Here goes my first post in 2007. Happy New Year to you all.

I was recently reading this post on Joel Spolsky's blog about the number of shutdown options available in Windows Vista. Even though they are quite a few and can be narrowed down like he suggests. I think  I have a better idea!

I have been using Vista for almost a year now but for some reason I never thought about this. But for me I tend to shut down my computer most of the time if I'm not using it and to do so I always have to bring up the start menu point the arrow to the shut down option, and now I think this is a bit annoying because I hardly ever use the Sleep button or the Lock button which are available directly on the start menu without having to go the second step.

Now here's my idea. It would be nice to be able to set a default action action on the sleep button that suits everyone's needs and this way you can setup the button to do the action that most fits your needs using one step.

I'm quite sure that most people use one shutdown option regularly and the others less? So doing so would make me use the function I do regularly without having to click the arrow and see all options every time.

So Microsoft here is my suggestion, I would like to be able to do something like this, right click the sleep button, click a menu item that says set default action or something like that, and then choose the one that suits me. I think this way the problem that Spolsky mentioned of too many choices would be minimized and I would be able to shutdown my computer by clicking the button...

Probably those of you who already downloaded and are running Office 2007 RTM know this but anyway.

The Microsoft addon for the save as PDF feature - which was taken out from the beta versions of Office - can be found here

Found this link about Live Search on the Microsoft home page.

Vista has finally arrived!

See here and here

I was playing with the MSN Search web service to try and enable Live Search into websites a couple of days ago and I lost the article reference that I was reading through with the examples.

Today while searching for that article I stumbled across this link. Apparently there are easy ways of integrating Live Search into your websites without having them embedded.

The link above allows you to implement the search in two ways, one by having the search box only and redirecting the results to the Live Search results. The second is by having a floating window that displays the results on top of your web site.

Check it out.

I'm currently also playing with the MSN Search web service (why is it called MSN and not Live when it's for Live Search?)  and will be posting more about this soon.

It's about time I started blogging again, it's been a while. A couple of days ago I realized that Google has made a new offering with it's search services. Google Personalized Search. And almost instantly I was thinking, this looks familiar and you know why. I blogged about something very similar before a while back when I posted about Windows Live Search Macros.

It looks like Google are offering a very similar service to WLSM. I have not tried Google's yet but will be checking it out soon.

I guess Google likes some of Microsoft's ideas! They even have an ugly looking service similar to Windows Live, have you ever seen the link that says personalized page on Google?

This just keeps getting better and better all the time! I've now found yet another reason to use Live Search. The Image Search features are really great. Viewing full size images was a very nice idea but here are some even better ones IMO. The scratch pad and the related people panes, VERY NICE. The scratch pad allows you to drag images to the side of the page and build a collection of images from the search results you get and the Related people pane also shows when you search for a person in images, if you seach for bill gates for example, you see Paul Allen, Warren Buffet ...etc in the related people list.

Here's a screenshot showing the scratch pad.

So Windows Live Search is now Live, and also has new features. I just noticed that there is now an "Only from New Zealand" checkbox that lets you localize the search. It's good this has now been made avaialbe and surely enough I had to try it out.

So I decided to seach for myself and it looks like Windows Live Search knows best!

Searching for "Dan" using WLS with only NZ selected returns my blog as the no1 result (yay!) and if I search for "Daniel" on WLS search I also end up on the first page but I show on 5th. Not bad!

On Google searching for "Dan" finds my blog on the top of page three when NZ is selected.

Will try to play with the algorithm customization thing I blogged about earlier and see what that does to the results (not that I want to!) it's good to be on page one.

The only annoying thing that I see after the release is renaming Windows Live TM Search to Live Search. I think it was better when all Windows Live pages had the Windows word in them rather than some having it and some not.