Comments on: 5 Fun yet Productive Vista SideBar Gadgets

By: Stacey Cochran

Stacey Cochran — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:30:51 +0000

5 useful Vista Sidebar Gadgets http://tinyurl.com/5rokkq

By: RogÃ©rio Tomio Hirooka

RogÃ©rio Tomio Hirooka — Thu, 03 May 2007 01:16:53 +0000

Hi! I’m the developer of the Sphere Timer Gadget, and I’m here to thank you very much for this article. I’m very happy for having found this.

thanks again,

RogÃ©rio

By: Brad Isaac

Brad Isaac — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:27:40 +0000

Well, nobody would ever accuse Microsoft from stealing ideas from Apple would they????

By: Maid Mirawyn

Maid Mirawyn — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:55:31 +0000

Actually, the concept goes back further than Longhorn. From the original Mac operating system on up until System 7, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_Accessory]Desk Accessories[/url] were part of the OS. From then on up until OS X, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stickies]Stickies[/url] were a very widely used desktop mini-app.

More recently, Mac OS Tiger introduced [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_(software)]Dashboard[/url], which also uses Widgets, including a new version of the original Stickies.

By: Brad Isaac

Brad Isaac — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:39:13 +0000

Hi Scott, I stand corrected. I wasn’t aware these all originated with Longhorn. Thanks for pointing it out.

By: Scott Kindorf

Scott Kindorf — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:26:15 +0000

Actually, Sidebars like Google’s, SmartBar XP, DesktopSidebar and others are actually based on the first iterations of public or semi-public demonstrations of WIndows Longhorn back in 2003. I’ve used SmartBarXP and DesktopSidebar (in fact, I still use it with XP X64). Google didn’t start the whole idea – if you want to get technical about it, you can look back to NeXTStep with it’s dock – which was actually called a “wharf” where objects can be docked and provide info such as system resources or contain fly-out menus of other dock-items like shortcuts to applications.