Vista Sidebar Gadgets for Gamers

[Priest_Sidran]

What Vista Gadgets would you want for your games

Me Initiative Tracker, Dice Roller, Experience Calculator

 

[Plane Sailing]

Now that's an interesting idea that hadn't occurred to me before...

Are you asking because you're planning to write them

 

[Priest_Sidran]

Only if I can learn the form of programming, and or hire someone to do it

A whole potential amount of vista gamers supplies could be supplied in such a way.

So I suppose Its either I would write them, or find someone more capable to do it.

 

[Redrobes]

I have come to ask for guidance Priest Sidran...

Not being part of the order of Vista, I wonder whether you could enlighten me as to the benefits of the teachings of Sidebar and how different it is from the practices of Quick Launch Bar, Custom Tool Bar or merely Desktop Shortcuts.

I am from the old order and scribe the popular ViewingDale Dice app. Should I repent and abandon the old ways ? Would I need to take a quest and seek out the fabled .NET framework in order to take me to this new level of enlightenment ?

 

[ThirdWizard]

All you need to know to make gadgets is some html, javascript, maybe some css, and mspaint. There are some gadget APIs, but I doubt you would need them for the kinds of things you're mentioning.

 

[Priest_Sidran]

Not being as knowledgeable at Quick Launch, I believe that Side bar which is made up of a number of Gadgets (which are run on their own) is very different than the Quick Launch.

Vista gadgets I currently have include such things as several media players (Zune and WMP)
An alarm clock, bubble wrap (popable for endless boredom moments) cpu usuage monitor.

I am still learning the whole process of the gadget (an easy google search for Windows Sidebar Gadgets should bring up pages for developers). Aeroexperience forum also deals with the Gadget, Requests for new gadgets, and archived gadgets.

Gadget guide here

 

[Redrobes]

The quick launch is just another tool bar. A tool bar is a collection of shortcuts which you can dock on the main / bottom app bar or you can drag them to the desktop and they make a window filled with the shortcuts. To get an app into a tool bar you just drag the shortcut from the desktop into it or drag the app into it and press the alt key down to make it a shortcut.

The side bar appears to me to be a lot like another dockable toolbar which looks a little nicer but essentially allows you to launch apps from it. It also appears as though you can only lauch specific types of app called gadgets.

I looked over the gadget list on MS and noted the kinds of thing that you can run. These apps appear to be more than just html or java script programs but maybe you can do simple web pages or more complex graphical apps.

So here are the million dollar questions. Can you take my dice app and park it on a sidebar like you can with a custom tool bar or the quick launch bar ? And, can you run gadgets on windows XP / 2000 ? Is it backwards compatible ?

I would imagine that the answers would be a 'no' to each.

I have found that the majority of people are running older PC's and OS'es - often laptops with 2000 or XP. If almost everyone was on Vista or it were backwards compatible then it might be worth it.

 

[schporto]

The sidebar is a bit different then a quicklaunch. There is a sidebar gadget that acts like the quick launch though. Most sidebar gadgets are actual applications (although simple and specialized) that are running in the sidebar. The quick launch on the other hand collects static links to applications. The sidebar is more analogous to the system tray. So there's a clock gadget which tells the time, but has a (disableable) second hand. There's a slideshow that shows you pictures. Then again there are some more useful ones out there too. A rss feed lister, that keeps updating. Also the gadgets can generally be made translucent too.
I think an initiative tracker wouldn't be too useful there. A dice roller would be though. So too a searcher for SRDs.
-cpd

 

[ThirdWizard]

The gadgets actually run in the sidebar. Here is what it looks like:

The clock ticks the seconds away, the weather channel gadget tells me lots of weather information, and the last one monitors my CPU and memory usage. All this is done in real time in the sidebar all the time.

By the way, for anyone interested, the weather channel gadget is the best I've seen and can be downloaded here. It really is very very good.

So here are the million dollar questions. Can you take my dice app and park it on a sidebar like you can with a custom tool bar or the quick launch bar ? And, can you run gadgets on windows XP / 2000 ? Is it backwards compatible ?

Yes to #1. No to #2. You can do a lot with sidebars, and a die roller would be fairly simple. And, a while back they were planning on a sidebar for XP, but it died due to time constraints on all the things they were working on.

A die roller would be easy to do in javascript/html. You'd just do something kinda like:

var img_1
var randomNumber = Math.random()*5
if (randomNumber = 4)
{
    img_1 = "d4_roll_4.gif"
}
if (randomNumber = 3)
{
    img_1 = "d4_roll_3.gif"
}
...
...
etc

Of course, I haven't used javascript in a while, so I'm positive you can't use that exactly, but it should give you a general idea of what you're looking for. Stick that in some html that displays images for die rolls, probably a button, some text fields to choose what die and how many you're rolling.

For more advanced usage, check out the gadget api page from msdn. There you can find various calls that are more powerful than those supported by javascript, for example the ability to read system information or network capability.

So too a searcher for SRDs.

You know what I would find useful? A gadget that would tell me info on various status effects! So, I could type in "nauseated" and it would tell me all the effects associated with nauseated. Or maybe even one that had the stats on various creature types so I wouldn't have to worry about forgetting all the immunities that go with plant creatures once in a blue moon when they actually see play. Those would be helpful for me. If I get some free time, I might work on some of those.