people clicked on the source everyone once in a while and actually read the article before posting comments like, "worst news article ever". This isn't a news article in the traditional sense. It is a collection of news worthy events that Paul Thurrott puts together every week (usually on Fridays).

Sometimes it helps to know what the hell is going on


Thank you. At least someone in this thread is using some sense instead of spewing off random **** they clearly don't know what they're talking about.

why didn't you just post the news after he posted it? quit wasting people's time

Maybe he was wasting your time, but that doesn't mean he was wasting other people's time. Don't come into the thread. You wasted my time posting this ****.

The Sidebar will be removed; they don't even have a Sidebar team anymore. Not since launch.

judging by the responses in this thread, it seems he did. Great I wasted more time

/out

I wonder how many people actually use the sidebar? I haven't. I turned it off the day I installed Vista. I just can't find a use for it.

Blah blah blah...give them time jebus.

He does? I always read Paul Thurrott's articles, and I disagree. He always covers MS releases, even non-consumer oriented ones, such as Hyper-V.


They are? MS has always used a 3-year release cycle for Windows. Windows 7 is no different. If anything, MS is keeping their mouth shut about Windows 7 (which is good, because I like surprises that they can realistically implement).

I don't as well, I just turn it off as it takes too much screen space for me.

Scirwode

Yeah, they all moved into the shell. Where coincidently enough we've seen the sidebar gadgets move thus far.

Sad but true. Faulty drivers/lack of drivers/drivers with limited features are always blamed on the OS.

He seems to do that quite a lot. Write an article which basically says I'll be writing this later....

The sidebar is a joke, just to make ppl excitied bout vista when it first came out they couldnt think of anything new so they decided to add sidebar, first why do u need a clock on sidebar after years almost 20 years using windows i always look in the corner were the clock is why look on sidebar, half the stuff that came with sidebar is also useless as u want need it, firstly it also gets info from ametuer sites...tut tut. Man didnt see the sidebar like this since today but yeh i turned it of after a week or 2 no point to it

Meh. He said the developers weren't getting off their butts. A little different to call developers lazy than saying that the OS had limitations.

I find them quite useful. Especially the weather, stock price, seattle traffic, sticky notes, and of course my indexer status gadget. I also have the RSS gadget set up to show me when new downloads of my favorite shows are available.



And yet this thread has already has a second page*, heh.


(where page = 25 posts)

That's not what I meant, I didn't even mention "OS limitations". LOL
All I'm trying to say is: when a piece of hardware(software too btw.) doesn't work, they always blame the wrong "x". (x can be anything from windows to microsoft to windows devs and linux to linux devs and even OSX/OSX devs if something doesn't work on their hacked OSx86 machine.) Instead of blaming the company that made the piece of hardware and doesn't release decent drivers for it or cross-platform drivers.

Always the way, useless threads...

Last I heard, the Sidebar was turned in to part of Live, then just scrapped entirely. I don't know what happened to the team after that - the Shell team looks like a logical place for them to go, though I don't know what they're working on (if they've not just been integrated in to the various teams already in the shell team).

Apparently, someone pretty high up in the company had a lot of enthusiasm for the Sidebar, which is why they didn't scrap it pre-launch. A lot of people didn't even want it shipped in RTM.

I'm using OSX as my primary OS now, and I don't even use Dashboard that much. The dock icons are much more useful - for example, my torrent application (for catching up on those Linux builds, you know?) has download speed overlaid on its dock icon. Mail.App has unread message count overlaid on its icon. It's much more useful, and that seems to be the route Microsoft is taking as well - if recent taskbar screenshots are anything to go by. That said, it's a just a contextual service for applications - an entirely different philosophy from the Sidebar, which was meant to aggregate online services in to one place on the desktop.

From what I have been told and from what I have seen in the screen captures that have been floating around on Google, the Windows Sidebar has been integrated directly into the shell (Windows Explorer) and is no longer a separate entity, which in my opinion is a good move because now that it is part of the shell there should be more underlying APIs being developed for this next generation which can be exposed by gadget developers.

