Windows Sideshow Returns! makes more sense now..

Some of you may have no clue about this once "over-hyped" feature of Vista. Its called Windows Sideshow

It was first seen on the few notebooks that had a sideshow screen built into them

this trend never caught on , and most people(me included) forgot about Sideshow...until last night when i found out that Microsoft had released a "Windows Mobile Developer Preview" of the app...click here to download the beta

i downloaded it and got it running on my phone(HTC P3470)!
(follow the instructions, theyre pretty streightforward)
It uses bluetooth to connect to the PC which is good enough to use it as a remote control for your media center.
heres some of the gadgets i have running..




looks slick on the main screen, but once you go into one of the gadgets, its back to the old bland windows mobile interface...

i'm hoping that will change once this gets past the dev-preview stage.. fingers crossed.

Basically these gadgets are like the Sidebar Gadgets, they either let you control correspondong apps on your pc (like windows media center and media player), or they just display data like, rss feeds and system stats. there are also gadgets that connect you to social networking/blogging services like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...etc.

for a more exhaustive list go to this gadget gallery link

to get these to install you will need to first instal Windows SideShow Managed Runtime 1.0 on your pc, get it here