First Look at Microsoft’s Tafiti search engine

Microsoft has released a new showcase of its Silverlight web development frameworks, a graphical search engine called Tafiti. Tafiti, which means “do research” in Swahili, is an experimental frontend to Microsoft’s Live Search engine. It presents search options in three panes on the screen: the left pane is for entering search queries and switching between image, RSS, Web, and News, the middle pane contains the search results, and the right pane is used to “dock” results using drag-and-drop for looking at later.

To run the Tafiti web application, you must first download and install Silverlight. Silverlight runs on Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4.8 or higher. A Linux version of Silverlight is being worked on by Mono developer Miguel de Icaza but is not yet available.

The installation is a one-time-only affair, with the default setting to update Silverlight automatically in the background when new releases come out—a good thing since the Silverlight frameworks themselves are still in beta. Once installed, a browser restart is required, and then the Tafiti site will run. Tafiti runs on Internet Explorer 6 or 7, Firefox 2.x, and Safari 2.x, but it will not work on Opera or the new Safari 3 beta. I had some problems with Tafiti not rendering search results on Firefox 2.0.0.6, but others have reported no difficulties.

Using Bookmarks in Word 2007

If you’re working on a long Word document, navigating through it can be a hassle. This makes it difficult if you need to return to a specific location for further editing.

But Word 2007 lets you bookmark specific parts of your document. Then, you can easily return to the location.

Adding Bookmarks in a Word 2007 document

To insert a bookmark in Word 2007, follow these steps:

1. Select the portion of your document you’d like to bookmark

2. On the ribbon, click the Insert tab

3. Click Bookmark in the Links section

4. Type a name under Bookmark name. Bookmark names must begin with a letter and cannot contain spaces

5. Click Add

Opening Bookmarks in a document

Once you insert bookmarks in your Word 2007 documents, you can open them easily. This makes navigating through long documents a breeze.

1. Click the Insert tab on the ribbon

2. Click Bookmark in the Links section

3. Select the name of the bookmark you would like to open

4. Click Go To

Deleting Bookmarks

After you’re done editing your document, you’ll probably want to delete any bookmarks you’ve created. Or, you may wish to delete the bookmarks after you’re done editing the bookmarked locations.

1. Click the Insert tab on the Office ribbon

2. In the Links section, click Bookmark

3. Select the bookmark you’d like to delete

4. Click Delete

Microsoft announces new Windows Live products

Microsoft has just announced two new Windows Live products, Windows Live Folders and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Windows Live Folders is Microsoft’s online storage solution, which features a 500 MB storage limit, with a 50mb individual file size cap. Unlike some of the other competing services, Windows Live Folders is more geared towards storing and sharing documents as opposed to storing music and videos. Microsoft’s take is that 500 MB is a sufficient amount of storage for documents.

Windows Live Folders

Windows Live Photo Gallery is an upgrade to Vista’s Photo Gallery, replacing it on install. It can also be installed on Windows XP SP2.