Hyperwords for Firefox - Version 2.1.6 - Interactive Text Search Engine

Reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Introduction

Frode Hegland has been able to establish a company focusing on rethinking how we communicate with one another and capture what we’ve learned into “Hyperwords”. His desire (as ours should be) is to convert the electronic technologies we use to be as fluid and portable as paper, yet allow for instant access for further knowledge that electronic connectivity permits – or in his words - “liquid information”. Thus was born the Liquidinformation Research Project.

Hyperwords for Firefox works by highlighting a word and then it provides links to language translations, reference sources, other search engines and allows for Email, print, tag, Blog, WordPress and also links to maps, time, weather, shopping links and package tracking and also can provide server information.

Getting Started

First, you will need to install a copy of Firefox 2, if you do not already have it on your system - http://www.mozilla.com or Flock - http://www.flock.com/download/ Next, go here to download the Hyperwords Extension - http://www.hyperwords.net/firefox.html This app was also optimized for use with WordPress. To see how it works, the Demo video presentation (linked above) does about the best job.

Using the Software

Once you’ve installed in Firefox as an extension, pop out of Firefox and back in to activate Hyperwords and highlight a word or phrase and see the dropdown menus appear. I checked to see if Hyperwords was based on pop-up screens by blocking those in preferences and it still functioned, so these are dropdown menus and not popups. To activate Hyperwords, just doubleclick the word or highlight a word or phrase and the menu appears.

What happens to your system is that a JavaScript extension is placed in Username > Library > Application Support > Firefox > Profiles folder. If you want to see it in Firefox, go to Tools > Add-ons to see it. For the geekset, the name of the file is hyperwords.xpi.

In Firefox, we can now highlight any word and “dig deeper” by also getting the word equivalent in a variety of other languages besides English similar to what we have imbedded on the macCompanion website, but this essentially makes such searching universal. Bu tthis tool does so much more!

There is one funny little thing though. Apparently we can flag items and add them in the Preferences Edit Menu tab, but I could not figure out how to add anything on those _____ lines that are shown in each section in the graphic shown above. So think of them as programming placebos for now – at least on the Mac. More to come later, I’m sure…

Conclusion

Now if only this were included in Safari! I guess we will have to wait and see what Mac OS X Leopard has to offer.

Recommendation

I have no problem recommending this app to the Mac community as a research tool that fits nicely with our continuing theme on Writing. I do not know how Frode Hegland expects to monetize this app, but the fact that he offers it as free right now is rather wonderful to me.