Adding Gadgets to the Sidebar

The Sidebar isn’t particularly interesting by itself. But Sidebar is really just a container for gadgets, and it is these gadgets that make Sidebar truly useful. To add gadgets to the Sidebar, click the Add Gadgets button at the top of the Sidebar, which resembles a plus mark. (Or, right-click the Sidebar - or the Sidebar icon - and choose Add Gadgets.) This causes the Add Gadgets window to appear, 6-7. This window provides you with a number of built-in gadgets, which you can add directly to the Sidebar surface. To add a gadget to the Sidebar, you either double-click the gadget in Add Gadgets, or you can simply drag and drop a gadget onto the Sidebar surface, 6-8. You can add multiple copies of any gadget to the Sidebar if you’d like. This is handy for certain gadgets, such as Clock, each instance of which can be set to a different time zone, Slide Show, or Weather.

Looking at the Built-In Gadgets

Some of these gadgets are obviously just for fun, but some are truly useful, especially for serious multitaskers. We especially appreciate the Clock and Weather gadgets, which can be used in multiple instances for different locations, and the Calendar.

Configuring Gadgets

When you have one or more gadgets displayed on the Sidebar, you’ll probably want to configure them in some way. Although each gadget exposes a slightly different Settings window based on the needs of the gadget itself, the way you access this information is identical for any gadget. If you move the mouse cursor over a gadget, you’ll see a few common elements. First, many gadgets visually change in some way to let you know that hey’re ready to be configured. Additionally, two small user interface items appear in the top-right corner of all gadgets, 6-9: A small close button (resembling an x) and a small wrench. If you click the close button, the gadget will close and disappear from the Sidebar without any warning dialog box. But if you click the wrench, the gadget will display its Settings window. Each gadget will display a different set of Settings options. article 6-10 shows the Settings option for the Clock gadget. In addition to configuring individual gadgets, you can also rearrange gadgets on the Sidebar surface using your well-developed drag-and-drop skills. Simply grab a gadget with the mouse and move it up and down the Sidebar surface until it’s positioned where you want it. Note that this feature works best when there are multiple gadgets. If you only have a few gadgets displayed on the Sidebar, they will be arranged only at the top of the Sidebar. You cannot arbitrarily move them down onto unused portions of the Sidebar’s bottom area. If you try to, the bottom-most gadget will simply slide right back up so that it is on the bottom of the stack of gadgets. To access other gadget options, you can right-click any gadget. This displays a pop-up menu from which you can control the opacity, or translucency, of the gadget and access other options.

Moving Gadgets to the Windows Desktop

o do so, simply drag and drop a gadget from the Sidebar onto an empty area of the Windows desktop, 6-11. You can also move a gadget to the desktop by right-clicking it in the Sidebar and choosing Detach from Sidebar. When you drag a gadget onto the desktop in this fashion, you’ll notice that it actually grows a bit bigger than it was when displayed on the Sidebar itself. To move a gadget back to the Sidebar, simply drag and drop the Sidebar. Or, you can right-click a floating gadget and choose Attach to Sidebar. If you move gadgets to the desktop, Sidebar will still need to be running in order for them to display. However, you can close (really, hide) the Sidebar if you’d like. When you do so, floating gadgets will still appear. However, if you quit Sidebar, the floating gadgets will disappear from the desktop as well. You can also add gadgets to your desktop by opening the Add Gadgets dialog box and dragging a gadget from there directly to the desktop, and not to the Sidebar. Gadgets remember where you left them. If you have some gadgets on the desktop and some on the Sidebar and you quit Sidebar and then restart it, each of the gadgets will reappear exactly where you left them. (This includes multiple monitor setups as well, which is nice.) Additionally, Sidebar will remember how it was configured when you quit. If you quit Sidebar while it is hidden, Sidebar will start up next time hidden as well. Finally, you might be wondering if there’s any easy way to access floating gadgets that have been hidden by other application windows. There is, assuming the Sidebar is visible: Simply right-click the Sidebar (or click the Sidebar tray icon) and choose Bring Gadgets to Front. This will display any floating gadgets on top of your other windows.

Removing Gadgets To remove a gadget from the Sidebar or desktop, simply right-click it and choose Close Gadget. Or, mouse over the gadget and click the small close button that appears. This will not delete a gadget from your system, of course. You will be able to re-add any removed gadgets later from the Add Gadgets window.

