Sometimes what customers want is not always what customers get. Take “Scout” for example, a little piece of Microsoft Research ingenuity that really helps users with the new Office 2007 “Fluent” interface. As religious as I am about the Ribbon and contextual interface, I suffer just as much knowing a feature exists somewhere in the application that I just can’t find in the Ribbon. I mean how do I know what context it’s in? And I’m almost certain I’m not the only one suffering.

Developed and distributed internally at Microsoft as a proof-of-concept, “Scout” solves the problem by offering a simple and straight-forwarding search solution. You basically type the command you are thinking of, and you’ll be presented a list of matching command buttons. And unlike commands in the Ribbon which are only a select few picked by someone else who thought might be relevant, this search goes deep into the application to find anything and everything.

Even though it was highly favored by Microsoft employees, Scout was never released to the public. Chris Capossela, corporate VP for Microsoft’s business division argued Scout was “superfluous and potentially confusing”. No. The only thing superfluous are the features I can’t find.

Of course, who needs overconfident Microsoft vice presidents when you have software developers like Jeff Scanlon. He wrote to me this week about a little something he’s been working on only recently because he came across my posts about Scout. I’ll let my quick 1:30min screencast demo do the talking.

[flv:searchcommands.flv 670 372]

No question this add-in needs quite a bit of tweaking and polishing before it’s widely available, but this is an inspiring start. As you saw, I could edit and publish an entire document with only “Search Commands”. Although that’s not the purpose of this add-in, it certainly shows it’s capable. Together with keyboard shortcuts in future versions, you’ll have access to every feature in Office without even touching the mouse.

Currently only available to Word 2007 as a COM add-in, Jeff plans to work on it more as well as develop the add-in for Excel as well. He also promises to keep it free. Keep an eye or both eyes out on his blog to get it when its available “soon”.

Announcing the Windows Live Suite on the same day as the new iPod touch crafted by God himself might not have been the brightest idea, but Windows Live still managed to get some attention by the usual suspects. The hype has been around this unified installer which not surprisingly does exactly what the label says and nothing more. I decided to give it a whirl but was surprised by not what it did, but how.

For those that haven’t tried already, you point your browser to http://get.live.com/WL/ and you will come across this splash screen. At first, it might look like a silly ‘sign-up’ form which you must complete to gain access to the downloads, but in fact you’re asked to choose what you want to install in the suite. I thought to myself, “oh that’s neat. I’m choosing what I want to install on a web page.” Then I pondered, “how does this actually work?”

After pressing “Install”, you’re asked to download the installer’s executable. At this point, I started wondering if this executable was somehow dynamically generated or prepackaged to install only the things I selected, nevertheless I hyper-clicked all the next buttons until it eventually started installing. Not surprisingly, it only downloaded and installed the applications I chose. Whatever it did, it worked.

Unsatisfied with “it just works”, I decided to investigate further. I first analyzed the HTML to see what effect it had on the download link when I selected the different options, but no luck there, it pointed to the same “WLinstaller.exe”. To prove a point, I then downloaded the executable without going through the form to compare it with the other executable I already, it was the same. So if the executable didn’t change, then it can only be the website.

One more look at the HTML and specifically the Javascript reveals the secret, cookies. By clicking “Install”, the Javascript generated a unique cookie for me under the name of “wlxp” that contained sets of globally unique identifiers (GUID) which I now know are the references to the particular applications I selected.

document.cookie="wlxp=p="+finalList.join(",").toLowerCase()+"&t="+t+";expires="+d;

Just to make sure, I even ran Process Monitor on the process to check out its file system requests.

Even though I had already known about the cookies, it still shocked me a little to see it actually query my file system first to find any cookies for “live.com”, then start accessing those cookies to find the relevant information. Same applies for Firefox, which I was using at the time. In fact, it’s even more complicated for Firefox because it first has to find my profiles, then shift through megabytes of cookies in the single repository to find the “live.com” one.

Whilst this might seem like a lot of work just to check what I want to install, I think it’s a neat idea with a lot of indirect potential. A few that popped into my mind quickly included:

• Third party applications or bundles – assuming the installer simply downloads from the Microsoft server anything matching the supplied GUIDs, you could easily deliver additional applications or service beyond those by Microsoft without bundling them into the installer
• Universal installer – this installer will require less if any maintenance since it can be suited to download any application, any version, any bundle by simply changing GUIDs in the browser
• Special promotions – imagine if you have accessed a promotional website which offered Live Messenger freebies, by simply adding a code to the cookie, only you will be given access to download these exclusive freebies

Someone suggested to me this is not new and in fact Adobe may have done this in the past with the Acrobat download bundles, however I think they changed the download URL to a whole new package with or without the bundle depended on your decision, instead of the truly unified installer in this case.

