ZenVilla Blog

I’ve just finished re-reading a nice article on Daring Fireball titled “Apps of the Year, 2004″ and it occurred to me that we never got similar treatment from DF regarding John’s favourite apps of 2005. That’s an article I would really like to see. Sure, we have the MacMinute Showtime Awards, the MacWorld Eddys, the Apple Design Awards and probably more but what separates DF from the pack here is the detail and attention given to his analysis. In short, we get a list of apps we should check out and we get some ideas as to why they might be worthy of our time. I know 2006 is not exactly the new year anymore but what do you say John? Please… pretty please?

This is pretty cool. You can now setup your Bloglines account to display weather for various cities on top of bringing you your daily dose of news feeds. Good stuff.

As much as I like desktop aggregators there’s just nothing like the always on service of Bloglines. Even when my iBook is sleeping or in transit I know my news is just a click away.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been using Shiira as my main browser for a while now and today I finally got around to playing with the Search Engines window. I was aware that the search field could be customized but had never bothered playing with it. Then this morning, when searching for some things on MacUpdate I found myself wanting the OmniWeb style address bar searching. Well surprise, surprise but you guessed it, Shiira can do this for you right out of the box.

What do I mean by address bar searching? Let’s take a look. I’m not sure if the Omni guys where the first to do this but OmniWeb is where I first encountered it. What it does is allow you to type something like “google shiira browser” directly into the address bar and have it search Google using the term “shiira browser”. Okay, the search field does this already so what’s the big deal? Well, it becomes really cool when you can simply type in “imdb tom cruise” or “macupdate itunes library” and have it load your search results without having to hit the site in question first, type in the search term and hit the search button. It’s just too convenient not to love!

So here’s how to make this work in Shiira. First, open up the Search Engines window from under the Window menu. Now in the window that appears, click the “New” button on the lower right hand side of the window. A new empty row will be added and selected in the table. Hit the tab key to jump to the name field and fill in the details for your search engine. See this screen shot for an example. Be sure to click the little checkbox in the table that turns this search shortcut on.

The keyword field is where the magic happens. By filling in this field you enable Shiira to search from the address field as well as the search field. Just use this keyword as the first part of your search to let Shiira know what you want it to do. Check out this screen shot and then give it a go. Hit command-L, type “imdb zoolander” and hit return. Now isn’t that nice!

For easy copy and paste…

Internet Movie Database - “imdb” with this template…
http://www.imdb.com/Find?select=All&for=%@

Additional shortcuts you may want to try…

MacUpdate - “mu” with this template…
http://macupdate.com/search.php?keywords=%@&os=macosx

VersionTracker - “vt” with…
http://www.versiontracker.com/mp/new_search.m?productDB=mac&mode=Quick&search=%@

I’ve been using Shiira as my main web browser for a month or so now and I have to say that I’m quite happy with it. It’s a very solid showing for a beta level application. By the time it reaches 1.0 it should be pretty impressive. The tab implementation is probably the best I’ve seen yet. This is how I would like Camino’s tabs to look and work in the future. The toolbar icons that ship with it aren’t the most attractive so I recommend grabbing this theme by Jon Hicks and installing that. I would also recommend running the latest nightly build if you want to see the cool new things like Growl support.