Thursday, March 25, 2004
Desktop Sidebar Home Page
Great application for Windows - and it's free. A sidebar that integrates with Outlook and web services and other apps to give you one click access to critical daily information. It's a 3rd party app, but is very very much like earlier work done by Microsoft's social computing research group and set for release within Longhorn.
It provides a single column on the side of the screen which acts as a repository for dynamic information - clock, rss feeds, calendar, messenger, weather and so on. It's very much like earlier ideas on web snippets and so on that I worked on a while ago (scroll to web snippets)- the closest I came to coding it up was to implement a web scraping algorithm in php and then call that to grab certain bits off different websites and present them on one web page (though works, the formatting isn't ideal :-)). I can see me retaining this app on my desktop, mainly for the neat RSS presentation, weather info, and so on. It is an application that supports the monitoring part of internet behaviours (for more on this see the introduction in this paper) and so is likely to be very successful. There are also rumours that MS will push this 3rd party app as part of Longhorn because it's good to help others and not be anti-competitive.....
It's a bit buggy still - repaint isn't quite right - and I can't get the plugin's to work in visual studio, so can't see the interfaces that are needed for it - but I'm hoping that we will get this resolved shortly. This app is so useful for me that it may even affect my recent thoughts of buying a Mac - cos this is Windows-only software.....
Great application for Windows - and it's free. A sidebar that integrates with Outlook and web services and other apps to give you one click access to critical daily information. It's a 3rd party app, but is very very much like earlier work done by Microsoft's social computing research group and set for release within Longhorn.
It provides a single column on the side of the screen which acts as a repository for dynamic information - clock, rss feeds, calendar, messenger, weather and so on. It's very much like earlier ideas on web snippets and so on that I worked on a while ago (scroll to web snippets)- the closest I came to coding it up was to implement a web scraping algorithm in php and then call that to grab certain bits off different websites and present them on one web page (though works, the formatting isn't ideal :-)). I can see me retaining this app on my desktop, mainly for the neat RSS presentation, weather info, and so on. It is an application that supports the monitoring part of internet behaviours (for more on this see the introduction in this paper) and so is likely to be very successful. There are also rumours that MS will push this 3rd party app as part of Longhorn because it's good to help others and not be anti-competitive.....
It's a bit buggy still - repaint isn't quite right - and I can't get the plugin's to work in visual studio, so can't see the interfaces that are needed for it - but I'm hoping that we will get this resolved shortly. This app is so useful for me that it may even affect my recent thoughts of buying a Mac - cos this is Windows-only software.....
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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