Dear Microsoft: Please Make Vista's Sidebar Relevant
by SAB on Mar.24, 2009, under Technology
I want to like Vista’s sidebar. I do! I would love to have my desktop populated by easily accessible, eye-friendly mini-applications to tell me the weather, my calendar and mail schedule, etc. Sadly, Microsoft seems to have gone the distance to make this an impossibility for me and many (most?) others.
Sidebar would be far more useful to me if I could set what hot key I want to show/hide it, or choose to have it hidden to the side of the screen. Some Microsoft programs already do this, such as the task bar (home of the Start Menu) which auto-hides quite effectively. I’ve even tried looking for third party solutions to the auto hide, but so far the only solutions I can find are inadequate. Solutions range from keeping the sidebar running and using Auto-HotKey to bring the sidebar on top of other windows, but no solution has been found to minimize/close to the system tray or auto-hide off the side of the screen.
Google’s Google Desktop has a sidebar which offers some of these features, but I find the program’s inability to separate itself from its indexing function to be worrysome from a privacy standpoint, and Google’s brand advertising on the Sidebar is insufferable: Google is clearly branded at the top AND at the bottom of the Sidebar and these brandings can’t be removed or skinned away. Desktop Sidebar has some options, including autohide and many widgets, but the interface remains unintuitive and sadly clunky.
If anyone knows of a trick, tip, hack, whatever to make Sidebar more usable please let me know!
