Windows Sideshow - a Sideshow on your Windows
One of the lesser know features in Windows Vista is the support for Windows Sideshow. "What’s that?" I hear a million people asking all at once.
Well according to Microsoft, these are extra mini display screens. Which are passed information from your main computer. And most of them don’t exist yet. Some ideas include Displays on your Media centre remote, Status screens on keyboards, and the rather nice display on the outside of your laptop to let you read email without powering on the laptop fully…
"Some units will be powered when the computer is turned on while others can be powered whether the computer is on or off. Some units may even have their own separate rechargeable batteries. Some units will be in colour and some will be grayscale or monochrome. Some will allow bitmaps to be displayed while some may only allow text. Some units will offer varying amounts of on-board memory for caching data while others may have no on-board memory at all. Some will offer buttons allowing navigation of the cached data. Some may offer touch-sensitive displays.
Some may offer a built-in wireless technology (such as Bluetooth) so that the computer can communicate with the device without it being physically connected to the computer. Some may offer a headphone jack allowing you to listen to music or video that has been downloaded into its memory"
Now if the technology gets pushed out to include sideshow extensions to run on smartphones, or PDAs.. then there could be some really clever ideas just waiting to happen
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