Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Man – one of the greatest productivity boosters I’ve had in the past few months has been the introduction of "middle click" with Windows Vista.  Call me lame but I never did this before and it’s the default function of Windows Vista for the scroll wheel button.

BATCH PROCESSING SEARCH RESULTS
Basically, when you click on the scroll wheel of you mouse as a button within Internet Explorer on a particular hyperlink, by default the action of Windows is to open the link’s URL as a new tab within Internet Explorer 7.0, while keeping the focus on your current page.

This allows you to scour, say a search results page like Windows Live or Google, and simply click search results links to your heart’s content, and have the potential "correct" sites just line up as tabs in your current browser session.  This can be as many results as you want, and it allows you to select all the links you think might relate to your search query all at once, then inspect each link for the information you’re looking for.

I can’t express how this ability to "batch process" search results has increased my Internet research productivity.  Seriously – it might not seem like a big deal to you, but it sure has speedened things up for me.  It’s a godsend and it’s one of my Top 10 favorite things about Windows Vista.

OOPS!  INTELLIPOINT CHANGES THE BEHAVIOR
If you’ve read my past posts, you know I am also in love with the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000.  This little guy is fantastic and is the sales person’s diminutive dream when it comes to laptop accessories.  The hardware guys at Microsoft really got it right when they made this thing.

The problem is that it requires Intellipoint – some special software we make – to allow the "presenter buttons" on the bottom of the mouse to function.  Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal however it reprograms my beloved "middle click" "scroll wheel button" to use this thing called the "Instant Viewer", a task switching applications that gives you a view of all the running applications… something like Flip3D, but not as nifty.

So to chance it, you have to run the Microsoft Mouse program (it gets installed when you install Intellipoint) and create an application specific setting for the middle click/scroll wheel click button so that it

ALSO PROGRAM KEYS FOR "ZOOMIT" FOR AN ADDED PRESENTER’S BONUS
Here’s another interesting thing to reprogram if you’re doing this already:  Download Zoomit.exe from Systinternals.com.  (Now part of Microsoft)  Zoomit.exe will allow you to "Zoom in" on a part of the desktop to allow your spectators to get a better view of the desktop.  It’s also really eyecatching and captivates and audience when you use it because it "zooms in" in an animated fashion. 

Normally, you would click CTRL+1 however, you can program the left side button in Microsoft Intellipoint to apply the keystroke, "CTRL+1" and also program the right side button to apply the keystroke, "CTRL+2".  This will enable you to "zoom in" to an area of the screen simply by clicking the left side button.  You can draw on the screen by clicking the left mouse button to toggle "drawing mode" on and off.  If you wish to draw on the screen without first zooming in, simply click the right side button which will issue the CTRL+2 keystrokes and that will allow you to do just that.

Of course you need to be running Zoomit so add this to your Startup folder.