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Making tool bars interesting again. No, really.

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Here's something interesting from InfoSpace... a tool bar!  No, really.  In fact, see for yourself over at Sam Chenaur's site.   He's got a nice screen grab, too.  This is not your "father's toolbar".   

I tried to get my own screen grab from the Recipe toolbar I installed, but it's really quite hidden until you engage with it... so it's completely innocuous until you want to use it... and then it looks great.  Other notes:

  • The requirements say IE7, but seems to work just fine for me on IE8 so far. 
  • The UI is context sensitive, and uses some of the same conventions as the "ribbon" in Office UI. 
  • I like this is as an non-traditional "software-plus-services" example to "get" what that's all about... (assuming for the moment you can have a "non-traditional example" for a term without too much of a tradition yet!)  :-) 

What I mean about "software-plus-services" is this: software that runs on a computer you control, plus services delivered over the internet from a computer you don't control, working together to enable cool new experiences that make both software and services better than either by themselves.  There are certainly more complicated ways to describe software-plus-services (sometimes called "S+S" around Microsoft), and i'm frequently guilty :-) ... but that's the essence of it. 

I'm guessing a bit about how this all goes together, but it appears that from a users' perspective, the software pieces include the tool bar itself, the XAML UI, and Silverlight to render the XAML.  The services pieces come into play because the toolbar hosts a couple services (at least): recipes and pics from AllRecipes.com, and also a search product from InfoSpace called Nation that aggregates yahoo, google, ask, and live search as a meta search engine (that is, the search service itself is actually a simple composite of still more services). 

You may be saying, "big deal -- none of these things are very interesting or unique by themselves."  I fully agree.  And yet together, they create something completely new in character as to be, literally, unique.  And that's really the punch line in some ways with Software-plus-services -- thinking about how collections of software and services can go together and make each other better is a powerful way to create compelling new experiences!   

So hop on over to Sam's site and check out his and pic and what he has to say about his hand in helping InfoSpace do this good work.  Or, if you can't wait, jump straight to InfoSpace's toolbars here. 

 

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