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Google has added a Sidebar section to its Google
Desktop plug-ins page. Currently five Sidebar additions are offered; this is only the second day of
Sidebar’s public life, the developer information has
been published, and Sidebar users probably have a lot to look forward to. TIP: As you pile
modules into Sidebar it can get pretty crowded. Remember that you can minimize modules by clicking the arrow on any
module’s title bar and selecting Minimize. Also remember that the Sidebar as a whole is resizable by width, and
widening it gives more room by flattening the modules. It’s essential to use Auto-hide (under the Sidebar menu arrow)
when widened.
 There is no transparent installation procedure for the Sidebar
plug-ins as there is, for example, when installing Firefox extensions. You download the thing to the desktop or a
folder, open the EXE or MSI file, walk through an installation wizard, and the module gets added while Sidebar
continues to run.
The five plug-ins now available are:
Todo: a handy list-oriented scratch pad.
No calendar functions, but I’m finding it more convenient than logging into Yahoo! Calendar for simple tasks like “Call
the vet.”
System Monitor: displays CPU use,
memory use (broken out into virtual memory and physical memory when you extend the plug-in), disk access, and network
access. Minimal options; you can disable everything except the CPU meter.
gdTunes: an iTunes controller. You
must have iTunes open. Basic playback controls allow starting, stopping, next song, previous song, repeat on/off, and
shuffle on/off. The options panel allows you to implement the iTunes star-rating system, handily. I don’t normally use
iTunes as my desktop music player, but I am today; this thing is handy and fun to use.
TimeWarp: this is a funky, distorted clock. It’s fairly useless and unreadable
in a narrow Sidebar display.
Adsense Status: Supposedly
displays clickthroughs and earnings for Google AdSense publishers, but I can’t get it to work. It shows Connection
Error after multiple Reload Now attempts, though I can log in to my AdSense account easily enough on a Web page.
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