I'm uninstalling the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta. Not only am I not happy, but I'm actually annoyed. I tried the reviewers guide by Scoble, but I don't trust a guide of questions by a maker of one of the products. They give you the questions they want you to ask, but not what is really meaningful to you.
So much potential, wasted. For those that don't want to read the entire “review“ below, it boils down to me saying this:
“Yes, I get it, you want me to use MSN for everything. There's a point where that stops being convenient and starts being annoying, and you passed that point during the install.“
Good points first. It's obvious some really talented people worked on this, so I don't want anyone thinking that I'm not impressed.
- Good results. Very important (I'd prefer great results, but hey)
- Unlike others, I like the “deskbar“ approach. when I want to find something, ctrl+alt+m is great. (however, space is an issue. See aside at the very bottom)
- Quick. The results are returned and shown really fast (not in the more useful search window, though - the one with context. See bad #2)
- Low resources. Not much memory or CPU eaten up. Yaay!
Okay. Good stuff above. However, here's the bad stuff that made me rip it out right away
0) MSN everywhere. I'm not a hotmail user. I don't research on MSN money. I'm not on MSN spaces. I use google, not MSN to search. I shop on Amazon, not MSN. Get the point? On my desktop, in my browser, and in Outlook (outlook, for god's sake!) it adds lots of useless (to me) buttons and menu items with no way to disable many of them. Sorry, but I wanted to search my desktop, not use every MSN service offered to mankind. (This is why it's not named MS Desktop Search, but “MSN Toolbar Suite“.)
1) See #0. Really. Two buttons in my outlook bar that I can't git rid of that take me to MSN stuff. On a tablet with limited toolbar space that's a killer. Let me reiterate:
I want to search my computer for documents, images, contacts, emails, and related items. I don't want quick access to the latest offers from MSN partners through a convenient button in outlook.
2) UI. On a desktop search, I certainly would expect a good windows UI. Sure, while I'm typing into the desktop bar, I get an okay one; but it doesn't give me relative rankings, easy filtering, or context. It's also an impermanent window - once it looses focus, it's gone - so it's a pain to open multiple items in the search results.
The “main“ UI is some half-web client that seems to combine the downsides of the web (no type-ahead search, doesn't show any results until all of 'em are there, web widgets instead of windows widgets, etc) with a listview control slapped in it. Not sure where they're going with this.
3) Odd results This isn't really a killer in a beta like this. I'd say “the results will get better with every release” And they will. What is an odd result? I get resource files written in Thai as the top five results for a word like “map“. I don't read Thai. It's a localizable UI resource file, and I don't see “map” in there anywhere.
But like I said, this wouldn't be a killer. I'd try again. But I have little hope that #2 will be fixed. And my cynical self knows that #0 and #1 will always be there. So see you later, MSN Toolbar Suite.
Also, there's bugs. It's a beta. Twice now, explorer has restarted on me after I close a search web window. But I can deal with that, as well until release.
As an aside: Deskbar is great, but make it a single button or icon until I hit the hotkey, will ya? I need that space! I don't care at all about what I typed 10 minutes ago. Or at least let me size down... this minimum size is much too big. You'll note that I think entirely too many pixels on my taskbar are used on a menu button dedicated to taking me to MSN.
I'm really with Andy on this one. Why do it “like google”? Do it better! For now, I'm sticking with other alternatives, and definitely Lookout