The windows sidebar has been removed from Windows 7. However, Gadgets are still supported. Our earlier blog article ‘Make a Vista sidebar gadget’ explained how to make a gadget for Vista, this followup article explains how to convert these previously described gadgets for use on Windows 7.
Vista users will be aware of the sidebar and the gadgets that it can contain. Although the sidebar has been dismissed by many as a hog of screen real estate, I personally think it is quite useful. I suspect that most SWiSH’ers are not aware of how easy it is to make great looking sidebar gadgets using SWiSH Max2 or SWiSH miniMax2.
Quite often I find myself needing to resort to a command prompt interface. For example, I recently needed to list the names of all of the components in Max2. The easiest way (that I know) is to use the command line interface and the command:
dir *.swi /s > c:\tmp\filelist.txt
My problem was that the above command needed to be opened from the Max2 components folder. Under XP there was a power toy that allowed the command prompt to be opened at any specific folder via the right click mouse button. I looked for a similar tool under Vista, but I found something better… it is possible to open a command prompt from windows explorer by holding down the “Shift” button then right clicking on the folder that you wish to open the prompt at.