Many useful and innovative gadgets surfaced with the introduction of the Windows Vista sidebar. Here are a few gadgets that are very popular and useful.
Vista Sidebar was introduced with Windows Vista. It is a sidebar placed on the side of the desktop where you can attach various gadgets capable of performing various tasks such as displaying CPU usage. Let's have a look at some very useful and most widely used Vista gadgets.
Staying updated
WeatherBug
WeatherBug is a Vista sidebar gadget that displays live weather conditions anywhere in the world. The details include forecasts, radar, weather cameras, weather alerts etc. It has enough customizable options that let you set degrees (Fahrenheit or centigrade) you want to view the temperature in, location etc. You can set your location by searching with city, sate even zip code.
Atom/RSS News Reader
Another useful Vista gadget! Atom/RSS News Reader is a tiny feed reader that fits in the Windows sidebar, helping you to always stay in touch and updated with the latest content you care about. It supports both RSS and Atom feeds and also features stylish themes (skins). You can even import subscribed feeds from Internet Explorer 7.
RSS To Speech
It's basically a RSS feed reader but it actually reads the feeds aloud after downloading them. You can add feeds of your choice and also have the ability to control various settings like speech volume and speed, delay between feeds etc.
Sport Scoreboard
This Vista sidebar gadget displays live sports scores for MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, NCAA Basketball, and NCAA Football. A must have for those sports fan who follow these games!
Fidelity Market Monitor
Fidelity Market Monitor gadget helps you keep track of the stock market. You can personalize your watch list by adding stocks, mutual funds entities you want to watch. The gadget is also capable of showing details like day high, day low, %change, historical charts, and news on a particular scrip etc.
Utilities
App Launcher
Handy Vista gadget that lets you launch applications quickly from the sidebar with a single click! The gadget is highly customizable and you can add or remove an application from the launcher easily from the options menu, you can also customize the style and layout of the launcher, add special links.
Drive Meter
Drive Meter visualizes your computers physical disk activity. It utilizes the performance monitor data and displays %active time and bytes read and written per second to the disk. It can automatically reconfigure if disk are added or removed, groups logical partitions on the same disk and also allows you to exclude certain drive letter from the visualization.
Wireless Network Monitor
This useful gadget displays the current status of your wireless network and also details such as connection status, SSID, signal strength etc. The gadget actually displays the SSID and Signal Strength when opened. But you can click on the SSID to view other network details.
Screen Snaper
Screen Snaper is a screen capture utility that allows you to capture your desktop screen. You also have an option of capturing the full screen, or windows or even and object in the screen. It can automatically save the captured images and support seven different image file formats (bmp/emf, gif, jpg, png, tiff, wmf).
SuperClipBoard
SuperClipBoard is a nifty Windows vista gadget that makes managing the clipboard an easy task. It records a history of previous clipboards and is also capable of recovering, previewing and deleting previous clipboards.
Security & Privacy
File Shredder Utility
File Shredder Utility is an essential tool for those working with sensitive files every day.
File Shredder Utility destroys such files permanently by overwriting them with special sequences of data that makes it impossible to recover the data.
Password Vault
Keep forgetting your passwords? This Vista gadget can help you. It stores multiple passwords in an encrypted file (uses 128-bit AES encryption), has a search option to quickly find any password you want, allows you to copy password and erases the clipboard automatically after 30 seconds.
DESlock+ Encryption Gadget
DESlock+ is a Vista gadget that provides quick access to 256bit AES encryption. To encrypt a file all you need to do is to drag the file on the gadget and enter a password. You can also encrypt/decrypt your clipboard.
