I expend most of the past week in NYC with the Internet Explorer team showcasing IE8 and aggiorno to most of the attendees of the Web 2.0 Expo; and got to say that some of the most acclaimed features from IE8 in the booth where both their new Accelerators and Webslices features.
Accelerators are services made accessible from within the users reach and can be activated by just selecting a piece of text in a page and getting results through a mashup of services without having to leave the page the user is in; while Webslices are pieces of Web pages that can be sliced and placed in the bookmarks toolbar for ease of reach and updated as per users request.
Accelerators such as the Define by Encarta and the Map with Live Earth, where among the ones that created the most wow effects from the hundreds of people that approach one of the 3 displays slated for demos, excelling the user experience of the user at hand.
Now to my surprise I found through the leaked photos of Windows 7 that were published yesterday, that such features seems like are also coming to the next generation of the Softies Desktop OS. Check the first menu item under Accessories in the the image below:
I can only imagine been able to mash up services right from within my Desktop experience, having the myriad of web services available at the reach of a right click and contextual to my task at hand.
I guess the view of an ubiquity experience between the desktop and the Web is becoming more and more a unifying paradigm, and with the advent of platforms such as Live Mesh powered by cloud services and the access to all of my services will enable an truly interconnected world of universal access.
Let's keep setting our expectations open, that Microsoft's PDC is just around the corner and you never know what could be that next big shift in the world of a semantic living.
Cheers and enjoy the future!
Nothing truly innovative here (OS X Leopard already has these features to some extent), but I'm glad to see Microsoft rolling them in to Windows and interested to see the opportunities they open up. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteKallOut Brings IE 8 Accelerators and More to All Office Apps, IE, Firefox, Adobe Reader and Google Chrome (in the next release)
ReplyDeleteIf you think you might like the IE 8 Accelerators feature and don't want to wait, you will absolutely LOVE KallOut.
As shown on http://kallout.com/product_tour.html, KallOut offers many more accelerator pages and it offers them in floating palettes that work for selections that you do inside any of the following apps:
1. IE 6, 7, 8
2. Firefox 2, 3
3. Microsoft Office Apps: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Notepad, WordPad
4. Microsoft Outlook
5. Adobe Reader
We are also in the midst of adding support for Google Chrome in our next release.
This means that just about every major Windows app (with Mac Apps coming soon) supports a suite of Best-of-Breed Content Providers in a dynamic, context-sensitive, BestGuess Menu that suggests the ideal KallOut not just those showing Microsoft products.
Clearly, KallOut's shipping product is superior to this initial entry from Microsoft in the Selection-based Search category.
Please try it out and let us know what you think.
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, KallOut -- a new way to search using only your mouse