Do Vista Gadgets make sense...
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...or are they just fattened tray icons? I would like to start a discussion on sense of developing - and using - sidebar Gadgets. Personally, I am trying to keep my desktop very clean: it contains only the icons I use really often, and the tray area is kept as small as possible. I have nothing against having more elements on my desktop, but they have to be really useful and informative. At microsoftgadgets.com[^], among four highest rated gadgets are three games, namely: Othello, Web Mine Game and Sudoku Live. Personally, I don't see any sense in keeping on my screen games that I am not playing at the moment. The other highly rated type of gadgets is notes/reminders (Live Notes, Notes 1.0, ToDo List). This looks more reasonable, but I prefer reminders that pop up (and thus are so annoying that I instantly take an action to handle the task and get rid of the reminder). I agree that RSS gadgets can be useful, though there is often somewhat too little space to hold the number of items one would like to see. To recapitulate, I am not very convinced by the Gadgets technology. May you have a different opinion? Please share your observations and/or ideas to convince the undecided developers to delve into the gadget world. I've been thinking for some time what gadget I would like to use, and I think I could have profit from a Subversion notifier. Once some other team member commits his update to the server, my gadget could display an appropriate information. Still, I have a Visual Studio plugin to access SVN, so there is no ultimate need for such element. I will be pleased if you join this thread. -- modified at 12:10 Sunday 4th February, 2007
Regards, BB http://spin.bartoszbien.com
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...or are they just fattened tray icons? I would like to start a discussion on sense of developing - and using - sidebar Gadgets. Personally, I am trying to keep my desktop very clean: it contains only the icons I use really often, and the tray area is kept as small as possible. I have nothing against having more elements on my desktop, but they have to be really useful and informative. At microsoftgadgets.com[^], among four highest rated gadgets are three games, namely: Othello, Web Mine Game and Sudoku Live. Personally, I don't see any sense in keeping on my screen games that I am not playing at the moment. The other highly rated type of gadgets is notes/reminders (Live Notes, Notes 1.0, ToDo List). This looks more reasonable, but I prefer reminders that pop up (and thus are so annoying that I instantly take an action to handle the task and get rid of the reminder). I agree that RSS gadgets can be useful, though there is often somewhat too little space to hold the number of items one would like to see. To recapitulate, I am not very convinced by the Gadgets technology. May you have a different opinion? Please share your observations and/or ideas to convince the undecided developers to delve into the gadget world. I've been thinking for some time what gadget I would like to use, and I think I could have profit from a Subversion notifier. Once some other team member commits his update to the server, my gadget could display an appropriate information. Still, I have a Visual Studio plugin to access SVN, so there is no ultimate need for such element. I will be pleased if you join this thread. -- modified at 12:10 Sunday 4th February, 2007
Regards, BB http://spin.bartoszbien.com
I have yet to see a really useful gadget. What's the point in having games, picture shows and whatnot. The only gadget I do 'sometimes' pay attention to is the feeds. I live far away from home so the headlines do come in handy. I used to keep the sidebar below other windows, but since purchasing a widescreen monitor I have pinned it to the top. Only because some webpages look strange. On the whole, it's a waste of space.
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...or are they just fattened tray icons? I would like to start a discussion on sense of developing - and using - sidebar Gadgets. Personally, I am trying to keep my desktop very clean: it contains only the icons I use really often, and the tray area is kept as small as possible. I have nothing against having more elements on my desktop, but they have to be really useful and informative. At microsoftgadgets.com[^], among four highest rated gadgets are three games, namely: Othello, Web Mine Game and Sudoku Live. Personally, I don't see any sense in keeping on my screen games that I am not playing at the moment. The other highly rated type of gadgets is notes/reminders (Live Notes, Notes 1.0, ToDo List). This looks more reasonable, but I prefer reminders that pop up (and thus are so annoying that I instantly take an action to handle the task and get rid of the reminder). I agree that RSS gadgets can be useful, though there is often somewhat too little space to hold the number of items one would like to see. To recapitulate, I am not very convinced by the Gadgets technology. May you have a different opinion? Please share your observations and/or ideas to convince the undecided developers to delve into the gadget world. I've been thinking for some time what gadget I would like to use, and I think I could have profit from a Subversion notifier. Once some other team member commits his update to the server, my gadget could display an appropriate information. Still, I have a Visual Studio plugin to access SVN, so there is no ultimate need for such element. I will be pleased if you join this thread. -- modified at 12:10 Sunday 4th February, 2007
Regards, BB http://spin.bartoszbien.com
I think they could come in handy, keep the fattened icons on the sidebar instead of all the small icons right below. Often those give a status which is hard to see on high screenresolutions. Anyway, that's what I would use it for... :-)
