Windows 8 Gadgets
Microsoft has been working on ways to integrate the data you want most often in a seamless way with the Windows desktop. In Windows Vista, the company created a feature called Windows Sidebar, which would typically sit on the edge of the PC display and provide an environment for Windows Gadgets, mini-applications that provide valuable information at your fingertips.In Windows 8, Windows Gadgets are largely unchanged from Windows Vista. But the Vista Sidebar is gone. Instead, Gadgets now appear only on the desktop and cannot be hosted inside of a visible, side-mounted panel. Also unlike with Vista, no Windows Gadgets appear on the desktop by default; you need to enable them first.
Adding Gadgets to the DesktopYou access Windows Gadgets from the Windows Gadget Gallery.. You can launch this application from the Start menu (just type gad in Start Menu Search) or by right-clicking the desktop and choosing Gadgets from the pop-up menu that appears. (If you already have one or more gadgets displayed on the desktop, you can also rightclick a gadget and choose Add gadget from the resulting pop-up menu.)There are two ways to add a gadget to the desktop:Double-click the gadget in Windows Gadget Gallery. When you do so, the gadget is placed in the top-right corner of the desktop. Subsequent gadgets are added down the right side of the screen. So if you were to add three gadgets using this method,
Looking at the Built-In Gadgets
Calendar Provides a handy onscreen calendar with both day and month views. Note
that there is no settings window for Calendar: it’s designed to tell you the
date and day of the week only.
Clock A clock that can be cond to show the time in any time zone or city
worldwide, or just use the current system time. Clocks can be named and
you can choose between eight different clock styles. You can also choose
whether to enable the second hand.
CPU Meter A set of two gauges that tracks the load on your PC’s microprocessor and
RAM, using percentage only. There is no settings window for this gadget.
Currency A simple currency converter. It’s handy if you want to see how poorly the U.S.
dollar is doing today against the euro. There is no settings window for this gadget.
Feed
Headlines
An RSS client that integrates with the RSS feeds to which you’ve subscribed in Internet Explorer. You must click the View Feeds button before it will display the results of any feed. To view more information about a particular feed, click the feed and Feed Headlines will expand out with a larger text view. To view the actual feed or Web page in Internet Explorer, click the headline in the expanded window. The Feed Headlines settings window enables you to con which of IE’s RSS feeds to display and how many headlines to show at a time.Picture Puzzle Remember those little handheld tile games in which you move tiles around until the picture displayed on the front of the tiles is complete? Well, here it is in gadget form. You can choose from 11 pictures, enable a timer, and click a small button to see what the finished picture is supposed to look like.Slide Show A photo slide-show gadget with a host of options. You can pick the folder from which to obtain the pictures (the default is the Public Pictures folder), the amount of time to display each image, which of 15 transitions to use, and whether the pictures should be shuffled. While the gadget is running, you can also mouse over its surface to access a small controller overlay with Previ-ous, Play/Pause, and Next buttons, as well as a View button that displays the current picture in Windows Photo Gallery.Stocks An electronic stock ticker that integrates with Microsoft’s MSN Money Cen-tral to provide constant stock price updates. By default, this gadget displays the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the NASDAQ composite, and the S&P 500 index, but you can add and remove stock symbols as you see fit.
Configuring Gadgets
When you have one or more gadgets displayed on the desktop, you’ll probably want to
con them in some way. Some gadgets offer no customization per se, but many expose
their customizable features via a Settings window. The way you access this information
is identical for any gadget. If you move the mouse cursor over a gadget, you’ll see one or
two small user interface items appear in the top-right corner of all gadgets, as in
4-36: a small Close button (resembling an x), which is always present, and pos-
sibly a small wrench. This second item appears only on gadgets that offer some form of
customization.
Removing Gadgets
To remove a gadget from the desktop, simply right-click it and choose Close gadget. Or,
mouse over the gadget and click the small Close button that appears. This will not delete
a gadget from your system, of course. You will be able to re-add any removed gadgets
later from the Add Gadgets window.
