Brandon Paddock, a guy I quoted on couple of things before for cool tips and opinions, just made available a nice little freeware app for Vista. He calls it Start++, and it surely is the right name for it.
All of you who used Windows Desktop search on XP should know about those cool little shortcuts: type "g search terms" to search Google on the provided search terms. You could also launch programs, run scripts with parameters and more.
Now, in Vista, we have the search integrated and some of this functionality provided straight from the Start Menu search bar - but, it lacks the shortcut functionality that Deskbar provided. Brandon expands Vista's own Search bar by enabling this once and again for us + he adds couple of cool new things too:
- typing "w genetics", searches the WikiPedia on the term 'genetics'.
- typing "g something", searches the Google for what that 'something'
- and my favorite: typing "sudo programNameOfYourChoice" will run that application with administrative privileges! This is really great since it even beats the [CTRL] + [Shift] click on the app to do so - how easy is that! :)
- Start++ also works from the command line!
- Search Actions let you perform actions over search results. In the following case, “Play Shakira” will:
a) perform a search for music with the keyword “radiohead”
b) write all the results to a .M3U file
c) open the results in Media Player
Here's a screenshot of the configuration UI, which lets you create your own custom commands / aliases:
Check out his post about this on his web site (www.BrandonLive.com).
In the license terms it explains I am not allowed to redistribute the application, therefore, please go to his site for the download. Brandon - If you allow me to redistribute - I'll gladly host it on my site as well to help with the bandwidth ;)
All in all, Great little app Brandon! You are starting our PowerToys section before some long due powertoys like Image Resizer and PowerCalck make it to Vista from the Msoft kitchen :) Seriously how hard is it to repack the XP powertoys so they can be installed on Vista?
Via: BrandonLive.com
Comments (7)
Hey Petar, I don't really have a problem with people redistributing it, so long as they link back to my page somewhere.
Although it does raise the problem of people finding old versions of it... I mean, it's been a few hours and I've already updated it once =) So just linking to my download page is probably the best idea for now.
Posted by Brandon Paddock | February 23, 2007 4:16 AM
Posted on February 23, 2007 04:16
a) perform a search for music with the keyword “radiohead”?????? ;)
Posted by Philip Seyfi | February 23, 2007 10:09 AM
Posted on February 23, 2007 10:09
Lol, actually the keyword for performing the search on music is PLAY, radiohead was what Brandon used in his post lol!
I'm just nuts ... In my case, it performs the search for Shakira ;)
Posted by Petar Smilajkov | February 27, 2007 6:00 PM
Posted on February 27, 2007 18:00
Thanks Brandon...
Posted by Petar Smilajkov | February 27, 2007 6:02 PM
Posted on February 27, 2007 18:02
Nice site. You are doing a great service to the web
Posted by Michelp | March 24, 2007 6:57 AM
Posted on March 24, 2007 06:57
Nice site. You are doing a great service to the web
Posted by Michelp | March 24, 2007 6:57 AM
Posted on March 24, 2007 06:57
Hmm... sweet! [*../nice_site2.txt*]
Posted by Blair | April 7, 2007 1:17 PM
Posted on April 7, 2007 13:17