Advanced Sidebar Configuration Options Although the Sidebar configuration user interface is fairly complete, there are a few things you can’t easily do. Behind the scenes, however, the Windows Sidebar utilizes special configuration files named settings.ini to determine all of its configuration possibilities. If you don’t mind taking a small risk by editing these files with a text editor such as Notepad, you can perform various configuration tasks that are impossible with the standard Sidebar UI. Be sure to back up any files you’ll be editing before making changes. You’ll also want to quit Sidebar before editing these files. There are two versions of settings.ini. The first is devoted to system-wide configuration options and default settings and is located in C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar by default. If you right-click this file and choose Edit, you’ll see the contents of this file, which should resemble the following:

[Root]

SettingsVersion=00.00.00.01

SidebarShowState=Imploded

SidebarDockSide=2

Section0=1

Section1=2

Section2=3

SidebarDockedPartsOrder=0x1,0x2,0x3

[Section 1]

PrivateSetting_GadgetName=%PROGRAMFILES%\windows

sidebar\gadgets\RecycleBin.gadget

PrivateSetting_Enabled=true

[Section 2]

PrivateSetting_GadgetName=%PROGRAMFILES%\windows

sidebar\gadgets\Launcher.gadget

PrivateSetting_Enabled=true

[Section 3]

PrivateSetting_GadgetName=%PROGRAMFILES%\windows

sidebar\gadgets\SlideShow.gadget

PrivateSetting_Enabled=true

A second version of the Sidebar settings.ini file is available for each user. This file is located in C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar by default. This file has a similar structure, but could be much longer depending on how much you’ve configured Windows Sidebar. Here’s an example of what it could look like:

[Root]

SettingsVersion=00.00.00.01

SidebarShowState=Imploded

SidebarDockSide=2

SidebarDockedPartsOrder=0x2,0x3,

SidebarAlwaysOnTop=true

SidebarDockMonitor=0

PickerPosX=386

PickerPosY=233

Section0=1

Section1=2

Section2=3

[Section 1]

PrivateSetting_GadgetName=C:%5CProgram%20Files%5CWindows%20Sidebar%5CGad

gets%5CworldClock.Gadget

PrivateSetting_Enabled=true

PrivateSetting_GadgetTopmost=false

PrivateSetting_SidebarDockedState=Not%20Docked

clockName=Eastern%20Time

clockText=

timeZoneIndex=13

timeZoneBias=0

dayToNight=True

secondsEnabled=False

SettingExist=True

PrivateSetting_GadgetDropLocationX=1078

PrivateSetting_GadgetDropLocationY=179

[Section 2]

PrivateSetting_GadgetName=C:%5CProgram%20Files%5CWindows%20Sidebar%5CGad

gets%5CRSS.Gadget

PrivateSetting_Enabled=true

PrivateSetting_SidebarDockedState=Docked

PrivateSetting_GadgetDropLocationX=257

PrivateSetting_GadgetDropLocationY=859

rssFeedPath=Internet%20Explorer%20Team%20Blog

rssFeedUrl=http:%2F%2Fgo.microsoft.com%2Ffwlink%2F%3FLinkId=58643

PrivateSetting_GadgetTopmost=false

[Section 3]

PrivateSetting_GadgetName=C:%5CProgram%20Files%5CWindows%20Sidebar%5CGad

gets%5CRSS.Gadget

PrivateSetting_Enabled=true

PrivateSetting_SidebarDockedState=Docked

PrivateSetting_GadgetDropLocationX=1433

PrivateSetting_GadgetDropLocationY=420

rssFeedPath=Internet%20Explorer%20Team%20Blog

rssFeedUrl=http:%2F%2Fgo.microsoft.com%2Ffwlink%2F%3FLinkId=58643

PrivateSetting_GadgetTopmost=false

Let’s examine a few of these settings. The SidebarShowState option is set to Imploded in the code example. This means that the Sidebar will be displayed normally, and not in front of other windows. SidebarDockSide is set to 2, which is the right side of the screen. If you change this number to 1, the Windows Sidebar will display on the left. In addition to the options you see here, there are a few other undocumented options. For example, if you’d like a certain gadget to never appear in the Add Gadgets windows, you could simply find the gadget in C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets and delete it, but what if you wanted it to be available to other users? In this case, you could simply add a line like the following to your user’s version of settings.ini: PickerDefaultPackageSkipList=SlideShow.Gadget,worldClock.Gadget This particular code would only make the Clock gadget unavailable. Obviously, there are many more settings possibilities. It’s also likely that an enterprising software developer will come up with a TweakUI-style application that will provide the same functionality. We’ll report on any such developments on the Windows Secrets web site (www.windowssecrets.com).

