Lately we have been hearing a lot about the Metro Theme coming to Windows 7, there is an advance type of launcher which will allow the user to launch the programs, or we can say an interface which will have loads of tiles arranged on your desktop, every tile will act as a shortcut to some program, info, or may be some specific task. Also we have been seeing different type of programs which mimic the Metro Style tiled interface on your Windows Systems.
Though I personally don’t like playing around much with such applications which tweak the default interface of the Windows, however this one is pretty simple and doesn’t need much tweaking, hence I liked it.
This small app named as Metro Sidebar is convenient to install, just small zip file is to be downloaded and unzip it to get the Metro Sidebar.exe file, run it, and it will install the metro style sidebar on your system. Later, here is a snapshot which shows you what the Metro Sidebar looks like.
Here is a small video which will show you the installation and later it covers the other features of the Metro Sidebar.
So, Metro Sidebar once installed allows you to –
- Have a look at the Date and Time on the sidebar itself.
- Shows you the username of your Windows account.
- Also allows you to perform Log Off, Shut down, Switch user, etc. like activities right from the sidebar.
- Shows you the name of the Operating System.
- Shows you the details of the C Drive.
- And finally it allows you to launch you favorite web browser from the sidebar.
Metro Sidebar can be accessed in order to make it customized at any point of time, for this you can access the system tray icon, right click it and choose ‘Settings’, this will allow you to change the background colour of the sidebar, and also you can change your browser, as of now it supports Opera, IE and Firefox.
The app works pretty fine, and can definitely spruce up your desktop’s UI for some time. However there are couple of things which can be added to this sidebar, like it should allow 2-3 more shortcuts, probably a description for every drive on the system, etc.
I liked having the Metro Sidebar on my system, if you too want to have a feel of Windows 8 UI, go ahead and give it a try.
If you want to have a better experience of Metro UI, you can probably try Metro UI (Theme) For Windows 7, which too is available for free.
Download Metro Sidebar (Runs well on both, Windows 7 and Windows Vista)
