DQSD v4 - With Support for x64
As anyone who has known me for a while will tell you, I can be qute passionate about applications I really like. Well, one of those little gems is an opensource project called "Dave's Quick Search Deskbar" or DQSD as it's commonly known. When I first moved to x64 some three years and more ago, the current version was 3.1.9.1, and it had been the same for quite a long while. Which was fine, it still worked, though there were some annoyances in XP SP2. But i simply didn't work at all in x64, since it's a pure Windows Explorer addon. This was not something I was willing to live with, so I contacted the current maintainer, Kim Gräsman, who turned out to be a Microsoft MVP at the time. IAC, I offered some hardware and my limited expertise to see if we could get a 64-bit build, and we did - Kim did the compiling by logging in remotely to my 64-bit machine, and I wrote a crude little batch file installer. And all was well, for a while.
Then Vista shipped, and my DQSD was seriously unhappy again. I could get it to load, but it was an ugly blue blob on my dark Vista taskbar. So, again, a couple of us played around with CSS files that controlled the look and feel, and we got that solved.
But meanwhile, the DQSD Developers List got active again, and a new version was released that solved some lingering problems with XP SP2, and just generally behaves better. And since it's a solid, stable release (4.0.0.6), Kim has built an automated build process that includes a 64-bit version as part of the normal build. Whoopee! Finally, we're in the mainstream here. Of course, there are still some gotchas - for one, since DQSD uses an installer that doesn't understand 64-bit, the installer is still my batch file. Though it has gotten quite a bit more sophisticated and robust, thanks primarily to some changes from Kim and some better modularizing and error checking. We've added automatic Windows version checking, integrated the Vista colour scheme loads, and cleaned up the registry changes. Expect to see a public build in the next few days, and I'll be posting a link, here and on the 64-bit newsgroup.
Finally, a thought - DQSD really is the best seach add-on I've ever used. It integrates into my daily life, without getting in my way, and it has a wealth of possible searches. But I think it really needs to move off the task bar and onto a widget/gadget for the Vista Sidebar going forward. And it needs some more cleanup of searches that have either outgrown their usefulness, or have been broken by web site changes. But with all that, still one of the first things I load on a new machine. And it's FREE. So, thanks again to all the folks who have contributed to it over the years.
Charlie.