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That's interesting - the thing that gave me the notion of trying vista (beta) out WAS the sidebar...

I use desktop sidebar right now but it's quite slow and prone to freezing...

For the record, after a day or two I reverted back - I think Vista beta jaded my interest before I even started using it by screwing up the dual boot meaning I had to get software to restore the XP partition... Give it another six months for a few service packs to be released then I'll try it... (first rule of MS products - wait for the first SP).

I personally like the sidebar, not that it's anything that I couldn't have downloaded seperately anyway, but I enjoy having the CPU usage meter right on the side, along with a calender, the weather and a currency converter.

    I'm not entirely sure what the sidebar includes in Vista (not having tried it myself), but it sounds eerily similar to this: http://www.desktopsidebar.com/, which I've been using (and loving) for about the last four months on an XP installation.

Would you trade a market of 95% of all Windows-users for even 50%? And how long do you think it'll take before Vista hits 50%? We (nerds) know that Vista isn't really that much of an improvement over XP now and the average user doesn't, but they will as soon as people they know get it -- and are likely disappointed unless they're upgrading from 98.

Let's rehash Vista for a moment:
1. Aero: You can make XP look just like Aero right now for free; just go look at softpedia.com or download.com.
2. The sidebar (is that even still on Vista?): desktop sidebar works even on Win 2k. And then's there the Google Desktop.
3. Better security: You'd be better off sticking with Win 2k or XP and getting the free version of Win Patrol. More security and it uses less than 5 mb of Ram to run in the background -- how much memory is Vista going to require again?
4. DirectX 10: It'll be almost useless for a long time. No game company is going to trade the market of almost all Windows-users for the Vista-users market exclusively. I predict that when games get more advanced they will either use OpenGL or even program what the game needs into the game itself (which likely won't be a permanent upgrade to your system).

Those are its pluses! Consider the biggest negative of all: 8 different versions, each costing more than the last. Is everyone going to rush out and buy a copy of Vista when the version they can afford has less features than the copy of XP they already have? Most who do so would by mistake.... and they won't be very quiet about how they feel they got screwed either. Personally, I think the 8 versions thing is what is going to be the biggest detriment to selling it. MS is trying to force everyone to pay through the nose for Windows and a great many simply will not. MS has forgotten that their target market is cheap; if they weren't a lot more of them would be using Macs (and I'm no Apple fangirl by any means, so don't take it that way).

Pirate Vista? A lot of them won't even bother with that when they find out from folks who have it that it's not really that much of an improvement over XP (from a user's standpoint) and requires powerful, expensive hardware -- which a lot of people simply don't have even now. You can't download hardware over p2p so Vista will be useless to many, who aren't going to upgrade without a compelling reason to do so. And what complelling reason will there be? MS's own games? That's not good enough for most, not so long as there are a lot of games that still support XP. No, I think Microsoft's only real hope lies with companies like Dell, who will sell pre-built computers with Vista. And guess how happy those people are going to be when they find out that they have to pay do much exta for features? To summarize, I think word of mouth alone will do a lot to prevent Vista's widespread adoption -- it will cost too much to have anything beyond the basics, most hardware can't even utilize it and hardware that can won't be all that common for another couple of years. For all that inconvenience Vista Premium should have a boatload of great features, but it's apparently not going to. Even with all that aside it would be very foolish for a game company to go Vista-only because the Vista market share is going to be too small. And if Vista bombs they certainly won't. Even if it is suceesful, its market share is still going to be low enough compared to previous versions of Windows that marketing games to it exclusively just wouldn't be profitable enough, especially since OpenGL can be used instead.

Come to think of it, maybe Vista will do more to push OpenGL than anything else. Bonus! Go MS! :-D

. . . and to be fair, KDE's kwin copied the kmenu from Win9x/2k/etc. Start Menu. . . and Windows 95 copied heavily from Mac OS, IRIX, and Motif.