Right now, Windows Sidebar 1.0 (in Windows Vista) is flawed because of the lack of APIs (yes, you can hook in with .NET if you know what you are doing, but let's pretend you are an average Joe User and you want to make your own sidebar gadget). With more APIs exposed to potential developers and better tools (let's see some love for Gagdets in the next release of Visual Studio), I think that the ecosystem for Windows Sidebar gadgets would be richer, more robust, and most importantly more useful.

Hook it from .Net? I don't think so, you'll need native code for that.

Give them time? What I described was exactly what Vista was supposed to be way back when, and I think they've had more than enough time to get it right by now. All the features they slashed from Vista were my reasons for wanting it in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I love Vista and am using it on the two computers I have that can run it, but the only reason I own them is because 1 copy came with my Laptop and the other I got when I built my first computer and it was actually cheaper to buy Vista than XP. I'm all the time defending Vista, but when it comes right down to it, there aren't enough new features to have made me want to upgrade had I already owned an XP license.

My point is that Microsoft needs to do something drastic with the next release of Windows, and the fact that they're just building off of Vista at the moment seems troubling to me (actually, the very soon-ish release is what makes that *really* troubling). I haven't seen plans for that 3D interface I mentioned since way back before XP was released, but I thought it was a novel idea, given current graphics card availability and capability. Operating systems need to evolve with the equipment they are running on, and while the business sector doesn't care for a resource intensive 3D interface, the consumer(and I specifically mentioned "consumer" for a reason in my original post) aka home user might want something... different, and better organized, and yes, full of eye candy. Might as well do something with those beefy machines we all own.

Given the flak Vista has received for being not different enough from XP, I thought people would be on board with me in saying they shouldn't repeat that mistake twice.

But I guess I would be okay with a Vista add-on if it actually *did* include all the features Vista was supposed to have in the first place. The dedicated gaming mode was probably my most wanted feature, although now that I own a computer capable enough for the time being, I don't see too much of a need. Still, it would be nice to have nothing bogging your computer down when you're gaming in those more graphic-intensive games.

I hope the functionality of sidebar will be in the redesigned taskbar Makes more sense to me.



I use sidebar but find it takes up too much screen space. Got an Gadget showing my internet usage, network traffic, cpu usage and a clock.
But it more like a gimmick than something really useful. Needs redesign.



He has a name. Jim Allchin

I actually like the Sidebar. I really like the CPU gadget, and my calculator gadget.

IMO, it also adds a lot of nice eyecandy. If it's gone, I will be upset .

sidebar needs to be brought back to the level it was in the Longhorn beta (part of the shell and could be "merged" with the taskbar

and Aero being out is good news too, it looks cool for a bit but isn't very usable

Right. Just like how 'gadgets' work in Ubuntu ( my second fav OS ), this way the information they show is informative but not bloated in screen real-estate.

My indexer status gadget uses a .NET control. While it could be problematic if you loaded another .NET gadget that used the .NET 1.x framework, and that one got loaded first, I haven't found this to be a likely scenario.

On the brighter side, it makes it easy to have automatic support for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions with one binary.



Eh, you can do quite a lot from just JScript / VBScript. Quite a lot of system APIs (and application APIs) are useable from script via COM / IDispatch / ActiveX.

I dont think the CPU gadget is even accurate. Try using CPUz

I also keep it off. In fact the only time I'd think of using the sidebar is using Brandon Live's search gadget to force the indexer to index at highest priority. The sidebar performs sluggishly and takes ages to start up on a fresh Vista install.

If they do bring back Sidebar in Windows 7 it better take advantage of something like WPF instead of being a fancy mini-webpage.

Aero isn't going anywhere. The article mentioned some modifications to it. Aero is actually very usable, as it does improve performance of your system by offloading the entire UI rendering to the GPU instead of the CPU.



Um, what? The CPU gadget reports what the current utilization of the CPU is. CPUz is a system information tool.