Microsoft writes "Today's applications have lots of information to share with end users. However, screen real estate is limited and organizing all of the possible information is taxing for software developers as well as end users. Furthermore, people prioritize information in different ways and at different times.

For example, when a meeting is imminent, I need to know the time and place right now. When I'm driving, I need to know how soon to make the next turn. In general, I might want to always be able to check newly received e-mail messages. Likewise, you can imagine scenarios where I might want information on traffic, flights, weather, financial transactions, and so on. Trying to get the right information to the user at the right time is a difficult problem. The Microsoft gadgets initiative is committed to alleviating this problem. A gadget is an application (or part of an application) that can present users with the data they want when and where they want it. Currently, Microsoft offers three different kinds of gadgets: gadgets for Windows® Sidebar present a user's information on the user's desktop or in the Windows Vista™ Sidebar; gadgets for Windows Live™ present a user's information on any computer via a Web browser; and gadgets for Windows SideShow™ present a user's information on an auxiliary hardware device via its SideShow-enabled device driver. In this article, I will focus specifically on SideShow hardware devices and how to write a SideShow gadget to communicate with these devices using the managed API." For more information on this excellent article, please read this article.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | google | yahoo | technorati | slashdot