And also if you’re wondering what happens if you don’t have the cookies or have cookies disabled, then you’ll simply be offered a different installation experience where you select which products you’d like to install (left).

P.S. If you’re running X64 and questioning the purpose of life, then check out Rafael’s hack to get Windows Live Suite working on X64.

I’ve never been a big fan of computer books because if it’s in a book, it’s probably on the interweb. But relying on this ‘internet’ might not be as reliable as Senator Ted Stevens explains, the internet is made up of tubes and those tubes can be clogged. I’ll spare you the rest of the Senator’s scientific explanation, but basically it’s probably a good idea to still buy books.

Speaking of books, Steve Sinchak‘s latest masterpiece is “Hacking Windows Vista“. The book tells a story about a young man by the name of “Windows Vista”. The youngest sibling of the Windows family, Vista is much improved than his older brother, Eks-Pee, but he is still far from perfect.

In the first act, the story begins with Vista looking to change his appearance, especially his interface. Vista becomes a frequent in several plastic surgeries including the “Registry” and “Control Panel”. In the second act Vista is off to tone up his fitness for improved performance. He is able to achieve a few gains by turning off some unnecessary organs. In the third and last act, Vista is feeling a little insecure from the school bullies. He identifies his weaknesses and hires several protection services including “Defender”.

In all seriousness, “Hacking Windows Vista” is a great all-in-one collection of most Windows Vista tweaks known to date. It’s very easy to read and follow with clear instructions illustrated by bundles of screenshots. The variety of tweaks include the most basic like hiding icons in the task tray to the more advanced modifying resource files for the sidebar background.

I must admit though by having come across dozens of tweaking and hacking sites including Steve’s own TweakVista.com, this book didn’t contain much that hasn’t been documented before. So if you think you know all the tweaks out there, you’re probably right. This book is more catered towards the user who likes the idea of tinkering with his Windows with some confidence – not “this tweak may render your system inoperable”.

Due to an error, I’ve received two review copies of the book from Wiley Publishings. I tried reading two books at a time but that didn’t work out very well, so I’m going to give both away.

Update: The winners have been drawn and notified by email.

From bouquets to search engines, there’s nothing the talented folks at Jackson Fish Market can’t do, except maybe sell fish. Last week, in cooperation with their former employer Microsoft, they launched “Tafiti“, a Silverlight-powered Windows Live Search interface with a twist.

Given it’s Jackson Fish with Jenny Lam we’re talking about here, there’s no question it’s an elegant experience inside out. But it’s not all looks and no substance. Tafiti also incorporates a set of unique ideas including result clippings and “passive search” – a.k.a. tree view – the ability to explore search results without user interaction.

I had the wonderful opportunity to ask the Jackson Fish gang (Hillel, Walter and Jenny) a few questions. Of course they were busy as always, so we kept it reasonably short.

For how long have you worked on Tafiti? How long did you spending planning, designing and implementing?

Did Jackson Fish approach Microsoft or vice versa? What was the initial project concept?

What sort of tools did you use to design and develop Tafiti?

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Correct me if I’m wrong but I think it’s been at least two Windows releases since any new or updated Windows Media Player visualizations. Sure, what comes in the box are still visualizations by definition, but I couldn’t consider any of them eye-candy. Recently, a new visualization pack made by two Microsoft employees in their spare time is worth checking out.

Stephen Coy, the designer of the Windows Vista screensavers and Tim Cowley, a software engineer on the Office team have come together to release a visualizations pack for Windows Media Player called “Psychedelia” two years in the making. But don’t worry, no LSD drugs involved.

As a requirement to run these visualizations, you will need a graphics card that supports at least shader model 2.0 (most DirectX 9 graphics cards will), which might seem like a high requirement for visualizers, but how else are you suppose to create visual magic right?

Included in the single package are 7 visualizations with over 40 variations in total, including

• Album Art 3D – 3D cubes with the album art of the song you’re currently playing
• Bubbles – inspired by the Bubbles Vista screensavers also featuring the album art
• Distortion – distorts the album art in a 3D waveform
• Hypnobloom – hypnotic checkered purple rings
• Ribbons – inspired by the Mystify and Ribbons Vista screensavers (as seen above)
• Gigertron 3D – 3D layered visualizer bars
• up cuber – a pigment arrangement of 3D hexagon cubes

I’ve never been a big fan of visualizers before but I’m hooked onto “Ribbons”. If you’re looking for some awesome WMP visualizers or something to match your Vista screensavers, then give Psychedelia a try. It’s a reasonably light download at 5MB but best of all it’s free!

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