Of late, I’ve been hunkering down and digging into the depths of Objective Development’s LaunchBar.  It goes without saying that the utilty of the application is amazing.

(Note: If you are not familiar with LaunchBar and want to know what is all about, you should check out this short video or even this longer screencast for an overview).

LaunchBar’s “Search Templates” option provides a configurable interface to easily access the search functions of almost any website and comes with preconfigured search templates for many mainstream websites and search engines such as Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and more.  The power of the feature however is that LaunchBar makes it very easy to add custom searches for your own needs.

To give you an example — I realized the other day that LaunchBar does not have a default search template to search Gmail messages, and I was able to create one in about 5 minutes.

1. Within LaunchBar, select Index > Show Index from the menu bar.
2. Click Search Templates (UTF-8)
3. Click Add..

1. Under Name, type “Gmail”
2. Under Details enter the following string (no quotes): “http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/*”

1. Close the window and save the configuration before exiting.

That’s it.  The next time you invoke LaunchBar, type “GM” and you should see an option to invoke a Gmail search template. Click the space bar and you will be presented with a text field to enter your gmail search string.

This template supports full gmail operators, i.e. from:, label:, etc., so give and as long as you are logged into gmail should work like a charm.

My personal email account definitely got away from me over the last few months.  I went from a fairly disciplined Inbox Zero type of system to a semi-permanent state of emergency scanning.  This past weekend, I put in a couple hours and was able to reclaim my inbox and do a pretty thorough clean-up.

As I did this I was surprised to realize that Gmail does not have a one-click way to view all unread items in your inbox.  Instead, you have to enter a query in the Gmail search box to do it.

The syntax is straightforward, but I’m not sure it is formally documented anywhere, so here it is in case you ever need to use it:

label:inbox label:unread

Over the last two weeks, I have been pretty excited to see a flurry of activity from the folks at Delicious after what has been a rather quiet second half of the year.  Delicious just launched a beta of the long-requested bulk edit feature, and this follows three other recent updates:  a beta mobile version of the site, an integrated mp3 player, and updates to the Firefox and Internet Explorer add-ons.  Does this indicate that we may be in for more active and frequent updates to the core Delicious functionality over the next year? I hope so.

One of the ways that I informally judge the health of a web application is by the frequency with which its product development team rolls out new features.  Generally speaking, I believe when you see a web application that is regularly updating its feature set, it is a good sign that:

1. The site is “in it to win it” and is focused on maintaining leadership in its category;
2. User adoption is increasing; and
3. The parent company has made it a priority to invest money into engineering and development.

It goes without saying that if all three are true, then it bodes well for the site for the long haul.  Contrast that with one that only trickles out bug fixes here and there.  Unless the platform is very mature, it can get you a little nervous about the site’s future.  Let me illustrate with a couple examples:

In the past several months Google’s Gmail team has totally been on fire.  They have released too many updates to list, but some of the more recent ones include viewing PDFs directly within Gmail, Gmail themes, and integrated video chat.  Without a doubt, Gmail is the innovation leader in the webmail category.  If you are an engineer at Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, do you feel like you can ever catch up?  On the user side, when was the last time you heard of someone switching from Gmail to Yahoo Mail?  Honestly, I have never had someone tell me that.  Yet I know of people jumping ship from other services to Gmail all the time.

What about LinkedIn?  If Linkedin did not make a single update to the functionality of the site from how it operated six months ago, it would still be the best business networking site around, yet the company is not content to rest on its laurels.  Instead, LinkedIn releases new features on what seems like an almost weekly basis.  In the last few months alone some of the major features they have added include better searching, LinkedIn applications, and much enhanced groups among others.

Finally, I have to mention TypePad.  I just started using the service in October, but I probably could not have hit it at a better time.  In the last three months it has been steadily rolling out its new platform and a number of new features which are making the service better and better.  I am at the point where I expect to see a notice on my iGoogle page or TypePad login every week of another new feature that improves the blogging service.

In all three cases, these companies have added functionality that is not feature bloat, but instead will typically evoke one of two reactions from me: either they add a feature that I have been wanting for a long time, or one that I never knew I needed until I saw it.  As a user of these applications, the aggressiveness their product development teams take to enhance the application makes me all the more excited to use the applications on a daily basis.

So getting back to Delicious… I have to admit I have been a little worried about where the site was headed.  I only really started using Delicious toward the end of this year and love it, but after the Delicious 2.0 upgrade in July (which was a major update), the updates have been primarily of the bug-fix variety.  Combine that with Yahoo’s recent struggles, and I have been wondering of late what the plan was for Delicious.  Was Yahoo content to let the site linger as-is or were they going to treat the way it should be – as a flagship Web 2.0 property?

I hope that the activity we are seeing right now means 2009 is going to be a big year for Delicious, and we will see ongoing enhancements to the platform.  The Delicious product development team does a great job managing and responding to a ton of great user suggestions and feedback on their forum, and I, for one, would love to see as many of these as possible translated into reality next year.

P.S. Thanks to the developers from all of these services for all of your hard work in 2008!