A Bit of Windows 7 News

[Prince21]

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

[markwolfe Veteran]

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

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.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

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

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.

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

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

(where page = 25 posts)

[Unknown_97784568745]

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.

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.

[Antaris Veteran]

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

Always the way, useless threads...

[Blackice]

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.

[Cadium]

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.

[Blackice]

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

[Kupo-Cheer]

Blah blah blah...give them time jebus.

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.

[zerologic]

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

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

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.

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.

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.

He has a name. Jim Allchin ;)

[Mikee99]

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 :(.

[Rudy]

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

[zerologic]

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 :heart: ), this way the information they show is informative but not bloated in screen real-estate.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

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

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.

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.

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.

[Prince21]

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 :(.

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

[Denis W. Veteran]

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.

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.

[Mikee99]

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

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.

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

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