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 Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets
Update 2: I found the old Sidebar Gallery URL, which confirms that Microsoft did indeed yank the gadget. Still no idea why however…
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Digg This: http://digg.com/microsoft/Live_Maps_Sidebar_Mess
When I donlaod from that link it gives me a zip file with a directory named LiveSearchMaps.gadget; not a .gadget file…
Correct, the .gadget encoding is lost because this was a post-install gadget that has since been re-archived.
But if you move the .gadget folder to where I said… it should show up in the available gadgets.
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Thanks so much for explaining how my favorite gadget disappeared when I reinstalled Vista last week. I’ve got my traffic gadget back!!
I saw this discussion of security issues at the link below as the reason for why it was pulled. Could someone comment on whether this is a real concern for this gadget or a hypothetical concern (e.g., that it is bad practice to allow gadgets to be written this way but if you trust the developer then you are ok)? I don’t understand enough about these issues to know. Thanks.
http://www.liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2007/10/30/yes-the-live-search-and-live-search-traffic-gadgets-are-gone-security-concerns-cited.aspx
Thanks for the update, glad to see Microsoft finally addressing the matter.
Basically, from what I can tell, they pulled the gadget because it calls a script remotely. This is potentially abusive because if someone were to spoof Microsoft’s server (through a DNS attack), they could run their own script in the place of Microsoft’s.
Personally, I use OpenDNS for third-party DNS protection, so I don’t feel very at-risk. This could be a security threat if Microsoft bundled those gadgets with Windows… but they’re not.
Hopefully Microsoft will take charge and share the API code, or fix things themselves.
I still feel the gadget is secure enough to offer for download, but yes, you should keep this in mind. I’m not taking it off my sidebar…