Knowledge is Power

I’ve been using the Vista Sidebar on my laptop for a while now, because it has a widescreen and I couldn’t care less about the width of the screen! I’m more interested in the number of lines of code I can cram in one view… so instead of wasting the space with “whitespace”, I decided to actually use the Sidebar to display useful things.  I’ve installed a while ago the pretty good looking All CPU Meter from the folks at Add Gadget and I really liked it, though I was bummed that it didn’t have support for Battery Life and Signal Strength display.  Since I’m using it on a laptop, these are values I’m very interested in.

For a while I searched the net for good Gadgets that could display what I wanted, but they all either had a bad UI or had too much information in them.

Tonight, I decided to take a look at what a “Gadget” is… actually, it’s a simple HMTL app, with CSS and JS files.  It turned out that I could easily set the values for two bars / graphs I wasn’t using (my laptop only has 2 cores) and I hooked them to my battery life and signal strength.  5 minutes later, I had the Gadget I always wanted!

Tadam!

Thanks to the guys at Add Gadget!

PS.: I won’t be releasing the source code as the original work is copyrighted, but I’ll try to see with them if it could be possible to add the options to the original gadget!