Windows Vista Annoyances

The Sidebar

As you know, the essence of using Windows is running programs, which often produce documents. In Vista, however, there’s a third category: a set of weird hybrid entities that Microsoft calls gadgets. They appear, all at once, floating in front of your other windows, at the right side of the screen. They’re there when you first fire up Vista, or whenever you press

+Space bar. (You can also open them by choosing Start→All Programs→Accessories→Windows Sidebar.)

Welcome to the new world of the Sidebar (Figure 6-5).

Figure 6-5. When you summon the Sidebar, you get a fleet of floating miniprograms that convey or convert all kinds of useful information. They appear and disappear all at once, on a tinted translucent sheet.

What are these weird hybrid entities, anyway? They’re not really programs, because they don’t create documents or have listings in the All Programs menu. They’re certainly not documents, because you can’t name or save them. What they most resemble, actually, is little Web pages. They’re meant to display information, much of it from the Internet, and they’re written using Web programming languages like DHTML, Javascript, VBScript, and XML.

Vista’s starter gadgets include a calculator, current weather reporter, stock ticker, clock, and so on. Mastering the basics of ...