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September 14, 2005
Inquisitor search plugin for Safari
I feel safe in saying that everything David Watanabe touches is gold. His Acquisition isn’t just a fine Macintosh P2P client, but an example of some genuine user interface innovations (especially around filtering a large set of results quickly) that everyone would do well to copy immediately. His NewsFire RSS reader is one of the most attractive applications I have on my computer; “supple” is the word that comes to mind. I happily paid for both apps, although I’m back to using NetNewsWire as my main RSS reader.
Now, his (free!) Inquisitor plugin adds configurable predictive searching to Safari’s search field. Think Google Suggest for your browser. This is one of those little improvements that’s so useful and obvious that five minutes with it will change your searching habits for good.
UPDATE: Watanabe’s released an improved version 2.0 of the Safari toolbar plugin as donationware, a concept I don’t think I’ve seen before. Instead of charging a fixed price after a trial period of use, he’s requiring a minimal ($1 or $2) donation to download the software in the first place. The newer version makes toolbar searches behave more like “Spotlight for the web”, and expose other search options (like searching Amazon) more clearly than version 1. (It also works a lot like his web-based version, which isn’t too interesting to me.) Two dollars is a bargain, I’ll happily send him more.
Posted by Andrew at September 14, 2005 09:18 PM