I'm not using Microsoft's Live Search too often. In fact you could say I try not to use it at all. I don't like it and I can't give a certain reason why. I just don't. This is just to make things clear so you don't get an weird idea like I'm trying to promote something that Microsoft created. Cause I'm not. OK.
Today I came across Tafiti, a project that describes itself as an "experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results". And I was like "Hmmm ... Useless!" For me anyway. I can't find any use for it right now. But the reason I'm telling you about it is it's nice interface developed using Microsoft Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. At least that's the official description I've found on their website. The front-end is cute, quite Web 2.0, but it reminds me of those "all flash" websites. Those really pissed me off. They would take forever to load and would slow your system to a stop. Of course it's not entirely true in this case, but it's close enough. On my system anyway. The animations are nice and the way you can arrange the search results in a tree view is original. I like that one. Not very user friendly, but interesting. One annoying thing is that you have to install the Silverlight plug-in. I expect we'll be seeing a lot of websites incorporating this technology in the future, seeing as it's main purpose is video streaming.
All in all, Tafiti left a good impression on me from a graphical point of view. Maybe one of it's main disadvantages is that it uses Microsoft's search engine :-) .
0 comments:
Post a Comment