another review of desktop sidebar
Regular reader of geekyinfo – Tim sent this by email in regard to Desktop Sidebar which we looked at here.
After reading Phil’s post on the Desktop Sidebar I thought I’d give it a try. I’ve previously used apps such as Konfabulator which provide equally cool functionality. Desktop Sidebar is definitely handy, it provides easy access to all that information you always want to get without having to go anywhere. As you can see in the screen capture, I set it up to show RSS feeds, email status, bittorrent client information, my chat client and the all the normal functions that the windows taskbar plays. I was thinking that I could offset the valuable desktop real estate loss by eliminating the need for the windows taskbar and only having the Desktop Sidebar.
Unfortunately the coolness and usefulness of the Desktop Sidebar are negated by the performance of the software. I have a pretty beefy PC, but once I’d added the features I noted above I noticed pretty serious performance issues. Also I found that not all the plugins (or panels as they are called) worked like they should. Some panels were quite glitchy and kept breaking in various ways.
Overall it’s a cool tool, but I’ve shelved it until they do some major speed and stability improvements and it doesn’t slow me down to a crawl.