Desktop Gadgets Going the Way of the Dodo in Windows 8

Posted by on July 5 at 11:10am
Ashley is a 26 year old with an enthusiasm for all things technology related. She hails from the Southern United States and when she's not tweaking her Android handset, she can usually be found in front of the computer or Xbox 360 enjoying the latest game releases.
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If you’re a fan of the desktop gadgets that were originally introduced in Windows Vista, I’ve got some bad news for you. According to Win8China, in the latest internal build if Windows 8, these gadgets are no longer supported. The gadgets originally introduced in Vista relied on a sidebar, while this requirement was removed in Windows 7 for standalone gadgets. It not appears as though Microsoft is abandoning the concept entirely.

This removal is no doubt linked to the push for a metro interface, as the gadgets as they are available now are quite garish and don’t really fit together very well at all. This removal will encourage developers to build metro apps that will fulfill the same functions as these gadgets, so I suppose all is not lost.

[via The Verge]

 

  • Wolf

    Wow! MS REALLY don’t want Win8 to succeed do they?!

  • richandwhite

    I get that these are mostly worthless and can be easily replaced by tiles. However, I have one that we developed at work that touches about 6 databases to pull information for our more than 80,000 servers we manage at work. This means I’ll either have to hang on to Windows 7, rewrite the gadget for Win8, or manually gather information when I build out servers.