Want Windows Vista minus the DRM? Install Windows 2000 or Windows XP, then add the Desktop Sidebar ( http://www.desktopsidebar.com/ )

Want Windows Vista (sidebar and all) without DRM?

Ingredients:

Windows XP
Desktop Sidebar ( http://www.desktopsidebar.com/ )
Style XP ( http://www.tgtsoft.com/ )

There's your Windows Vista. ;-)

The search functionality of Google Desktop is great, but there still aren't enough sidebar plugins (at least not with the functionality that I'm looking for) for it to replace Desktop Sidebar on my workstation. There's a great deal of third-party plugin and skin development for it right now - a nifty little piece of software if you've got a big enough screen to be able to afford to give some up for a sidebar.

Google Desktop for me consists of the toolbar entry only, which is still a damn fine way to search through all my e-mail, Trillian logs, files, etc. Saved my ass more than once. I'll be watching plugin development for the sidebar with interest.

The search functionality of Google Desktop is great, but there still aren't enough sidebar plugins (at least not with the functionality that I'm looking for) for it to replace Desktop Sidebar on my workstation. There's a great deal of third-party plugin and skin development for it right now - a nifty little piece of software if you've got a big enough screen to be able to afford to give some up for a sidebar.

Google Desktop for me consists of the toolbar entry only, which is still a damn fine way to search through all my e-mail, Trillian logs, files, etc. Saved my ass more than once. I'll be watching plugin development for the sidebar with interest.

The search functionality of Google Desktop is great, but there still aren't enough sidebar plugins (at least not with the functionality that I'm looking for) for it to replace Desktop Sidebar on my workstation. There's a great deal of third-party plugin and skin development for it right now - a nifty little piece of software if you've got a big enough screen to be able to afford to give some up for a sidebar.

Google Desktop for me consists of the toolbar entry only, which is still a damn fine way to search through all my e-mail, Trillian logs, files, etc. Saved my ass more than once. I'll be watching plugin development for the sidebar with interest.

How does this compare with Desktop Sidebar?

Does anyone else see this as pretty much the same thing as the Desktop Sidebar? That's what I use, and I love it. It can even be integrated with ver. 1.0 of google desktop search.

Do you think that Google is trying to steal this for their own use, or are they claiming that it's completely their own idea? As a note, Desktop Sidebar stole the idea from the Longhorn betas.

Another thing, I sincerely do not think this will ever replace a browser... I will always use a browser.

Seems to just like the other Windows sidebar projects out there...

Sadly the whole idea is taken from Longhorn.

If you want an excellent RSS +more sidebar (That LongHorn is actually based on) check out http://desktopsidebar.com/ ... I have used it for a very long time now and find it to be very actively developed.

Here is my screenshot: http://www.mnsi.net/~n0spam/I_broke_Google.PNG

I also like and use Desktop Sidebar when I have to boot to XP.

XNView - An exellent graphics viewer with a massive collection of compatible file types, and a sweet thumbnailing browser.

SnideSoft IcoEdit - A thorough icon editing application, with support for multiple icon sizes and bit-depths.

WinWGet - A lightweight and simple file downloading tool.

FileZilla - A good FTP client, with a simple and familiar interface.

KillaFing 3 - A cookie/pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher.

Desktop Sidebar - A "Longhorn"-style desktop sidebar program, supporting email checking, a slideshow, clocks, quicklaunchers, and Outlook integration.

Codename Dsahboard - An alternative "Longhorn"-stlye desktop sidebar to the above.

I've got 26 things open right now and between a multi-tabbed browser, taskbars over two monitors and a sidebar I don't have any problem getting to what I want. The Alt-Tab Replacement helps too.

Part of the problem with 3D GUIs is that monitors are 2D devices, not 3D. Give me a workable 3D display device and manipulation tools (hint: I'm thinking of 'give me the real world' here) with my 3D GUI and you might have something. Even in the 'real world' however, 2D is often a most useful abstraction. Jakob Nielsen has an interesting column (with rebuttals) on the problems of 3D interfaces.