Shortcuts – My Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget

I read a tutorial about building Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget and decided to try it myself. So this will be my first (and hopefully not the last) Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget – a gadget to display some usefull shortcuts.

The first problem I faced is the need to have a better knowledge on javascript. Fortunately, lately I ‘m working on a projects based on Atlas , so I ‘ve learned some basic javascript stuff. It would be even better if the Sidebar API was based on the Atlas client-side API – this is where I’ve invested a couple months digging into…Anyway, the second problem for me is the visual appearance of my gadget – I can’t do the design stuff, but anyway I’ve made some quick images with Paint.So here are the features in short:

• display a list of clickable shortcuts
  
• clicking over a shortcut, triggers execution of some shell command
  
• support for adding new shortcuts.
  
• support for deleting shortcuts
  

In general writing a gadget is similar to writing a web site with client-side scripting only – it contains HTML , CSS, JS, media, etc. So that’s how it looks like in the gadgets gallery:

After installing the gadget , it displays some default shortcuts

Only the last shortcut may be deleted – that is not quite user friendly , but it was easier for me :-)

Clicking on settings of the gadget provides dialog to add a new shortcut. The user may clear all shortcuts as well.

The gadget code may be downloaded from here. It is not completed in anyway and has some bugs as well. The zip file contains installation instructions.

There is a lot of room for improvements… but no time at all