A Shout-Out for KallOut
Today I'm temporarily departing from my usual blog format to tell you about a crazy-cool new software program I recently came across which I believe MTs are going to love. KallOut (
http://www.kallout.com/) is a free application that allows you to perform context-based Internet searches from within a document
without having to open a browser. The program works with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, as well as with Adobe Acrobat/Reader 8.0 or newer, Notepad and WordPad.
To perform a search, you simply highlight a word or phrase in your document and a very small and unobtrusive blue balloon appears above the highlighted text. By hovering your mouse over the balloon, the KallOut menu displays a variety of search options, including Google Search, Yahoo Search, Live Search, Maholo, and Technorati, or you can manually add additional search sites. You can also designate one search engine as the "QuickPick" (default) search option if you generally use the same search site repeatedly.
KallOut is not limited to search sites, however. You can also use KallOut to check reference sites such as Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, Google Translate, Biography.com, Encarta, IMDB, Last.fm Music, and How Stuff Works; shopping sites like Amazon.com, Shopping.com, eBay, and Craigslist; news sites such as Google News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Twitter News Alerts, ESPN, etc.; online photo and video sites including YouTube, Hulu, Flickr, Photobucket, and more; location sites such as Google Maps and Virtual Earth; and social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Again, within any of these categories you can add your own sites to KallOut.
Once you select a site with which to perform a KallOut search, a small (about 3-inch-square) window pops up over the top of the document you're working in with your search results displayed. Up to this point you haven't had to leave your document. Only when you click on the link to a search result does your browser open up in the usual fashion to display the web page you selected.
KallOut is still in beta, but so far I haven't run across any bugs. The company intends to add KallOut functionality to more applications in the near future; I've already put in a request for Thunderbird email compatibility.
If you give KallOut a test drive, please feel free to leave a comment to let us know what you think of it.