Girish Gangadharan

Another Vista basher

// March 11th, 2007 // Vista

First of all, the Vista sidebar SUCKS! Stupid crap! I hate it!!! You can’t resize it! Why would you not want to be able to resize it? Google desktop’s sidebar is resizeable. If you really want to be inspired by others (Konfabulator, Google Desktop), do what they do and MORE!

Compare Google’s Scratch Pad gadget to Vista’s Notes. You can’t resize Notes. You can view only one note at a time. I don’t like that!

Compare Google’s Outlook Tasks plugin to its counterpart in Vista. Same issue. But here it gets worse – since you can’t resize the width of the gadget, the text actually gets cut off. I dissected the code and the CSS style for each list item (holding the task) is set to “overflow:hidden”.

You can’t even resize the whole sidebar horizontally. It just sits there, stuck!

But guess what? I downloaded and installed the latest version of Google Desktop that plays great with Vista. Fantastic! I got everything i wanted. Now my sidebar looks better than what i actually had on XP Professional.

For a developer, desktop real estate really matters. He tries to fit in as many windows as he can on his screen. And for some of us freaks out there, one monitor is not enough. We are like the moguls that just can’t be happy with all the space we have. So we get a second monitor (19″ or more…believe me when i say freaks, i mean it) and extend the desktop further (up, down, left or right).

So this sidebar issue is not really a big deal… i got more coming. Stay tuned.

P.S: No worries. I still am fascinated by Vista. And to be honest, haven’t found a show-stopper yet. There’s always a work around with MS products.

But if you really can’t afford to take risks or just the cost of it, here’s a cheaper way of getting the look and feel of Vista on XP.

Download the MVRTM.rar file and unzip the files with Winrar. In the “Visual Style” folder, you’ll find the MVRTM folder that holds an .msstyles file and a “Shell” folder. Copy the MVRTM folder into the C:\Windows\Resources\Themes directory. Double-click on the MVRTM.msstyles file and take it from there.

Before all that, you might want to download and install the uxtheme.dll patcher.

NO, IT’S NOT A 3rd PARTY SOFTWARE. Just a little hack of the uxtheme.dll file to customize your windows skins. That’s all. Google it and see for yourself.

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