V. I found a living worth working for, but haven't found work worth living for.
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...or are they just fattened tray icons? I would like to start a discussion on sense of developing - and using - sidebar Gadgets. Personally, I am trying to keep my desktop very clean: it contains only the icons I use really often, and the tray area is kept as small as possible. I have nothing against having more elements on my desktop, but they have to be really useful and informative. At microsoftgadgets.com[^], among four highest rated gadgets are three games, namely: Othello, Web Mine Game and Sudoku Live. Personally, I don't see any sense in keeping on my screen games that I am not playing at the moment. The other highly rated type of gadgets is notes/reminders (Live Notes, Notes 1.0, ToDo List). This looks more reasonable, but I prefer reminders that pop up (and thus are so annoying that I instantly take an action to handle the task and get rid of the reminder). I agree that RSS gadgets can be useful, though there is often somewhat too little space to hold the number of items one would like to see. To recapitulate, I am not very convinced by the Gadgets technology. May you have a different opinion? Please share your observations and/or ideas to convince the undecided developers to delve into the gadget world. I've been thinking for some time what gadget I would like to use, and I think I could have profit from a Subversion notifier. Once some other team member commits his update to the server, my gadget could display an appropriate information. Still, I have a Visual Studio plugin to access SVN, so there is no ultimate need for such element. I will be pleased if you join this thread. -- modified at 12:10 Sunday 4th February, 2007
Regards, BB http://spin.bartoszbien.com
I'm also not a huge fan, however I find the CPU meter gadget useful, at least it's far better then XP's task manager tray icon. Apart from this gadget, I only use an RSS gadget, but only for optical reasons as the sidebar looks empty with only one gadget :).
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...or are they just fattened tray icons? I would like to start a discussion on sense of developing - and using - sidebar Gadgets. Personally, I am trying to keep my desktop very clean: it contains only the icons I use really often, and the tray area is kept as small as possible. I have nothing against having more elements on my desktop, but they have to be really useful and informative. At microsoftgadgets.com[^], among four highest rated gadgets are three games, namely: Othello, Web Mine Game and Sudoku Live. Personally, I don't see any sense in keeping on my screen games that I am not playing at the moment. The other highly rated type of gadgets is notes/reminders (Live Notes, Notes 1.0, ToDo List). This looks more reasonable, but I prefer reminders that pop up (and thus are so annoying that I instantly take an action to handle the task and get rid of the reminder). I agree that RSS gadgets can be useful, though there is often somewhat too little space to hold the number of items one would like to see. To recapitulate, I am not very convinced by the Gadgets technology. May you have a different opinion? Please share your observations and/or ideas to convince the undecided developers to delve into the gadget world. I've been thinking for some time what gadget I would like to use, and I think I could have profit from a Subversion notifier. Once some other team member commits his update to the server, my gadget could display an appropriate information. Still, I have a Visual Studio plugin to access SVN, so there is no ultimate need for such element. I will be pleased if you join this thread. -- modified at 12:10 Sunday 4th February, 2007
Regards, BB http://spin.bartoszbien.com
Well I've used Yahoo Widgets for ages (since back when it was called Konfabulator) Here's a list of the widgets I have all the time
- A widget that shows me today's meetings from outlook
- Two CPU usage meters (one for each CPU)
- A rss feed summary widget (that shows an aggregated feed from an assortment of sites I read regularly)
- A widget that tells me how much disk space there is left on my work drive (it goes red to warn me when I'm about to run out of space, so I don't waste time debugging crashes that turn out to be the disk being full!)
- A little text-parsing calculator (that lets you type stuff like "x=42*sin(0.6);y=12*x; z=y*y; z") - far quicker than running calc
- A 5 day weather forecast widget
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Well I've used Yahoo Widgets for ages (since back when it was called Konfabulator) Here's a list of the widgets I have all the time
- A widget that shows me today's meetings from outlook
- Two CPU usage meters (one for each CPU)
- A rss feed summary widget (that shows an aggregated feed from an assortment of sites I read regularly)
- A widget that tells me how much disk space there is left on my work drive (it goes red to warn me when I'm about to run out of space, so I don't waste time debugging crashes that turn out to be the disk being full!)
