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Updated People Near Me tile for Sidebar

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hello there. this time I want to say that also a third IM provider, based on Peer To Peer Infrastructure, is not yet released, there is a Sidebar Tile for People Near Me feature in Windows Vista, the tile is released for Karl's Sidebar which is the most strongest emulation of Longhorn Alpha Sidebar.

Short Description: This tile shows you number of people near you using "People Near Me" feature of Peer to Peer infrastructure of Windows Vista. This feature enables you to see people who are using this feature on their computers if they are in the same network. You can start an activity with each person like start "Windows Meeting Space" say or other P2P application that uses Peer To Peer infrastructure of Windows Vista. Also you can promote a person nearby to Trusted Contacts. This will enable to see his presence in the Trusted Contacts tab of flyout for this tile, and also start activity with him like "Windows Meeting Space" as it was mentioned earlier. You can always go to your Windows Contacts folder (in your Profile, open "Contacts" folder) to see all of your Contacts. When you click on contact, it will be highlighted as Trusted if it was get from People Near Me.

Few screenshots:

Signed In

People Near Me sidebar tile - Signed In.

Flyout_Updated_PeopleNearby Flyout_Updated_TrustedContacts
People Nearby Trusted Contacts

You can also promote a person nearby to Trusted Contacts, get context menu for that Contact

Add To Contacts LH Styled v1 Flyout trusted contacts People Near Me with context menu
Add To Contacts dialog Properties for Trusted Contact

See properties of that contact or start an activity, say, Windows Meeting Space, with that person:

Windows Contacts Editor for Trusted Contact  image
Properties of Trusted Contact Start activity - Windows Meeting Space

You can download the tile and Sidebar itself here:

People Near Me tile Sidebar Beta 2 preview 0.2 Desktop
Download "People Near Me" tile Download "Karl's Sidebar"

You may also find Sidebar useful and wanna see what are tiles you can try. For you, there a few tiles you might find interesting:

Other tiles

  • Outlook Communication History - shows last 8 emails in your Inbox in Outlook
  • Outlook Calendar - shows next 4 events in Outlook
  • Facebook Tile - can't say what it really shows except it shows your Display Name and current presence status
  • Volume Tile - enables you to control Master volume - unfortunately it doesn't work with latest release of Sidebar :(
  • Slideshow Tile - shows you a slide show from pictures in your Pictures folder
  • Weather Tile - shows you weather for any location from the world (Yahoo! Weather)
  • Gismeteo Weather Tile - shows you weather for any location from the world (Russian Gismeteo)
  • Ink Tile - enables you to ink on the Sidebar - say add notes etc.
  • BBC News Tile - this is an RSS tile like the one in Longhorn, shows BBC News
  • Windows Media Player Tile - this one enables you remotely manage your Windows Media Player - you can even close WMP and music will continue playing in tile!

Got interested? then go there to download and try these tiles: Karl's Sidebar Tiles @ Aero Experience community.

Conclusion

This Sidebar, built on WPF, is the emulation of the Longhorn Alpha Sidebar, it has an open platform to develop new tiles, to develop a one, you need to know C# and just grab the Sidebar SDK to develop the tile.

And for Semantics, Sidebar is a best place to provide context-based services for user --> the host! :)