Using Windows Sidebar

With the proliferation of local and global digital information since the advent of the public Internet, Microsoft has been working on ways to integrate the data you need most often in a seamless way with the Windows desktop. Early in the development of Windows Vista, the company created a feature called Windows Sidebar, which would sit on the edge of the PC display and provide a centralized and standardized area for Windows, third-party applications, and web services to provide notifications and alerts. Although the original Sidebar was scrapped partway through Vista’s development, a new version of the Sidebar, based on web standards and partially integrated with Microsoft’s Live.com web site and the Sideshow feature on modern portable computers, was eventually created. In this article, we’ll examine this optional new feature of the Windows shell and demonstrate how you can use the Sidebar to keep valuable information at your fingertips.

What Is Windows Sidebar?

Back when Microsoft shipped Windows 98, it added a debatably useful feature called Active Desktop that provided an HTML layer on top of the traditional desktop. Active Desktop was an attempt to capitalize on the then-emerging trend of users wanting to combine live data from the Web with their PC operating system. The term for this, at the time, was push technology. The idea was that although you could use a Web browser to manually find, or pull down, data from the Web, a push technology client like Active Desktop could push data to the user automatically with no interaction required. Ultimately, most users found Active Desktop to be confusing and undesirable, and although the feature was never really removed from Windows, it was deemphasized in subsequent Windows versions, such as Windows XP. 6-1, however, it’s still possible to add web content to your XP desktop via Active Desktop if you really want to.

Active Desktop may have failed, but the underlying benefits of push technology are still valid today. You can see that newer versions of this functionality exist in such technologies as RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which in fact, attempts to solve essentially the same problem as Active Desktop: Rather than force users to manually search for the content they want, that content is delivered automatically to them using a unique kind of client (in this case, an RSS client). One such RSS client is included in Windows Vista as part of Internet Explorer 7, which we discuss in Article 17. In Windows Vista, Active Desktop is finally gone forever. But integrated push technology lives on with a brand-new feature called Windows Sidebar. Like Active Desktop, Windows Sidebar is available by default and is running when you start up your PC, unless you configure it not to do so. But Windows Sidebar solves one of the major problems with Active Desktop by moving the main user interface to the side of the screen where it won’t typically be hidden under your open applications and other windows.

Windows Sidebar is actually not displayed by default on all PCs. If the resolution of your PC’s screen is 1024×768 or less, for example, Windows Sidebar will not display by default. To enable Windows Sidebar on such a system, follow the instructions in “Launching Windows Sidebar,” below. Then, right-click the Sidebar and choose Properties. In the Windows Sidebar Properties dialog that appears, check the box titled Start Sidebar when Windows starts if you’d like it enabled by default. For others, however, Sidebar might not be a desirable feature. To disable Windows Sidebar, right-click the Sidebar tray icon and choose Exit. (Do not right-click the Sidebar itself and choose Close; that simply hides the Sidebar.) Then, uncheck the option box asking whether you’d like to run Sidebar automatically when the system reboots. Put simply, Windows Sidebar is a panel that sits at the edge of your screen and houses small gadgets, or mini-applications, each of which can provide specific functionality, 6-2. Gadgets typically connect to data somewhere, be it on your PC or on the Internet. Windows Vista ships with a variety of these gadgets, but you can download many more online, and if you’re familiar with Web technologies like HTML (HyperText Markup Language), DHTML (Dynamic HTML), and JavaScript, you can even build your own gadgets. Because Windows Sidebar does take up a small portion of vertical real estate on your screen, this feature is more useful for those with widescreen displays. That said, Windows Sidebar appears under other windows by default so that users with normal square-shaped screens can use it as well. We’ll examine this behavior in just a bit.

Launching Windows Sidebar Windows Sidebar should launch automatically when you boot into Windows Vista. If you disable the Windows Sidebar’s autorun functionality, you’ll have to go digging for it in the Start menu. It’s somewhat hidden in Start -> All Programs -> Accessories, 6-3. This is made all the more confusing because Microsoft has changed the way the Start menu expands; instead of the submenu system employed in previous versions, the submenu expands and contracts in place right within the Start menu now. When Windows Sidebar starts, you’ll see a subtle black shadow appear on the right side of the screen, 6-4. Additionally, a blue Sidebar icon appears in the tray notification area next to the system clock. Depending on how your system is configured, you should also see one or more gadgets, or mini-applications, displaying in the Sidebar itself. If you move the mouse cursor over to the right side of your screen, the Windows Sidebar will fade into the foreground slowly, and you’ll see that it is, in fact, a translucent panel of sorts, and not a screen defect. That shadow appears only when Windows Sidebar is configured to autohide, which it is by default. We discuss this and other configuration options in the next section.

Configuring Sidebar It’s highly unlikely that you’ll want to use Windows Sidebar in its default form. Thankfully, Windows Sidebar includes a number of configuration options. You can change the way this panel displays, where it displays, which gadgets it will display, and other related options. And, of course, you can determine whether it appears at all when Windows Vista first boots.

Configuring the Sidebar Display Many Windows Sidebar features can be configured directly from the Windows Sidebar Properties dialog box. To access this dialog box, move the mouse over to the Sidebar, right-click, and choose Properties. 6-5, this dialog box enables you to change how the Sidebar displays on your screen.

Using Sidebar Properties Here, you can determine whether the Sidebar appears under other windows (the default), or is shown on top of other windows. If you select to display Sidebar on top of other windows, Sidebar will appear as a solid, glass-like panel and will lose the subtle shadow and translucency effects. Additionally, floating windows - applications, dialog boxes, and so on - will visually appear below the Sidebar. There is an additional behavior associated with this mode, however: When you maximize any window, that window will treat the innermost edge of the Sidebar as the new edge of the screen. As you can see in article 6-6, this creates a strange effect when both floating and maximized windows are displayed with the Sidebar. To make Sidebar appear when you log on to Windows, select the option titled Start Sidebar when Windows starts. (This option is obviously applicable on a user-by-user basis; enabling Sidebar to autostart for one user will not cause Sidebar to appear for other users.) You can also configure Sidebar to appear on the right or left of the screen (but not on the top or bottom). And, if you have multiple computer displays, you can choose which monitor you’d like to use for Sidebar. The View list of running gadgets enables you to examine which gadgets you’ve configured to run in the Sidebar. We’ll look at this feature in the next section.

Other Sidebar Configuration Options In addition to the Sidebar Properties dialog box, there are other ways in which you can configure various Sidebar features. For example, when you right-click the Sidebar surface, you’ll see a number of options. To hide the Sidebar - not to be confused with autohide - select Close Sidebar. When you do this, the Sidebar disappears from the screen. To make it reappear, click (or right-click) the Sidebar icon in the tray and choose Open. All of the menu options you see when you right-click the Sidebar are available from the Sidebar icon in the tray. This enables you to easily access various Sidebar features when the Sidebar is hidden or cannot be seen under other windows. The Sidebar icon’s menu is available only when you right-click the icon. If you just click it, nothing will happen. If you use the Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut to task switch between running applications and windows, and choose the option for Desktop, all of your running applications and other displayed windows will minimize or hide, including Sidebar if it is configured to display underneath other windows. To redisplay Sidebar, select another application or window from the task switcher. If Sidebar is configured to always be on top of other windows, however, it will not disappear when you task switch to the Desktop.