I caught this bit of news tonight from Redmond Pie’s awesome Web Slice for IE8 Beta 2 which shows their latest headlines: Microsoft Live Labs has released a really neat Color Picker Gadget for Windows Sidebar.

Download: Color Picker Gadget from Microsoft Live Labs

Essentially the Color Picker Gadget gives users quick access to RGB color hex codes. This could be extremely handy when working with several apps or doing website development and you’re needing to utilize a palette across the board. This Gadget allows you to create and save your own color palettes and search palettes from the website COLOURlovers. This was a side project of Live Labs Designer Jeff Weir. For more information, check out this post on the Microsoft Live Labs Blog.

Donavon West, Sidebar Gadget-maestro, is at it again! He just released a brand new Windows Sidebar gadget designed to let users keep track of Olympic Medal wins from the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

Download: 2008 Beijing Olympics Medal Count Gadget

This is a great gadget for people who aren't following the Olympics very closely but want to keep tabs on Olympic Medal wins. I'm not following the Olympics as closely as I'd like due to several things I'm working on so this Gadget is very helpful in at least keeping me "in the loop".

You can also watch encore videos of the Olympics at NBCOlympics.com thanks to a partnership with MSN Video and are presented in Silverlight. Also: don't forget you can also watch Olympic content directly within Windows Media Center on PCs running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate. I posted about NBC Olympics On The Go a few weeks ago here. I hear TVTonic has released a 64-bit version of NBC Olympics On The Go as well.

You can get the latest weather (Maximum and Minimum temperatures per Sol or Martian Solar Day) on Mars from the Phoenix Mars Lander delivered to your desktop from the Phoenix lander currently on Mars.

Download: Phoenix Mars Weather Gadget

The Phoenix Mars Lander is a Martian lander (not a rover like Mars Pathfinder) designed to look for evidence of water or ice under the surface of Mars. Instead of roaming around the surface of Mars looking for water evidence - the Phoenix lander will dig below the surface to look for water or ice. Matter a fact, today the Phoenix Mission Team announced they may have found ice - aka frozen water! That's awesome.

The Phoenix Mars Weather Gadget is updated regularly as soon as the weather data is downloaded* from the Phoenix Mars Lander.

*In some cases due to technical reasons, weather data may not be available on a daily basis. For example: I believe today is Sol 25 but the Phoenix Mars Weather Gadget is reporting weather data from Sol 22.

You can get the latest on the Phoenix Mars Mission from their website here or the NASA website here. You can follow them on Twitter as well.

Today I've got some pretty neat new Sidebar Gadgets to tell you about for Windows Sidebar.

If you're into Baseball, you'll like this new Gadget. Fox Sports on MSN is offering a Fantasy Baseball Gadget brought to you by People-Ready Business from Microsoft.

With this Gadget, you can check up on Fantasy Baseball news, check player stats, and create your own roster. This Gadget requires Adobe Flash so if you're running Windows Vista x64 (like me), you'll need to run Windows Sidebar under 32-bit. To do that in Windows Vista x64 - just go to C:/Program Files (x86)/Windows Sidebar and execute sidebar.exe from there.

Download the People-Ready Fantasy Baseball Gadget here.

Another new Gadget to check out is the brand new MSN Video Gadget for Windows Sidebar. The MSN Video Team announced its availability today along with some highlights as to what you can do with the Gadget on their blog.

Download the MSN Video Gadget here.

Got a Sidebar Gadget recommendation? Would love to hear them!

Donavon West, whose company LiveGadgets.net was hired by Microsoft to develop the Live Search Maps Gadget originally, has announced via LiveSide that the Live Search Maps gadget is back and available for download! This awesome gadget lets you look at traffic in many different cities. I use this gadget all the time especially when traveling up to Seattle.

Donavon says work has been done “under-the-hood” so visually the gadget won’t look much different than before. He also says new cities have been added: Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Toronto. New cities will automatically show up in the Live Search Maps Gadget when they are added going forward.

This gadget is a must-have for folks who commute and do quite a bit of traveling.

In order to get started using your brand-new Dell (PRODUCT) RED PC right out of the box, you will need to enable a few things in order for the Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED bits such as the Sidebar Gadgets and Windows DreamScene to run. In the following video - I show you exactly what you need to do to view the awesome (PRODUCT) RED Sidebar Gadgets as well as the (PRODUCT) RED DreamScene.

Video: Windows (PRODUCT) RED: Sidebar Gadgets and DreamScene

As shown in the video, in order to utilize Windows Sidebar I first needed to deactivate Google Sidebar.

My preference is Windows Sidebar anyway - especially with the all the gadgets I run. After I deactivated Google Sidebar and got Windows Sidebar running, I needed to install the (PRODUCT) RED gadgets which are located in the following directory on your Dell (PRODUCT) RED PC:

C:\dell\red\Recovery\Gadgets\Vista\

Once the (PRODUCT) RED Sidebar Gadgets are installed, I was able to use the Gadget Picker in Windows Sidebar to add them (although they appear automatically after installing them).

Next, in order to use the (PRODUCT) RED DreamScene, I needed to start up Windows Update and download and install Windows DreamScene. Remember - Windows DreamScene is a Windows Vista Ultimate Extra and only available on Windows Vista Ultimate - or in this case Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED.

And also: remember there is a (PRODUCT) RED Screensaver as well. Just right-click on the desktop, click “Personalize” and then “Screen Saver”. There you can choose the “productred” screensaver which is really neat!

With both the (PRODUCT) RED Sidebar Gadgets enabled as well as the (PRODUCT) RED DreamScene, you can proudly demonstrate that your choice of Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED contributes to helping eliminate AIDS in Africa.