This is hands-down my favorite gadget for Windows Vista Sidebar. The Live Search Maps gadget gives you live traffic on your desktop, and in a very non-intrusive way. It’s great for checking the local traffic, to see if you should put off that quick shopping run by an hour or so. It has already saved me countless hours that I would have otherwise been stuck in traffic.
The gadget, unfortunately, was buried on the Vista Gadget Gallery… which is a bit of a confusing site, since it puts Vista Sidebar gadgets right along side Live.com gadgets. Many times you click on a gadget thinking it’s for Sidebar… but wind up finding one that’s for Live.com.
Now, here’s the painful part… Microsoft pulled the gadget. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it was because nobody was downloading it. Probably because nobody knew it existed.
And, wait, it gets worse. It was suddently replaced by a third-party gadget of the same name. This gadget has similar functionality, but terrible usability. You can’t see the maps on the sidebar itself… you have to click on the widget and interact with it just to see a map. Terrible, sluggish, and hardly a replacement for an already-excellent widget.
Bottom Line: Microsoft needs to put this gadget back online, pronto. And, if they want it to be as popular as it should be, they actually need to promote it. How? Oh, I don’t know… on the Live Maps web site!?
Update: Barring any complaints from Microsoft, you can download the offlined gadget here. You’ll need to extract the ZIP, then open the resulting folder. Finally copy LiveSearchMaps.gadget to C:Program FilesWindows SidebarGadgets
Update 2: I found the old Sidebar Gallery URL, which confirms that Microsoft did indeed yank the gadget. Still no idea why however…