I have been running with a sidebar (the aptly named Desktop Sidebar application) ever since I started using a dual monitor setup many years back. The added productivity from having so much at your fingertips certainly makes up for the small loss of screen real estate. I have tried a couple of different alternatives, but have always come back to Desktop Sidebar. My latest adventure was with turning on the sidebar in Google Desktop Search. The GDS sidebar would have worked perfectly for me, if it were not lacking one thing:
Auto fit.
The plugins for the GDS sidebar cannot be set to auto fit depending on the size of the information displayed. I use auto fit on several panels in my normal Desktop Sidebar, such as the Windows Live Messenger contact list and Outlook Calendar and Task viewer. These panels have content that varies in size, so they need to stretch when several contacts come online, for example. In the sidebar in GDS, if I get too many Live contacts online at a time, I need to manually resize the pane (which is a pain, with Google’s algorithms that resize every other pane to try to make room for your actions), or the contact list scrolls off the page – with no scroll bar!
If anyone can point me to how to turn on auto fit in the GDS sidebar, please do.