Darryl Burling @ Work : Sidebar

Wanted - a Video Player sidebar gadget

dburling — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 00:40:00 GMT

I was just considering watching a videocast that I'd downloaded but I've got other things to do and don't want to devote myself to just watching the video.

On my computer I've got the sidebar set to always on top (I've got a 20" wide screen monitor, so no great loss of space). What I'd love to be able to do is put the video into the sidebar where it can just play away and I can tune in and out of it as I work.

Ideally something where I can load a video from a location on my computer and then play/pause the video as required. When the video isn't playing it can show a logo or something. It would be great if you could set the logo yourself. Other nice to have's would be if you can queue up some videos (perhaps via a Windows Media play list).

Would anyone else use something like this? Has anyone got one? Has anyone got time to build one? :-)

Trade Me Launches Vista Gadget

dburling — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:31:46 GMT

Good news from Rowans Blog.

The TradeMe gadget is one of several New Zealand gadgets that have been incubated.

This gadget is for people selling stuff on TradeMe - if you sell stuff on TradeMe, this is a great way to keep up to date with what your goods are up to and what value has been placed on them.

I'm using it to track one of my auctions right now, and I've used it for previous auctions.

You'll see a few more gadgets come online this week, so stay tuned. In the meantime, go get the TradeMe Gadget :-)

Powershell gadget and using WCS in the sidebar

dburling — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 08:33:23 GMT

Last night the guys from Mindscape unleashed their powershell gadget onto the world. This very cool gadget allows you to enter powershell commands into a gadget rather than having a powershell window running full time in the background. The guys have actually hooked up their sound system to a system that plays MP3's and using powershell they "bump" and play tracks. So the gadget was inspired in many ways by this scenario. The gadget also has a nice flyout which serves as a powershell window that tucks away when not in use - very nice.

The other interesting thing about the powershell gadget is that it uses .Net but without requiring a UAC prompt or MSI installer to make it all work - thus, you get full .Net power in a sidebar gadget that any user can install and use - very cool.

You can download the gadget here, and read about how you can automatically register any objects you need here. If you get it - make sure you install powershell before you tell them it doesn't work... :-)

You've seen JB using .Net from inside a gadget and you've now seen the Powershell Gadget that uses .Net, Vitorrio has taken to the next level by using Windows Card Space in a sidebar gadget. He's also written a pretty comprehensive blog post that tells you how he did it and he's attached the source from his project to his blog post.

Very cool! Hopefully these help you expand the possibilities you can acheive with gadgets :-)

Technorati tags: WCS, Powershell, Sidebar, Gadgets, Windows, Vista

More NZ Sidebar Gadgets

dburling — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:41:43 GMT

There is lots of activity in the Windows Vista Sidebar gadget space here in New Zealand. There are a heap of significant organizations here that are working on gadgets right now that will be revealed in the next few weeks.

For the moment though I want to highlight the astonishing gadget development effort of Chris Crowe. Chris is an IIS MVP from Christchurch and he's been busy making gadgets for a while. I had no idea he was working on these until the Christchurch Technical Briefing when I caught up with him briefly.

He currently has six gadgets that he's built. Five of them are Radio gadgets (one for each of More FM, Radio Pacific, News Talk ZB, RDU Radio in Christchurch and ZM Online)- so you can put your radio station on your sidebar and listen while you work.

The other one is a very cool NZ Weather gadget. This gadget tells you the current wind speed and direction, rainfall, humidity, barometric pressure and temperature. In addition you can see graphs of the data over the last 24 hours or 7 days depending on the type of data.

This is a very cool gadget. He's only uploaded it a few days ago (last thursday IIRC) and its already had nearly 3500 downloads!

You can get any of Chris's gadgets from his live gallery profile page here.

There is lots of news around gadgets coming up - there are some cool gadgets and gadget usage starting to happen.

If you've got a gadget you'd like showcased, please let me know.

Technorati tags: Gadgets, Sidebar, Vista, New Zealand

Sidebar Gadgets - getting started made easy

dburling — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:57:00 GMT

We've got some great New Zealand gadgets up on the Microsoft NZ website now including ones from DigiRama, TrafficWatch, NZ Herald, ASB, and TVNZ (my personal favorite). These are all listed on here.

If you've been thinking about writing a side bar gadget (and you are not the only one) there are a few places you might like to start.

The first place to start is the Gadget Development overview which gives you an introduction to building a sidebar gadget. This will give you an understanding of the basic architecture and minimum requirements for a gadget.

There is also the Sidebar Reference (ignore the mostly blank landing page - look in the table of contents...) that will provide details about events and API calls available to use from inside the sidebar.

Daniel from the UK DPE team has also put together a 10 minute video that walks you through developing a gadget, this is a good way to get an overview of the process and simple gadget development.

In case you are a little daunted about burying your head in javascript and HTML or if you just dont have the time to do all this reading, JB has got something that should help. He's published a gadget shim which is essentially the basics of a gadget already to go. All you've got to do is download it, add your content and publish the gadget.

Go and download the shim (a small zip file) and build a gadget. And when you do, make sure you add it to the gallery - and let me know so we can add it to the NZ gadget page.

Technorati tags: Sidebar, gadgets, Vista, Windows