Windows 7: MS Drops Gadget Support

R.I.P gadgets

I use the Weather and calendar gadgets, after trying out others these are the most useful (to me). Anyone who lives in East Lincolnshire, UK, will tell you that we often have different weather to nearby areas. Something to do with the Lincolnshire Wolds and our geographical position, I believe. The Lincolnshire Coast bulges out into the North Sea, to the east of the Wolds. The local weatherman often gets it wrong, but I would say that the Weather gadget is more accurate.

The Calendar is useful to a Senior who often forgets what day it is (sometimes the year, although I am usually OK with the Millennium!) All gadgets can be set to degrees of opacity and I find that this is very handy as it hides them until I need them.

As long as I can keep the gadgets I have, it will mean very little to me that the rest are dropped. Lots of other similar stuff available, as has been said.

In principle, gadgets could be useful. But the implementation stinks.
They're just applications that "stick" to the side of your screen.
But they're too small to be useful.

The OP referenced Microsoft:

The Windows Live Gallery has been retired. In order to focus support on the much richer set of opportunities available for the newest version of Windows, Microsoft is no longer supporting development or uploading of new Gadgets.

Which translates as:

You know they suck.
We know they suck.
We're not going to continue to make this dog food anymore.

Why?

I don't know what the big deal is, to be honest...Gadgets are not dead just because Microsoft doesn't host a collection of them anymore.

Other websites do - still plenty of gadgets to be found.

So why all this hullabaloo?

No hullabaloo, just News.

There's something 200%better than gadgets. Its called RainMeter

It's a little bit tricky to use, but you can build your own meters.

I built myself a nice set of gauges when I was using Windows 7 beta, but I forgot to copy the data folder when I upgraded (which was in "My Documents") and so they are no more.

I hate it when programs dump stuff in "My Documents".

That's why any essential backups I do always includes Documents/My Documents

You never know

Oh... I know, believe me I know. No need to ask how I know