Get into gadgets

Learn what Vista’s gadgets have to offer you and your family

By John Bugailiskis

It’s another chaotic morning as Jane Hamilton scrambles to get her son, David, and daughter, Chloe, ready for camp. The newspaper called for sunshine, but the sky is looking gloomy. With no time to wait for radio or TV reports or load up the appropriate web site, Hamilton turns to her Windows gadgets to save the day.

With one quick click of the mouse, she snags the latest forecast and finds that rain is on the way. Thanks to the Sidebar feature on Windows Vista, Hamilton can keep one step ahead of Mother Nature.

“I love not having to open up my web browser anymore to check the weather,” says Hamilton. The mini-programs, or gadgets, that make this possible all reside on Hamilton’s Windows Sidebar, a vertical panel on the right side of the desktop.

Everyone loves gadgets. They’re stored in our kitchen cupboards, desk drawers and work benches.

Boost productivity

Gadgets are mini-applications designed to make daily life at home, work or on the go more productive. The programs can connect to the web to provide real-time information, or they can instantly access programs installed on a computer.

“Gadgets are a big hit in our house,” says Hamilton. “Having exactly the information I want and need saves me a lot of time. I no longer have to search to find what I need because it’s already all there in one place.”

Hamilton uses three gadgets to help get her family out the door and plan her day: Messenger and Notes (which both come with Vista) and WeatherEye (which she downloaded from Microsoft’s gadget gallery).

The Messenger gadget lets you interact with your Windows Live Messenger contacts, and the Notes gadget is like a digital stack of Post-it notes because you can write brief reminders that “stick” to your desktop.

Windows Gadgets are easy-to-use mini programs designed to make you more productive.

Gadgets dissected

“Gadgets are easy-to-use mini-programs that give you information at a glance and provide easy access to frequently used tools,” explains Jacky Mok, product manager of Windows Live. He says what a particular gadget can do is limited only by the imagination of the developer who created it.

“Gadgets can deliver business data, news updates, Internet radio streams, games and in fact [can do] just about any task you desire,” says Mok.

Windows Vista comes with 11 Sidebar gadgets including Calendar, Clock, Contacts, CPU Meter, Currency conversion, RSS Feed Headlines, Notes, Picture Puzzle, Slide Show, real-time Stock quotes and Weather. You can choose from about 1,300 other gadgets — the number expands daily as developers invent new ones — by visiting Microsoft’s gadget gallery.

Gadgets can also integrate with many applications to enhance interactivity. For example, a gadget can give you an at-a-glance view of all your online instant messaging contacts, the day view from your calendar or an easy way to control your media player.

You can organize your gadgets in several ways:

Keep all of the gadgets attached to Sidebar.
Keep some gadgets attached to Sidebar and place some on your desktop.
Detach all of the gadgets from Sidebar and place them all on your desktop.

Use Windows Sidebar to personalize your desktop with helpful ‘at a glance’ information.

Types of gadgets

Microsoft supports three different types of gadgets. These include:

Sidebar gadgets, which run on the Windows Vista desktop
Web gadgets, which run on Windows Live Spaces pages
SideShow gadgets, which run on newer devices such as a secondary display embedded in a laptop, typically on the lid of the unit

You can get all these gadgets and more for free in the Windows Live Gallery.

Have a look around. There’s a gadget out there that suits you.

My favourite gadgets are Ask Windows Live and Mini Outlook Inbox. Ask Windows Live is perfect for the inquisitive mind: You can ask just about any question, and the Ask Windows Live gadget will respond with answers from Windows Live, Live QnA, MSDN, Windows Live and/or Wikipedia. Even better, the answers appear in a fly-out window, not on a web page that takes over your desktop.

With the flood of e-mail most people receive daily, it can be hard to get any work done. Mini Outlook Inbox lets you preview new mail at a glance without having to stop what you’re doing. It also allows you to create, reply to, delete and forward mail, and to see complete messages in a fly-out window. Best of all, you don’t need to open Outlook.

And remember, gadgets have the advantage of being easily swapped out and replaced with new ones with just the click of a mouse. So if you haven’t tried them, give your gadgets a test run.