Pickabar BPM Sidebar Gadget
If you’re not running Vista, you can stop reading here  .
One of the cool new features in Windows Vista is the Sidebar, Windows’ technology for creating gadget/widgets/whatever you wanna call em. Basically, it’s a bar that runs along the side of your window which contains useful mini-applications. Well, today I posted my first Sidebar gadget, Pickabar BPM. Pickabar BPM is a simple little gadget with exactly one button that calculates BPM based on a tapped tempo. If you don’t record music, DJ, or make mashups you probably won’t find it useful. If you do any of those activities, you probably have a tap tempo feature in your DAW or what have you anyway. In that case, the only real advantage is that this little sucker is always there waiting for you, just a click away, w/o having to launch the full recording app. Developing the gadget was simple for someone with a web development background, since the gadgets are built using normal web tools like DHTML and javascript. The only tricky part of the whole thing was creating the background image, so that the gadget has smooth Vista-like corners. Luckily, I stumbled onto a Mary-Kate and Ashely site with a cool photoshop tutorial for easily creating images with rounded corners. Wow, that last sentence is going to bring in some interesting search engine traffic. Enjoy! |
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