Weekly Download: Desktop Sidebar
Why Wait for Microsoft’s Longhorn?
If you’re not familiar with the term “Longhorn” it’s the name of the next version of Microsoft’s Operating System. It promises many noticeable changes to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) we’ve come to love (or loathe), and one of the most anticipated is the Desktop Sidebar. This Sidebar is basically a robust toolbar that is extremely flexible and you can completely customize its tools, and presentation. I for one can’t wait, but I’m going to have to with Longhorn’s release date not being until 2006. Keeping this in mind I believe I found a program for you all that will propel our Operating Systems into the year 2006 with this week’s free download—the Desktop Sidebar from desktopsidebar.com .
Desktop Sidebar (DS) is a toolbar that integrates with your Internet Explorer (5.5 or higher), email and Windows operating system to put everything easily at your fingertips (not to mention it looks just like the sidebar being developed for Longhorn). Don’t miss a beat with weather, stocks and more; with DS it’s a cinch to stay up-to-date on the events that matter to you. DS has an integrated RSS news aggregator to bring headlines to you desktop as they happen—hover your pointer over the headline to get more info, and click it to see the whole story. You can control your Media Player, get a larger viewable Clipboard, and view you system resources in real time all right from your desktop. These features are just a taste of the things you can do with the DS, and you’re in complete control. Conveniently located at DS’s site are almost two hundred downloadable plug-ins such as calendars, virtual desktops, system tools as well as tons of skins.
The program is a mere 8.97MB in size and which means it can be downloaded and installed in a couple of minutes, even with dial-up. Once you get the program installed you should go out to their site and read the help files to help you get started. Next you should start tweaking out your DS—any questions you may have can be answered at the FAQs section or the forum section of their site. After you feel comfortable with the program don’t forget about all the great downloadable plug-ins that really make this toolbar hard to ignore.
DS will run on Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP but dial-up users should keep in mind that a lot of these panels are getting constant feeds from the internet, so you may want to watch how you set this up or it will eat bandwidth or cause errors.
Here you have it—the future brought to your desktop. Can’t wait for Longhorn? Taste it now with the desktop Sidebar.
http://www.desktopsidebar.com/download.html
~ Chad
*Keep in mind that Worldstart is not the developer of this software. Any technical support questions should be directed to the developer.
http://www.desktopsidebar.com/fileforum.php