Comments on: Comments on 12076

Post number 12076

jakd — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 14:19:51 -0800

Dave's Quick Search Deskbar: A cool little utility to make searches on the Windows desktop easy and (POW!) fast!

By: howa2396

howa2396 — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 14:32:06 -0800

pretty nice.

By: turaho

turaho — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 14:32:28 -0800

Dude, self-links are not cool.

By: jakd

jakd — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 14:36:24 -0800

turaho: Sorry about that. I thought it meshed well. Won't happen again.

By: turaho

turaho — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 14:37:53 -0800

No need to apologize to me, but fear the wrath of mathowie!

By: gd779

gd779 — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 14:47:03 -0800

I've been looking for something like this forever! jakd... *sniff*... I love you, man.

By: gi_wrighty

gi_wrighty — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 14:47:27 -0800

Another cool way of doing searches (google and others) straight from the address bar is to get the Web Accessories for IE and use the quick search power toy. (I found it out from the PHP Tips page which shows how to search the php.net site from the address bar.)

By: gd779

gd779 — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 15:43:43 -0800

Very strange: The delete key doesn't seem to work in the search field. Is that happening to anybody else?

By: mw

mw — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 16:29:21 -0800

gd779: It works for me, but there is a note on the linked page: "There appears to be a bug in the way Windows Explorer hosts IE on the deskbar that prevents deskbar-hosted pages from hearing about DEL keypresses. So the DEL key doesn't work. If anybody figures out a fix for this problem, please let me know!" I'm using IE 6.0 -- maybe it's been fixed there.

By: pjdoland

pjdoland — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 17:01:57 -0800

I'm willing to forgive the self-link on this one. This rocks.

By: gd779

gd779 — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 17:10:19 -0800

I'm willing to forgive the self-link on this one. This rocks. No, the self-link is still clearly inappropriate. Everybody's opinion of a "good" link is different, and we can't give the impression that self-promotion is acceptable as long as the link is useful. If your pet project is really that good, somebody else will pick up on it and post it for you.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 17:29:00 -0800

fwiw, I took out the self-link part.

By: jragon

jragon — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 17:47:53 -0800

The OSX tool is great. "Services" in OSX are a great piece of technology. You can copy things to the clipboard and immediately launch all kinds of things, like "summarize this" or "turn this into a sticky note" or "email this". Basically like the Windows version but more built in to the OS.

By: webword

webword — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 20:28:11 -0800

If someone went to WebWord and then went to the interviews page, they would find an interview with Dave. I was tempted to post a self-link, but I didn't. This is bad enough, don't you think? :-)

By: mathowie

mathowie — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 20:52:44 -0800

John it's ok to self-link in threads when it's appropriate to the discussion. Here's the interview with the creator of the windows version. I've always used the Address toolbar, as a quick shortcut to google, dictionary.com, etc, but Dave's bar looks like a nicer, more straightforward way to do it.

By: suprfli

suprfli — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 22:24:18 -0800

i will love you forever if someone knows of an application that allows me to highlight text and then right click it and choose to launch it in a browser. i always see test that isn't hyperlinked or see a reference to a site that i wish i could just highlight and launch rather than copy and paste them to the address bar. maybe that sounds lazy but i call it efficient.

By: kindall

kindall — Sun, 04 Nov 2001 23:39:34 -0800

It's called Apple Data Detectors. It uses regex to recognize various types of things (URLs, e-mail addresses, even names and street addresses) from selected text when you right-click. It's extensible: you can install new detectors to get it to understand new types of data, and new actions to do various things with each piece of data (bookmark a URL or launch it immediately or e-mail it to someone, for instance). Unfortunately, it's only available on the Mac, and it's considered obsolete (doesn't work with Mac OS X, for instance). It's been around for several years and I still find it indispensible. Gonna miss it.

By: campy

campy — Mon, 05 Nov 2001 08:47:18 -0800

Since I've always got four or five IE windows open, the Googlebar works for me.

By: ringmaster

ringmaster — Mon, 05 Nov 2001 11:34:32 -0800

suprfli: Try Babylon (Win). Don't even bother to highlite, just point and CTRL-Right-click. It OCR's the screen, finds your word even in graphics, and gives you the definition from one of over a thousand configurable glossaries. It'll even recommend spellings for poorly spelled words. One click in the definition window pops up the word in a search engine of your choice. There's are single, double, and infinite licenses (many of the good glossaries are web-based) that are relatively inexpensive. I use Babylon and find it completely indispensable.

By: darth_smoothies

darth_smoothies — Tue, 06 Nov 2001 13:06:14 -0800

very nice indeed