I thought about what would be a practical thing to make that wouldn't consume *too* much time so I turned to the Vista Sidebar. I made a small gadget that pings a user-specified hostname/IP in 2 second intervals (high time as I didn't want slower networks to feel it until I added support for user-specified intervals) to see if the remote host is reachable.
For those of you that don't know, gadgets are made using some XML, HTML, and scripting languages (JavaScript/VBScript/C#) and are packed in a compressed file and renamed as *.gadget. I would have figured gadgets would have been compiled using a HLL or something along those lines.
Anyways, I wanted to see if I could get some feedback about my first gadget to see if there are any major flaws and maybe later improve upon it. The site is here if anyone is interested in checking it out.
It works fine on all (4) of my own computers running Vista.
I may make another gadget sometime, it was a fun experience that really didn't require much time and/or effort but quickly produced results (exactly the opposite of OS development
).