Finding New Gadgets In order to make it easy for users to find new gadgets that will run on both the Windows Sidebar and desktop, Microsoft has created a few Web communities. The first is called, appropriately enough, Microsoft Gadgets (http://microsoftgadgets.com/). The second, which is available from the link Get more gadgets online in the Sidebar’s Add Gadgets window, is called Gadgets for Windows Vista (http://gallery.microsoft.com/Results.aspx?vista=landing&rdm=113828&l=1&ti=2) Actually, you can get three different kinds of gadgets from these web sites, as Microsoft has chosen to port these mini-applications to three distinct environments: Sidebar and the Windows desktop, Live.com (a web portal that’s part of Microsoft’s Windows Live initiative), and Sideshow, an external display that is beginning to appear on new notearticle computers and Tablet PCs. Unfortunately, the three environments are not entirely compatible, so you can’t just create one gadget that works in all three. If you wanted to get a gadget that would display your e-mail, for example, you would need different versions for Sidebar, Live.com, and Sideshow. That said, gadgets for all three environments would be built using the same HTML, DHTML, and JavaScript technologies and could share some cod On the Microsoft Gadgets web site, shown in article 6-12, you can find galleries of downloadable gadgets, a blog written by the Microsoft employees that maintain the site, forums for providing gadget feedback, and other information. Microsoft Gadgets is also an excellent resource for developers wanting to build their own gadgets. The site includes a wealth of information and documentation about building gadgets that work in any or all of the supported environments. If you are a developer, you’ll appreciate the fact that Sidebar is essentially a graphic script hosting environment: All of your skills writing web applications and web sites are transferable to gadget design and development. There are other online resources for Sidebar gadgets as well. The aforementioned Live.com web portal (http://www.live.com) offers some Sidebar gadgets, although most of that site’s gadgets are obviously designed for Live.com, not Sidebar. And there are many, many thirdparty gadget sites on the Web. There are Google search gadgets, dictionaries, and virtually everything imaginable out there.

Where Have I Seen This Before? Although Sidebar is a new feature that’s unique to Windows Vista, you may be familiar with the fact that mini-applications called gadgets or something similar have been with us since the earliest days of computers. Back when PCs lacked graphics cards and were constrained to just 640K of RAM, Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) mini-applications provided the same basic functionality as today’s gadgets (minus the Web connections of course), letting users run small utilities and even personal information management applications alongside WordPerfect, dBASE, and Lotus 1-2-3. Even the earliest Macintosh computers supported a suite of mini-applications called Desk Accessories, which provided such utilities as calculators and text editors on a system that, technically speaking, could not multitask. More recently, a wide range of gadget-type environments have cropped up, and it would be irresponsible to suggest that Microsoft wasn’t influenced in some ways by these tools. Environments such as Stardock’s DesktopX (www.stardock.com/products.asp) were among the first to provide handy Web-connected utilities that run on the Windows desktop. A Mac tool called Konfabulator (http://widgets.yahoo.com/) was such a hit that Yahoo! purchased it, and Apple included a pretty obvious copy of it in Mac OS X, which it called Dashboard. All of these environments share the same basic principles, although each comes with its own differences, advantages, and limitations. (Apple Dashboard, for example, uses miniapplications called widgets that cannot be easily placed on the computer’s desktop, as can Sidebar gadgets.) The question, of course, is whether any of these alternatives outshine Sidebar enough to consider installing them on Windows Vista. (Dashboard, obviously, runs only on the Mac.) In our opinion, the answer is no. Assuming you’re even interested in using gadgets, the way that Sidebar integrates into Windows and is supported by such a wide-ranging set of third-party gadgets outweighs any small advantages that other environments might have. Installing yet another gadget-type environment would bring little advantage, but would clutter up your desktop in an unnecessary way. Chances are, if you need a particular kind of gadget, there’s one available for Windows Sidebar. And in the end, that is likely the biggest consideration any potential user should entertain.

Earlier Sidebar Iterations If you followed the development of Windows Vista, you might be familiar with earlier versions of a Windows Sidebar that were quite different from the Sidebar found in the finished product. Early on, Microsoft had hoped to replace Vista’s tray notification area, which dates back to the release of Windows 95 in 1995, with a feature called the Sidebar. This early version of the Sidebar would have been the system’s central location for alerts and notifications, and it included such things as a clock, a search box, a synchronization center, a media player, and a list of contacts. It might have even replaced the Windows taskbar, as evidenced by early prerelease versions of Windows Vista, which then went by the code name Longhorn. The original version of Sidebar was influenced by work done at the MSN business unit at Microsoft, which had created an Internet client called MSN Premium that included a feature called Dashboard. Like the original Sidebar, Dashboard sat at the edge of the screen and included a list of contacts, a clock, and other useful at-a-glance information. The idea was to take this sort of functionality and make it part of the underlying operating system. So what happened? When Windows Vista’s development schedule veered wildly out of control in 2004, Microsoft decided it was time to start over from scratch, so it dumped a number of features that were not considered core to the success of this release. About a year later, Microsoft created the Platforms Incubation Team in order to foster an environment where smaller Windows applications could be developed quickly and updated regularly. This team resuscitated Sidebar and is responsible for the Windows Sidebar you see in Windows Vista today, including the decision to utilize web standards instead of Vista-specific technologies that would have been more difficult for developers to learn. They also created the Windows Calendar application, which we discuss in Article 20.

Summary Windows Sidebar is a highly visual and obvious change in Windows Vista. Whether it’s something you’re going to want to leave running on your PC will depend on your own preferences, of course. We feel that Windows Sidebar can be a valuable addition to your desktop if you’re using a widescreen display, are a natural multitasker, and find a handful of gadgets that you simply can’t live without. However, a certain percentage of Windows Vista users will simply be unimpressed. For those people, it’s not particularly easy, but you can at least turn it off.