The sidebar has made a few appearances during the beta program. It was first originally put into Windows Longhorn (when it was still in beta and wasn’t called Vista then) but then removed because it wasn’t useful anymore and it was too difficult to cope with. The computer world stopped… we were all horrified. It made its return however in one of the recent builds released to testers of Windows Vista.

The sidebar is an “extended taskbar” of which sits docked at the side of the screen with “gadgets” in. Gadgets are small bits of code, usually written in XML or a simple language of which you can customise your sidebar with many things. The default sidebar has a 3D analogue clock, an RSS feeds aggregator, it also has a search field for searching the web, and it also has a slide-show function. The sidebar also has transparency along with the rest of the desktop, and is smart in the fact that it doesn’t block windows when they are opened; it sits in the background waiting to be used.

 There is a demonstration relating to this article. Click here to view it.