Despite Microsoft Senior VP Chris Capossela saying that a search interface for the new Office ribbon device was unnecessary, Microsoft Office Labs yesterday released the internal project called ‘Scout’, now given the far less interesting title ‘Search Commands’.  What is it with Microsoft having cool development names and then giving the products really boring release titles?

Anyway, the plugin adds another tab to Word, Powerpoint & Excel.  It’s added as the last tab, but helpfully, you can just click ‘Windows Key + Y’ and it will jump to the search box from the application. 

All it really is is a search box, a bunch of suggestions plus a gigantic help button. It is very useful though.  Just start typing in the box and it will come up with a list of commands related to what you’ve typed in.  It starts with partial matches and narrows down as you type.  What is particularly handy is that it isn’t just doing a text match on the name of the commands, it’s doing a contextual match too.  The example given in the help tutorial is that if you enter ‘background’ it comes up with a bunch of commands related to document backgrounds (in Word).  This includes things like Watermarks, changing themes and shading.  I’m not sure how this is done, there must be some sort of categorisation for the application’s commands behind the scenes.

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Microsoft has announced that Windows XP Service Pack 3 has have been RTM.  This means that OEM providers and Enterprise customers will be getting it in the next couple of days, while it is due to be released via Windows Update & the Microsoft Download Centre on April 29th.  A PDF with an overview of the contents of the Service Pack is available.

This is a much smaller update than the previous 2 SP releases, especially SP2 which added a lot of functionality, especially security.  According to the PDF

With few exceptions, Microsoft is not adding Windows Vista features to Windows XP through SP3. As noted earlier, one exception is the
addition of NAP to Windows XP to help organizations running Windows XP to take advantage of new features in Windows Server 2008.

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Apparently after listening to Nessun Dorma I’d just love to crank up Follow Me.

Not really seeing the similarity here.

A new music site launches, so what do people use it for? Rickrolling of course!

I’m liking Songza, it’s got a slick interface.  I can do most things on the page with AJAX, so I can keep listening while I line up other songs to play.  The speed is good & the audio sounds like standard MP3 quality.

You can register for an account now, here’s my profile. You can share the songs you find, the site gives you links to Twitter the songs, email them or embed them in your own site.

Here’s some Jonathan Coulton for your audible pleasure:

<p><em>There is embedded content here that you cannot see. Please <a href="http://blog.slaven.net.au/archives/2008/04/18/guess-what-the-most-played-song-on-songza-is/">open the post in a web browser</a> to see this.</em></p>

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I’ve been a bit inspired over the last week to do some fairly major updates to the FriendFeed plugin.  Thanks to some helpful suggestions and feedback from a number of people, I’ve added a bunch of new features and fixed some dodgy code that was in the previous versions.

The biggest change is that you can now comment & ‘like’ a post directly from the post itself without having to go to FriendFeed.  This is done using a bit of AJAX (via Prototype). The user puts in their comment, their username & their FriendFeed API key.  The API key is never visible to the site owner, it’s passed directly through to FriendFeed and then discarded.

This form is turned on by default, but can be disabled in the admin section if you don’t like it. Also, because of this change, the plugin will now display on every post, whether there are comments or likes on it or not.

The other changes are:

• You can now edit the ‘headline’ text that displays. ie the "On FriendFeed, this post was liked by x people and commented on y times".  You can now put whatever you want there, and it will replace the tokens {comments} & {likes} with the number of comments & likes.
• A default stylesheet is now included, to get you started on styling the plugin’s content.  It also can be disabled in the admin page, and you can see what the stylesheet looks like here.
• The plugin can now be set to have the FriendFeed comments & likes be visible by default.  Currently the default is to hide them and only show them when the user clicks the ’show’ link.
• Also, based on the points I made in my post about self-cleaning WordPress plugins, the admin page now has a ‘delete plugin’ button.  This is will remove all trace of the plugin from the WordPress database, so you can then deactivate the plugin knowing it hasn’t left anything behind.  Needless to say, only use this if you want to completely remove the plugin, not just disable it temporarily.
• Numerous bug fixes & tidy-ups.  I’ve replaced my bespoke javascript to hide/show the comments with Prototype too.

So, if it hasn’t already turned up in the Automatic Updates list, grab the new version from here.  As always please let me know what you think & how it can be better.

Nicole Simon posted a request on FriendFeed for a bookmarklet that would search for the selected text on a page, so you could find who posted it first on FF.

I tried posting a reply on FriendFeed, but the comment kept breaking the url, so here it is again.  Drag this link onto the browser toolbar & it’s all yours.

Find on FriendFeed.

Best thing though is that Aviv posted a comment saying that this will soon not be needed:

No need for a bookmarklet… a "Find others" button is coming

Sweet!