Brandon Live!

Over the last few days I’ve been amazed at the reception Start++ has been receiving from the Windows enthusiast community.  Today it was even picked up on LifeHacker as download of the day!  All the encouragement motivated me to begin looking at what more I could do to extend the Start++ experience.  The current releases so far have used a pretty limited mechanism to “hook” into the Start menu on Vista.  In fact, it’s not really a “hook” at all but rather taking advantage of the Start Menu’s built-in Run functionality through some clever use of shortcuts and pathing.

For the upcoming Start++ 0.5 release, I’ve gone back and built a much more sophisticated Start hook, that will allow for some much more robust functionality and eliminate the few edge cases where the current shortcuts can conflict (ie. not be the default action) with other shortcuts in your Start menu.  It’s entirely done out-of-process, in .NET using a combination of standard windowing and automation APIs.

Truthfully, though, I think a picture is worth a lot more than words…  Keep in mind this isn’t exactly how it will look or work when I’m done, it’s just an idea of where I think I’m going with it.  And yes, this is an early build running on my desktop system.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s release, there’s already a new beta build for you to play with!

What’s new?

• Command arguments can now be specified seperately
• Aliases can now be exported as “Startlets”
• Share your favorite “Startlets” with other users!
• Bug fixes

Current users can safely upgrade without losing their current setups.

Update:  Fixed two small installer bugs.  New version is 0.3.2.

Download Start++

Download additional Startlets

Upcoming Bug Fixes

• Commentor Daniel pointed out a problem with program arguments for apps launched via the Simple Commands type of alias. 
  • Fix: Seperate the command to execute and the parameters to pass to it in the Simple Commands dialog.  Currently, all but the first parameter to your alias are passed as program arguments.  This is obviously not ideal, and was mostly something I through in to make the “sudo” command work properly, and I had planned to go back and fix it.  So I will. 
• Commentor Unq suggested a better Wikipedia query string.
  • Fix: “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%*”

Upcoming features

• Better parameter substitution mechanism
• Simple mechanism for sharing aliases with other users

After 0.3:

• Easy method for importing IE 7 search providers
• Switchable “profiles”
• Better extensibility for “search actions”
• Commentor P Cause noticed that Search Actions don’t work for Outlook items (like opening contacts).
  • Fix: Implement support for Outlook / MAPI items.  Might take a while, unfortunately.

Keep those suggestions coming!

Last night I updated Start++ to 0.2.2 in response to a user named Suren who pointed out that multi-word web searches were broken.  Check out the Download page to get the update.

You can also subscribe to just see Start++ updates via RSS.

UPDATE

Lots of people are linking to this post. A much better place to link would be to the new Start++ web site. Thanks!

I’ve decided to share a little tool that I wrote on a whim a week or two ago for Vista.  This is a personal project of mine, not related to MS in any way.

Users of WDS on XP may recall the “Deskbar Shortcuts” functionality that allows you to create little aliases between words or characters with commands and searches.  For example, you could set up the Deskbar so that you could type “g Stuff” to search for the work “Stuff” on Google.  You could also launch programs, run scripts with parameters, and more.

Windows Vista replaced the Deskbar with Instant Search built-in to the Start menu, which is totally awesome.  Unfortunately, it lacks all of that fun shortcut functionality that the Deskbar had.  Unless you have my tool, which for the time being I’m calling Start++.

Here are a few of things it does:

This will open the “Longhorn Server” page on Wikipedia.

This will launch Visual Studio with administrator permissions.

Start++ also works from the command line!

Search Actions let you perform actions over search results.  In this case, “Play Radiohead” will:

1. perform a search for music with the keyword “radiohead”
2. Write all the results to a .M3U file
3. Open the results in Media Player

That’s the configuration UI, which lets you create your own custom commands / aliases.

Like I said, this is kind of something I threw together, so it might still have some bugs, and I’ll probably add more to it when I get the time on weekends and such.  Anyway, let me know what you think.

Download Start++

Today we’ve released Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.  This release includes many bug fixes and improvements based on user feedback received since the release of WDS 3.0 last fall.  Some users noticed the lack of UNC / network share indexing support in WDS 3.0 and insisted we put it back.  So we did!  The UNC / network share add-in is no longer a seperate downloaded and is included in WDS 3.01.

WDS 3.01 also brings back full Group Policy support (previously available in the WDS 2.6 Enterprise releases). 

Special congratulations to the indexer team, many of whom worked some pretty heavy hours through January to make sure this release had that extra layer of polish on it.  Thanks guys!  Now go home already!

Download links:

Windows XP 32-bit

Windows Server 2003 (32-bit)

Windows XP/2003 x64 Editions

Group policy ADM file is included in the package.  Run the installer with the /extract parameter to extract the contents directly.

There’s also an updated Advanced Query Reference for 3.x / Vista.

The WDS website and related docs are in the process of being updated as I write this.

Our screening of Uganda Rising at the UW HUB Auditorium is tonight! 

We also have released the new Tusubira website early this morning.  There are still a few updates to be made to it, but we wanted to share the new design in time for tonight’s event (made possible by a few sleepless nights by yours truly!).

Wow, I can pay off my car!  Heck, I can buy a new one!

I’m estimating that Jack Tretton owes me about $72,000 as I count about 60 units (actually it’s probably 63).  While it may look like there’s one missing, and that might lead you to think it has been sold, you would be wrong.  I joked to one of the blue shirts, “I guess you sold one!”  He just shook his head and pointed me over to the PS accessories section, where the PS3 box had been placed on the floor, ostensibly after its carrier realized the price was per unit and not per stack of 60.

Ryan Faas has an article up highlighting the upgraded Spotlight feature of Apple’s upcoming “Leopard” 10.5 release of OS X.  It’s got some really cool stuff coming, including:

• Searching remote Leopard clients and server shares
• Full support for file permissions and ACLs
• Expanded “Recent Items” functionality
• Advanced search with a much more robust query syntax
• Use Spotlight as an application launcher (a sort of “Start Menu” if you will)
• Preview results and files without opening them

Those are all really great features!  I just can’t put my finger on it, but for some reason I feel like I’ve seen them before.

Apparently this Republican congressman has sent forth from his dark lair in Mordor Texas a bill proposing that all ISPs in the US be forced to log traffic from all internet users (including full text of all e-mails, IM conversations, etc) indefinitely.  Not only would such a law be laughably illegal and unethical, but it’s logistically impossible.

For example, this would require Comcast to keep copies of all my Microsoft internal e-mails, since I access them from home.  Of course, Comcast couldn’t possibly do this since my corporate e-mail is encrypted until it reaches my computer. 

Perhaps we should also force gas stations to submit records to the government of everywhere I drive, including wrong turns I make and precisely how long I sit in traffic on the 520 bridge.  Nevermind the fact that gas stations don’t have access to that information, and that obtaining it would be a gross violation of my right to privacy.  Nevermind the fact that it would be impossible for them to track every customer 24 hours a day and store all of that data in a secure fashion indefinitely.

Oh better yet, he’s proposing in the same bill that ISPs be fined $150,000 for “permitting” a subscriber to perpetrate certain illegal activities using their service.   I say the gas stations should be held accountable the same way.  They do provide the fuel that permits me to drive around US roads, right?  If I do something bad, shouldn’t they be held responsible for permitting me to use their fuel to perform nefarious acts?