Anyone writing gadgets?

Wells wrote:

It takes up too much space on 1024x768 and there is no shortcut key to quickly show/hide the damn thing.

When you have the sidebar open or minimized in the tray, press Windows Key + SPACE BAR to show it.

Wells wrote:

It takes up too much space on 1024x768 and there is no shortcut key to quickly show/hide the damn thing.

And honesty, who needs a fancy looking clock when there is a digital one right there in the system tray? I'm sure we all turned on the clock gadget for about an hour and then removed it.

I guess I'm not a gadget person.

edit: hold on, would it be possible to write a gadget that added a shortcut key to show/hide the sidebar? Or are gadgets not allowed that kind of control?

While they probably won't admit it, the Sidebar is far more useful on dual monitor setups.
In XP I run Konfabulator Widgets on the right monitor and I do the same thing in Vista with the Gadgets.
If I only had one monitor I would have turned it off a long time ago because I hate wasting space.

I think the sidebar is mainly useful for widescreen and multi-monitor systems.

Jeff,
   Can you guys rename the link from Build to Getting Started or something? Build "told me" that there was some automation tool for packaging some gadgets (like our Module Maker). Where people wanting to get started would be looking for a Getting Started or similar link....

   Just an idea...

W3bbo wrote:



littleguru wrote: Positive side effect: More RAM for the Visual Studio aka the RAM eater.

Try running Photoshop sometime, it's the only program I've got that I've seen use more than a gig of RAM. Not even all my installed games come close.

Photoshop's use of RAM is a good thing. Why have a gig if you aren't going to use it? Why have a second core if it's just going to sit idle?

Adobe knows this and coded Photoshop to take advantage of whatever system resources it could.

I'd much rather have PS sucking up RAM than swapping out to disk regularly.

Keep in mind that it can run on far less - it's designed to use whatever's available. That's a good thing for that type of app.

jeffsand wrote:

I'm on Vista now on all my machines even my family computer.  I am starting to play with Sidebar Gadgets.  (Yes, Jeff started at Microsoft as a dev . 

Curious if anyone else out there has made any or what they have found that they can't live without.  What Gadgets would you like to see?

I am thinking about some home automation gadgets.


-Jeff

I was writing Sidebar gadgests "back in the day" when I was still running the PDC 2003 build of Longhorn.

I haven't written any gadgets since because, to be honest, I don't really like the new dev experience. I liked the old sidebar environment much more. I understood the model - it was simple - and I didn't have to futz around with dynamic web stuff to make things work.

I'd much rather .NET my way to a gadget than JS it.

But, here's what I wrote:

1. A tamagotchi gadget (not sure if I spelled that right) - one of those "virtual friends" that you have to feed and pay attention to if you don't want it to die - it was a fish and it was awesome.

2. A Simon gadget - the game Simon, where you have to repeat the pattern of lights that are displayed (if you know what I'm talking about, then you know - otherwise, it'd take a lot more room to explain).

Now, here's the cool part...

I wired the two up so that, if you did well in Simon, it fed your fish gadget (if you had it open). If you did poorly, it robbed life from your fish.

I was going to create a whole ecosystem of gadgets that interacted with the fish. It was useless and insane, but oh, so fun...

Is there a gadget that would countdown to a given date and hour, and alert you when the time is up or when its close to being up?

Years | Months | Weeks  | Days | Hours | Minutes | seconds


And so you write an event and it would display in the side bar, so when you have an improtant meeting in a few days it would put it in your face and as the date comes closer, it would give more frequent alerts.

And it would support multiple events:)


Birthday,
Movie,
meeting with boss
Meeting with family
Shipping product X
Exam on subject y
etc...

littleguru wrote:



Rory wrote: ... 1. A tamagotchi gadget (not sure if I spelled that right) - one of those "virtual friends" that you have to feed and pay attention to if you don't want it to die - it was a fish and it was awesome. ...

Cool. Is it still available somewhere?

You could always search my blog. Not sure how effective that would be

It'd definitely be under the "Enter the Nerd" category, but I have no idea where. I'm pretty sure I put the thing together around the first couple months of 2004, if that helps (although it could have been the last couple months of 2003 - it was a while ago).

And, I never made the Simon game available. I just made the pet available. The Simon/Pet connection was really buggy, and I didn't want to release it in that state.

But, yeah - feel free to dig around

blowdart wrote:



jeffsand wrote:  Image a couple of C9 Gadgets.  One is tamagochi but the 9 guy and the other is a C9 coffeehouse reader, every time you visit a thread it helps the 9 guy, if you post even better.

Personalise it more.

• Have a Rory gadget you need to let shop for clothes and blog.
• A troll gadget that you need to download the latest kernel for (and deny that's the equiviliant of service patching)
• A w3bbo gadget that mutters that C9 doesn't validate and must be fed CSS

Woo-hoo!

I had quite the harty LOL in response to your comment.

Yes, indeed. I lawled very much.

Good stuff, yo.

On the gadget forum somebody said you can still call .net assemblies from the html code.

ddillon wrote:



brian.shapiro wrote: is there anywhere i can download the calculator gadget that was in beta 2 but removed afterwards

http://gallery.microsoft.com/Results.aspx?vista=landing&rdm=925338&l=1&ti=2

its not there, only cruddy calculator gadgets are there, i'm looking to see if someone uploaded the one from beta 2. some day i will just reinstall beta 2 to get it if i cant find it