AdSensor Gadget Updated
04 May 2009Vista (and now Windows 7) Sidebar gadgets are nifty little programs that run on your desktop. They’re mostly convenience programs for monitoring bits of information like stocks or weather. The Vista Sidebar gadgets have a reputation as being the lesser cousins of gadget applications like Yahoo Widgets. While there is a larger selection Yahoo Widgets, I’m not convinced they’re necessarily better. While I’m certainly biased, my Simply Weather, Calculator and Stop Watch gadgets are the best I’ve seen on any gadget platform. Yeah, I suck as graphic artist but the function and ease makes up for it.
AdSensor is my quest for a useful AdSense monitoring gadget. It’s jammed packed with information in a concise, no nonsense format. It could be prettier (and if some graphics artist wants to make a contribution it would be greatly appreciated), but it does two things that other AdSense gadgets I tried don’t. First off, it works. Many of the gadgets for monitoring AdSense are broken. Second, it tells me all the information I want at a glance so I don’t have to open the AdSense Web page which is something of a chore as these things go.
I introduced AdSensor a few weeks ago and have received “zero” feedback. I suspect the poor feedback is because I didn’t post it on Microsoft’s Live Gallery page where most Vista Sidebar gadgets are found.
As a quick review, the gadget looks like this.
If you’re not familiar with AdSense then it may look a bit confusing so here’s an annotated view.
As handy as this little gadget is I still found myself wanting to review the previous couple of days to watch for trends. So with a bit of fiddling, I added a “Flyout” dialog (that’s what they’re called in Sidebar gadgets) that shows the current month in a day by day format. Here’s a screen shot:
Click anywhere on the gadget to open the “Flyout”. Only the current month is shown.
With AdSensor, I find I visit the AdSense Web site only when I need to change ads or check on how particular ads placements are working.
It’s available on the downloads page as usual.