Universal Text Lookup Tool Release
Monday, July 11th, 2005I finally posted a utility I wrote called the Universal Text Lookup Tool. It was designed to solve the problem of looking up text on your computer, especially when it may not be in your browser. Instead of the usual flow of things when you want to look up a term you may see in a Word document:
1. See the term.
2. Load your browser.
3. Navigate to a search engine.
4. Type in term.
All you need to do is select the term and press ALT-F1. I orignally wrote this program to speed up foreign language searches. Instead of constantly copy and pasting search terms into my browser, I consolidated the entire process to a key press.
Some of the functionality of this program has been replaced by things like Microsoft Office’s Translate feature and Firefox’s right click + Search for this term option. Since there is still no operating system feature that does this, there is still a place in the world for this program.
July 15th, 2005 at 11:42 pm
Excellent! I remember testing this thing out years ago though.
It’s weird that no one has incorporated it (yet, though I hear Longhorn is “supposed” to have an integrated search capability like that…which means that some distro of Linux will have it first, only it won’t be integrated, and be a part of a window manager or something…).