Longtime Gnomie Gary Boone writes:

Chris, hi. I’ve been following your career for a while and enjoyed reading your many, many contributions and cool finds. So when I discovered something cool, I thought you might be the right guy to show it to.

I’ve created some cool hacks for the MSN Toolbar. These hacks allow the toolbar to do some useful things and change the way I look at desktop search.

For example, one of my hacks allows to you type “pr xxxxx” into the toolbar to hear the pronunciation of any word ‘xxxxx’. Another allows you to type “map work to xxxxx” or “map xxxxx to home” to plot routes to and from work or home using Google Maps. These hacks aren’t the same the existing shortcut mechanism - they use built-in scripting to allow much more control over the OS and the Web.

Two cool parts: First, it turns out that everything you need to do OS and Web scripting is already built into most versions of Windows. It’s called Windows Script Host and runs VBScript or Javascript. So it’s easy for technically-minded people to write scripts that can be called from the MSN Toolbar. They don’t need a development environment. The Deskbar provides a convenient way to have them always available fast.

The other thing I think is cool is that the shortcuts and these scripting extensions give a new way at looking at desktop search. We’ve been looking at it as _document_ search. But what about _application_ search? Imagine being able to search for the right command at the right moment. MSN Toolbar allows this already in that you can type “exc” into the Deskbar and Excel will appear as the first entry. Down arrow, enter to launch. Fast! (You may have to set your search options to search the whole computer beforehand.) Now with the scripting mechanism, anyone can make cool mini proggies that launch fast from the Deskbar. Cool!

What do you think? Neat? I thought about posting a comment on your recent blog about desktop search, but thought you might have better ideas for getting the word out on Toolbar Hacks. I’d like to see others create hacks and extend the functionality of desktop search.

My examples are at accenture.com/boone.