- A little text-parsing calculator (that lets you type stuff like "x=42*sin(0.6);y=12*x; z=y*y; z") - far quicker than running calc
- A 5 day weather forecast widget
I used Konfabulator/YahooWidgets too... mine are: - Upcoming events from Lightening (calendar within Thunderbird) - Gmail notifier - RSS Feeds - CPU monitor - Memory monitor - Post-It notes for temporary idea's - Weather map (fancy animated one!) I usually have the CPU/Mem ones pinned to top layer (but slightly transparent and "click-thoughable" so I can access buttons below), the rest are underneath but will pop to the top by pressing a function button. They really help with programming when finding the bottle necks in image processing code, but some widgets just eat cycles and memory! I think it is just sad that M$ decided to rename Widgets to Gadgets.. just another way to confuse non-techies into thinking M$ did it first, and they don't even do them well either!
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...or are they just fattened tray icons? I would like to start a discussion on sense of developing - and using - sidebar Gadgets. Personally, I am trying to keep my desktop very clean: it contains only the icons I use really often, and the tray area is kept as small as possible. I have nothing against having more elements on my desktop, but they have to be really useful and informative. At microsoftgadgets.com[^], among four highest rated gadgets are three games, namely: Othello, Web Mine Game and Sudoku Live. Personally, I don't see any sense in keeping on my screen games that I am not playing at the moment. The other highly rated type of gadgets is notes/reminders (Live Notes, Notes 1.0, ToDo List). This looks more reasonable, but I prefer reminders that pop up (and thus are so annoying that I instantly take an action to handle the task and get rid of the reminder). I agree that RSS gadgets can be useful, though there is often somewhat too little space to hold the number of items one would like to see. To recapitulate, I am not very convinced by the Gadgets technology. May you have a different opinion? Please share your observations and/or ideas to convince the undecided developers to delve into the gadget world. I've been thinking for some time what gadget I would like to use, and I think I could have profit from a Subversion notifier. Once some other team member commits his update to the server, my gadget could display an appropriate information. Still, I have a Visual Studio plugin to access SVN, so there is no ultimate need for such element. I will be pleased if you join this thread. -- modified at 12:10 Sunday 4th February, 2007
Regards, BB http://spin.bartoszbien.com
Personally, i see no point at all in them. Once i start up an IDE or web browser, i cant see my desktop any more. Why put info in the one place that never gets seen after i start using my PC?
-- Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
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...or are they just fattened tray icons? I would like to start a discussion on sense of developing - and using - sidebar Gadgets. Personally, I am trying to keep my desktop very clean: it contains only the icons I use really often, and the tray area is kept as small as possible. I have nothing against having more elements on my desktop, but they have to be really useful and informative. At microsoftgadgets.com[^], among four highest rated gadgets are three games, namely: Othello, Web Mine Game and Sudoku Live. Personally, I don't see any sense in keeping on my screen games that I am not playing at the moment. The other highly rated type of gadgets is notes/reminders (Live Notes, Notes 1.0, ToDo List). This looks more reasonable, but I prefer reminders that pop up (and thus are so annoying that I instantly take an action to handle the task and get rid of the reminder). I agree that RSS gadgets can be useful, though there is often somewhat too little space to hold the number of items one would like to see. To recapitulate, I am not very convinced by the Gadgets technology. May you have a different opinion? Please share your observations and/or ideas to convince the undecided developers to delve into the gadget world. I've been thinking for some time what gadget I would like to use, and I think I could have profit from a Subversion notifier. Once some other team member commits his update to the server, my gadget could display an appropriate information. Still, I have a Visual Studio plugin to access SVN, so there is no ultimate need for such element. I will be pleased if you join this thread. -- modified at 12:10 Sunday 4th February, 2007
Regards, BB http://spin.bartoszbien.com
With a third monitor, I'd sure have some room for gadgets. They do make sense if they convey information, or provide a custom "always there" control interface. And they are cute visual toys for the cute toy collectors. Like a bed full of plush teddies.
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