Windows 8 hasn’t been yet officially released but for the past several months, windows lover, can say power windows user, have been providing us various ways to try the features of Windows 8. If you search on the web, you’ll find many 3rd party applications that can help you to turn your current windows to Windows 8 lookalike.
‘Metro Sidebar’ is just another app which adds a Windows 8 style sidebar to your Windows 7. The sidebar gives a metro user interface to your Windows screen. It also allows you to choose the color of the sidebar and currently have 5 colors available – Red, Black, Blue, Green And Orange. Here’s how it looks like once installed.
The size of the application is quite small only 270 KB. So I don’t think it’s going to make a huge impact on Windows speed. Once you’ve installed this little app, you’ll be promoted to customize the settings of the sidebar. You can choose any color from the available five colors to match with your current wallpaper. Look at the screenshot I posted above, as I’m using Greenish wallpaper for my desktop I have chosen Green color for the sidebar.
The sidebar will display the Windows user profile name, date and time, properties of local disk C and contains direct shortcuts to Lock, Log off, Switch, Restart, Shut down and your favorite browser. You can select your favorite browser by going to settings of the app. Unfortunately, Google Chrome browser isn’t in the list. That’s my favorite browser 
You can change the settings by right clicking the ‘Metro Sidebar’ icon on the system tray. You can check the ‘Yes Run when Windows starts up’ option if you like the sidebar and want it to run automatically every time you start Windows. It’s only been a few days since the release of this app. Hope we’ll see more features added to the app over the coming months. You can download ‘Metro Sidebar’ here.
