What ever happened to SideShow?

For a long time I have been pondering over Vista SideShow technologies and the great potential that they hold. From a Media Center point of view SideShow could be a great technology for controlling your Media Center PC on small SideShow hardware devices.

Rumors of a Vista Media Center SideShow gadget have been around for ages, reading several Microsoft SideShow team blogs eluded to the fact that their was such a gadget for Media Center in internal beta at Microsoft. Unfortunately no public beta or time frame has been announced.

Two 3rd party SideShow beta projects that caught my attention were the Control Think one which can still be found here and the Go Gadgets beta that closed a while ago from Ikanos Consulting. These were aimed at enabling everyday devices to be SideShow compatible. Devices such as Sony PSP, Apple iTouch/iPhone, Windows Mobile and PDA devices.

Hopefully this development work is still in the pipe line and we will see some exciting developments in this area in the future.