The Home Server Hacks blog has just announced a new Windows Vista Sidebar gadget just for Windows Home Server users. This gadget, called "ShareMaster for Home Server," gives you quick access to the Windows Home Server's standard shared folders (Music, Photos, Public, Software, Users and Videos). The gadget has six icons on it that correspond to those six shared folders on the server. Clicking an icon on the gadget will open up that network shared folder. What's even cooler, though, is that you can drag and drop files onto the icons themselves to automatically move them from your PC to your Home Server. That's handy! This is definitely a must-have tool for any Windows Home Server owners. You can download the gadget from here. (image via Home Server Hacks)

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Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

David Cronshaw and I chat about the new MSN Video/Soapbox Vista Sidebar Gadget which is now available for download. 
The official MSN Video/Soapbox Vista Sidebar Gadget is now available for downloading and installing:

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=b4ea67a2-5cb6-4a15-8ae1-048cccaf8ffc&bt=1

Some of the Highlights of the MSN Video Vista Sidebar Gadget: 

• Display Localized MSN Videos with links to MSN Video Destination Site

• Display Soapbox Videos and play natively Inline

• Localized for over 30 countries and languages

• Top-Level market Navigation

• Numerous Sort-by options

• Display Search terms

• Display Related Videos

• Customize number of thumbs and pages to show

• Auto-scroll Pages at defined intervals

• And much more……

Source

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

WebSlices, meet desktop. Desktop, meet the web. Sean Lyndersay, ironically a former Microsoft IE developer (now Live Search), has developed a rather ingenuous solution to display WebSlices on the desktop using a very simple Sidebar gadget he calls the “WebSlice Viewer Gadget“. It’s still in alpha so it’s all Microsoft’s fault if it breaks.

In a nutshell, because WebSlices are actually stored as feeds inside the native Windows RSS platform, desktop applications including Sidebar gadgets can very simply fetch and display the data without much hassle. In this case, it couldn’t be any simpler to pick the WebSlice you want to display in the gadget, and have it appear in a simple frame on the desktop.

I think many people underestimated the potential of WebSlices by implying it was redundant in IE8 because you could just as easily load the full page which is true inside a browser, I think this gadget outside of the browser is a much better example of demonstrating where “subscribing” to a portion of content on the web is extremely convenient and powerful.

Also as opposed to RSS where you’re subscribing to new content, WebSlices focuses on updates to existing content, for example an eBay auction which would never have worked in RSS.

I only wish the Internet Explorer team had integrated the gadget in the first place, much like what OSX 10.5 Leopard did with “Web Clips”. Credit where credit is due - Apple’s implementation is actually far superior because users themselves define the portion of the webpage they want to clip, not rely on the discretion of the web developer. That way they can subscribe to anything and everything. Someone outside of eBay and Facebook will implement WebSlices, right?

Download WebSlice Viewer Gadget

Source: istartedsomething.com

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

One of the members at Zune Forums "litheon" has written a pretty nifty gadget that allows us to have our Zune Cards right on our Windows Vista desktops in the form of Sidebar gadgets. Just head over to this link [alternate download link] and download the Zune Card gadget for Windows Vista Sidebar.

Here's how the gadget looks:

Via: Zune Style | You Make it You!

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

This is for all Cricket Fans. The newly formed Indian Cricket League (ICL) whose website uses Silverlight for providing LIVE feeds of scores of Ongoing T-20 Cricket matches. Not only that, you can Watch the match LIVE which also is powered by Silverlight. Watch it LIVE.

Can also be used as gadget for Windows Vista users.

Via: meraTechPort

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

I just found this awesome gadget for Xbox 360 & Halo 3 owners. Its been developed using Silverlight technology. Lets hope more and more developers start using Silverlight technology in gadget development.

"HALO 3 is out and my Xbox is now getting the love it truly deserves.  Multiplayer mode in HALO is a lot of fun and even more fun when you can play with friends.  Thus, a perfect opportunity was born to create a useful sidebar gadget.

I've recorded a demo on how the gadget works available on Channel 9 and you can download the gadget directly from my server,  although I will be posting it to the Gadget Gallery shortly.

Just make sure that before you run the gadget you install Silverlight 1.0, otherwise the gadget will not work.

My data source for Xbox Live information is coming from Duncan Mackenzie's REST service and the UI is done completely in Silverlight 1.0.  This turned out to be a really fun project and the Sidebar hosting environment was a great place for a Silverlight application. 

One of the most obvious benefits is that within the Sidebar you can make cross-domain calls, no need for any server-side proxies.  You also gain access to certain System properties and a small data storage model all through the Gadget API.

I foresee more Silverlight-based Sidebar Gadgets in the future, I'm looking at you Twitter API..."

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)