Thoosje Sidebar 4.0

Gadgets were first introduced in Windows Vista, so owner of lesser version of Windows never got to experience the fun brought by these little sidebar items. If you’re a fan of XP, but you’d like to try on this cool new trend, we recommend Thoosje Sidebar. This application is a collection of gadgets that work on XP, Vista and 7.

The application places a sidebar on your desktop, which includes little utilities for weather, calendar, clock and so on. It has a fresh and stylish look and is highly customizable via the wide array of skins.

After installation, it displays the sidebar that contains, by default, a clock and a media player. In order to add more gadgets to the sidebar, press the ‘+’ button. At this point, a separate window pops up, showing the utilities it includes.

Gadgets include displaying sticky notes, calendar, hard disk usage, run, media player, POP3 mail, picture slider, system uptime, RSS, Internet traffic (incoming and outgoing), search toolbar, torrent search toolbar, weather, CPU and RAM usage, calculator, battery information and WiFi.

Sticky notes have a small window, and you can only write in three pages. The text format is not "word wrap", so if you write longer text, then browsing it becomes an issue.

The hard disk gadget shows used capacity of your hard drive, while POP3 mail shows new mails if you have a POP3, IMAP or Gmail account (but doesn't direct you to it).

The search toolbar displays a limited number of search engines that you can look into, and the same principle applies for the torrent search. The weather gadget displays the current temperature in your location (which you can set via right-click) in Fahrenheit or Celsius degrees. Resource usage can be checked via the CPU utility.

Thoosje Sidebar features 12 skins for the clock only and 9 others for the sidebar itself. Additional skin packs can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

All in all, Thoosje Sidebar is a cool addition for your desktop. It’s a companion that bundles the most important system utilities and it makes even Windows XP look more attractive.