Gadget Geek Journey; Desintation 2: Vista Sidebar Gadget
What an interesting day with Windows Vista. It is certainly “polished” than Windows 2000 and XP; things seems to be placed in logical areas. Also took the opportunity to install Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta, which worked flawlessly — all running successfully in Parallels! Two computers in one is a major time saver.
It was also time to swap to Microsoft Expression Web, to complete the Microsoft-centric development environment. Expression Web certainly feels more polished than Visual Web 2005. I hope to spend more time in this app.
Closing the loop on my Thursday experimentation with live.com and Vista Sidebar gadgets: and the result is a new little gadget I am alpha testing: The Neil Finn Lyric Vista gadget.
And it looks sorta like:
Please right-click, save-as a “.gadget”, double-click and drag and enjoy the words of one of the world’s best lyricists. Comments and feature requests more than welcome.
Best starting place for the proverbial Hello World experience for Vista Sidebar gadgets is http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx
Daniel Moth, from Microsoft UK has an Excellent screencast on the Channel 9 site at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=255735.These gets you going on the first part: at least getting your gadget running and drag and droppable.
You will need to do a little more Javascript, as this triggers events that ensure your sidebar gadget works
http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/ has some more up-to date info, as the MSDN site is a little behind on updating. I wonder if Microsoft is going to release an Apple Dashcode style of mini development application for widgets? Hope so. Whilst the development process is no more difficult than simple web page design; there are many pieces of wiring that could be made easier with a simple builder.