SideBar

Despite the fact that your operating system provides you with a wide selection of tools and utilities to make your experience comfortable, they are sometimes quite difficult to reach, especially if you need to open and close them repeatedly. Hence, you can use a handy toolbar to hold all of these shortcuts, without cluttering your desktop screen with a large number of icons and applications.

SideBar is a desktop enhancing utility that aims to make your life easier, by allowing you to quickly reach the most important system applications, as well as keep to-do lists and manage the currently running processes. All of these features are built into a compact and easy-to-use interface, which stays on your desktop and can be easily accessed whenever you need it. To increase functionality, the main window also includes a digital clock, which can also display the current date.

Although it does feature a large number of functions, you may feel slightly overwhelmed, especially since none of the buttons have clear names or tooltips to explain their purpose. You can, however, read the documentation in order to make sense of the interface, which offers you extensive information about each button and its meaning.

You can also keep notes and create extensive to-do lists, using a database-like utility to keep track of various tasks and their due date. Thanks to the table form of the list, you can easily sort it according to your preferences, by clicking on the desired field header. A process killer is available as well, which enables you to end the programs that cannot be closed the conventional way. You can also lock the processes instead, although you can only do so for a few, predefined applications.

As an extra feature bundled with the application, you can also find a basic image viewer. Even though it does not offer you too many options, it can be successfully used to open a wide variety of picture extensions, as well as to navigate through a media folder with ease, by making use of the integrated controls.

SideBar suffers from quite a few functionality problems, including error messages, freezes and unfinished GUI elements that are visible in some circumstances. If you can get pass that, the utility can offer you a few useful features, although you may not be able to access them any faster than in the usual way, due to the high amount of lag the application shows most of the time.