SideBar

A recent issue of The Daily Grid pointed me at a new tool called Desktop Sidebar (unfortunately, the link seems to be dead at the moment - hopefully it will be fixed soon). This is a very cool tool. It gives you a highly configurable side tray that makes all kinds of information available - news, weather, stocks, etc. It provides a POP3 email checker, integrates with Outlook to display your corporate emails, schedule, and to do list, and provides a Media Player controller. It can display system performance information, including your most active applications (nice). You can also put shortcuts on it and use it as an app launcher. All of this info is displayed in a set of panels. You customize which panels you want displayed and in what arrangement. The panels can be sized, overlayed, and stacked.  The whole tray can be docked to either side of the screen or float, and supports auto-hiding.

But I think my favorite feature is the command line, which seems to serve two purposes. It gives you a basic command line so you can, for example, navigate to a folder on your hard drive (with auto-complete, of course) and launch a program. But even cooler is a set of search shortcuts. So, for example, to search Google/Web for Microsoft you type "? Microsoft". To search Google/Groups you type "gn Microsoft". It has shortcuts for a bunch of services. As you would expect, it includes all the major search engines. But it also includes other great resources, like dictionaries, thesauri (?), an encylopedia site, the Internet Movie Database, the All Music Guide, MSDN, Amazon, eBay, and others.

While playing around with the searching stuff, it didn't take long to think of a couple of sites that I would want to have included but weren't. I went poking around in the app directory to see if there was any sort of config file that controlled the list of search resources. Lo and behold, there was a big XML file that did exactly that (and the rest of the app's configuration). Naturally, I immediately tried adding a new search resource - Netflix in this case. The XML was pretty clear and easy to understand, so it didn't take long. I added the following to the <searchengines> section of sidebar.xml:

    <engine prefix="nflx" description="Search Netflix" path="Entertainment/Netflix" link="http://www.netflix.com/" >
      <forms>
        <form name="ff_0"
              action="http://www.netflix.com/Search"
              method="post"
              key="v1">
          <input type="hidden" name="v1"/>
        </form>
      </forms>
    </engine>

After shutting down the app and reloading it...bingo, worked like a charm. Just type "nflx movie_name". How cool is that?

Here's another one that I find useful - the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

    <engine prefix="mskb" description="Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base" path="Other/Microsoft KB" link="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;KBHOWTO" >
      <forms>
        <form name="gsfxSearchform"
              action="http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx"
              method="get"
              key="Query">
          <input name="Product" value="msall" />
          <input name="Query"/>
          <input name="KeywordType" value="ALL" />
          <input name="maxResults" value="150" />
        </form>
      </forms>
    </engine>

Oh, did I mention that the product is free? Very cool stuff. Compliments to the chef.