Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Say "Yahoo" for cool tools!

Here are two very useful tools from Yahoo that you might add to your tool box... Yahoo Desktop Search and MyWeb. In my current job I have to work on a large legacy application. The application has been in development for more than eight years. It has a large amount of source-code and documentation. Finding information in this mass of files was very difficult until I used Yahoo Desktop Search. Search has a great interface for performing the searches and previewing the results. It handles source code, word, pdf and many other documents. So when I look up a function in source, I can easily spot everywhere it is used in code and in the documentation! Very very nice. I tried using Google's desktop search tool, but found the Yahoo Desktop Search to richer and easier to use.

I read a lot of technical articles, whitepapers and blogs. On any given day I probably read 2 to 10 articles about technologies I'm using. That is a lot of information to keep track of. My solution is Yahoo's My Web. Since late May (see previous post) I've been dropping every article I read into MyWeb at Yahoo. MyWeb captures a copy of the webpages so I can search them later. [Hint, use Yahoo Toolbar to make it easy to add to MyWeb.] So the next time I need to find that article on JTidy, Derby, or AspectJ I can use MyWeb to search only the articles I've read.

Maybe one day Yahoo will get the Desktop Search to also include MyWeb. That would be Nerdvana!


Enjoy!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Rob said...

Haven't tried Yahoo, but I did find Copernic Desktop Search to be far superior to Google's.

Mov 0 To 1 said...

Thanks! After reading your comment, I looked at Copernic briefly. I found Yahoo's GUI to be easier to use. So I didn't spend much time with it. I've read that Copernic is highly rated.