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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsVista sidebar widget available for WoW players
by Michael Gray 
Mar 24th 2009 at 11:00AM
If you're a Vista user, that odd sidebar has suddenly become relevant to your WoW lifestyle. Available for free from the Wndows Live site, WoW Explorer has a host of neat little plugins. The simplest of these features include the ability to put your realm on the Explorer skin -- you'll instantly be able to see if your realm is up or down, or what its population is like right now. You can also select your Explorer's theme, size, and toggle its docking behavior.The Explorer's neatest feature, however, is the search functionality. The plugin lives on your Vista sidebar, which gives you instant search from your desktop. You can choose which popular site is the Explorer's default (such as your intrepid WoW Insider or maybe Wowhead), and the results instantly return in a flyout window. I ran several different searches, such as looking for Dual Specs or some different fat loot, and found the widget to be incredibly fast and responsive.
You can't beat the price at "free." Since I'm one of the masses who had previously stared at the sidebar wondering if the dang thing would have any use, it's nice to see something WoW-related live over my local weather widget.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Fan stuff, Odds and ends
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 3)
Hoggersbud Mar 24th 2009 12:43PM
Well, some people's computer usage does mean they're not going to benefit much from any widget. Somebody who is always playing a full screen game for example. Well, that's fine with the widget makers, what do they think everybody is going to need it? Of course not.
Makes me think of cellphone non-users who think cellphone apps are useless. Sure, if you don't use your cellphone much...hey where is mine...
Eric Mar 24th 2009 12:54PM
Even with 2 monitors I don't ever see my desktop. Web browser always on google.com, Google reader streaming my RSS feeds, gmail, and a nifty little widget for iGoogle home pages that toggles between search engines such as wowhead, thottbot, armory, and wowwiki. And of course with WoW running on the main monitor I can tell what my realm status is by logging in or not, cause even if the realm is up if I can't log in that little icon saying up and medium is just a mockery of my inability to get to the server for some obscure reason.
Sidebar also eats resources that I don't like to share. TeaTimer eats enough as it is...
Hoggersbud Mar 24th 2009 12:58PM
So do you have something like:
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=ranger.befunk.com/google_wow/wow.xml
on your google home page?
Eric Mar 24th 2009 1:13PM
Not that one exactly but yea. My desktop is eerily empty, so maybe its just preference to the clean desktop but side bar seems like a meh idea, especially since I have a google homepage that does the same things and is mobile (computers all acces the same iGoogle page.They all require the internet anyways.
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?type=gadgets&url=rsnook.googlepages.com/wowdb.xml
I use that one.
Deplane Mar 24th 2009 1:54PM
I guess this is a great tool for those of us, say, with just one monitor.
:)
Eric Mar 24th 2009 9:36PM
Maybe, but even with one monitor unless its massive it's cutting in to screen space or being covered up. I had mine always on top and it made my browser just look funny, and if it wasn't always on top it was always unnoticed.
JDM Mar 24th 2009 2:24PM
Unfortunately, I have all of this information and utilities on my browser's start page, which is running virtually 24/7... I don't think I need to re-enable the sidebar and install this gadget to duplicate the same effect.
BuildAGadget Mar 24th 2009 5:09PM
Thanks for posting our gadget up on the blog and thanks to everyone for very interesting comments concerning the gadget and it's features. We'll try to address a few of those comments.
EU Realms - This is slated for a future update, we have to build a page scraper first and then figure out how to display the incomplete data on the page.
Customization - We'll look into this a bit more and sometime down the road maybe release some updates for custom backgrounds, and font colors. Layout however is likely to remain the same for a bit.
Search Options - We're going to try to add in more as they come up, someday we'll give the user options to add in custom links, we just need to get the interface foolproof first.
Platforms - Someday, we may be able to port this to every major widget platform. That's quite a ways off though.
Who Needs Realm Status? Lots of people like to know what the population looks like. Some realms also max out sometimes, regardless of there being an expansion or not. Established realms like Dark Iron run pretty high most of the time.
VOIP / Vent / Teamspeak - We'll look into this to seeif it's something we can either integrate into this gadget or build a standalone tracker. It's on our ideas list.
Vista Sidebar Hate - We know the general impression is that the sidebar is useless, which is why we're working to change that notion, even if we have to do it one gadget at a time. Okay, that sounded pretty cliche, but it's true.
More Features - We're planning on adding in more stuff like a news reader, video search and viewing, character tracking, talent calc, etc.
Again, thanks to WoW Insider for posting this up, we really appreciate it. If anyone has any ideas, questions, comments, problems, or suggestions, please feel free to post here, on our our site: http://www.buildagadget.com
Noscy Mar 24th 2009 7:54PM
Bring on Windows 7!!!
Steven Apr 3rd 2009 2:49PM
Simply put, Vista has a bad rap. But I have Vista Business x64, and run WoW at 3.5GHz with 8GB of RAM and a badass x64 video card with it. I've always closed out the sidebar widget until I got curious one day. Turns out if you keep a clean desktop like a responsible computer user, the sidebar can actually provide a lot of functionality.
And on the widget here.. this widget kicks ass. 10x faster than having to open my browser, go to a website, and then type a search. I just click search in the widget. And on Tuesdays, instead of continuously starting WoW and logging in to see if my server is done updating yet, I just glance at my widget.
This is amazing.