Vista Vexes

by Jan Fagerholm

January 2007

The Sidebar

A feature new to Windows with Vista is the Sidebar. This is a screen space of small utilities that you access quickly, use, then store quickly. The concept is taken from Macintosh OSX’s Dashboard, which has developed the concept to a point of elegance. On the Windows side, Yahoo Widgets, a free download from Yahoo, attempts to provide a similar service.

Vista’s Sidebar is very new and hasn’t many Gadgets yet (180 as of this writing, compared to OSX’s 2000+) You will find some useful and entertaining Gadgets available. There is a link in the Sidebar configuration window that goes to Microsoft (http://gallery.microsoft.com) where you can download more gadgets.

Sure, you can have your clock, calendar, and appointments Gadgets all loaded, but it’s the ones that have entertainment value that push the concept along. Load up your weather monitor, Internet radio tuner, color swatcher, and NGPod (slideshows National Geographic magazine’s picture of the day) to prevent boredom while staring at your word processor. There are several other useful and trivial Gadgets that just make using computers more fun.

I long for a Gadget that does what OSX’s Flight Tracker widget does - enter a flight number and it constantly shows you its location in real time on a moving map display.

Stupidly, there is no simple way to toggle the Sidebar on and off. While you can train it to load when Windows starts, the only way you can get it out of your face is by exiting the program from the system tray. Then you have to dive through nested menus through All Programs to get it back. Why doesn’t it have a toggle key like OSX?

Sidebar is new. It’s lacking in Gadgets and it’s clumsy to activate, and I can only hope that Microsoft will fix this lack of usability.