I’d never heard of a little program called ActiveWords until Jon Udell gave it high marks in a post on his InfoWorld weblog.
This is essentially a DIY command line interface for Windows. Pick a keyword, assign it a task, and you can instantly launch any application, window, URL or script from anywhere within windows (or just use it for simple text replacement). When I’m replying to e-mail, for example, just typing ‘go’ and F8 instantly launches Mozilla and goes to Google.
I’ve seen programs that did some of these features before, but none that did it anywhere near as well as ActiveWords does. For example, if I wanted to I could modify my Google keyword to pop up an input box for a keyword, hit return, and the browser would launch with a Google search on that keyword.
I usually work with both my text editor and web browser open 99% of the time, and it’s a real joy to launch programs and scripts with just a few letters and the F8 key in either. Easily worth $30.
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