If you’ve ever seen the movie X-Men, you may remember the writers’ premise for the suspension of disbelief required by the audience in order for it to seriously consider the plausibility that human beings can, within the realm of scientific possibility, concentrate hemisphere-sized hurricane-strength weather patterns into the space of a few square miles in a matter of seconds using only their eyeballs. Storm’s eyeballs turned white when this happened, and she flew, too. By the way, the premise was evolutionary mutation, which, the X-Men writing staff asserted, occurred in jumps. In biological parlance, this is known as punctuated equilibrium. X-Men took this concept way too far.

But KallOut is a very real example of punctuated equilibrium when it comes to evolution in the search world. First you had regular search engines that had their own website. This was in the days of AltaVista, Webcrawler, and Yahoo back in its heyday. Then somebody decided to invent the toolbar, the idea being that you shouldn’t have to actually go to the search engines website to type in a measly word or two. But still, typing it in to the toolbar would give you a whole new webpage to deal with anyway, so it didn’t really help all that much. Nothing to write home and/or sneeze about. The next jump in evolution, pioneered by KallOut, takes search out of the browser and puts it into floating information boxes without opening a new window. Here’s the example.

What you see here is a Wikipedia article about the International Monetary Fund, which until the credit crisis got really bad a few days ago, I never knew existed. So I wanted to find out what the International Monetary Fund was, and I just highlighted the term, hovered my cursor over the KallOut button, and clicked on the Wikepedia option. It opened the article in a floating information box. No going to Wikipedia, no going to Google to type in the word to end up at the Wikipedia article anyway, no opening a new tab. I can browse through the article, keep my place in my browser, and not disturb my precious homeostatic search equilibrium.

Before I tell you any more, watch the video. It’s got good music.

Speaking of Wikipedia, did I mention you can do this with YouTube as well, and search and watch videos on whatever you highlight without going to YouTube or watching in a different window? Well, I’m mentioning it now. Consider it mentioned.

OK, you get the point, KallOut is good when it comes to the big boys, but what about those alternative search engines that we report about here daily? Do those fit into KallOut? Yes, yes they do. Here’s how to add them.

1. Highlight a term

2. Kall it Out.

3. Click “KallOut Options”

4. Add a new one

5. Go to the alt’s homepage, and type in TEST TEST in the search box

6. Paste the resulting URL into KallOut

7. You’re good to go

Here’s even more, and this is over the top. KallOut is specifically tailored to MS Office applications, so you can search terms while looking over Powerpoint presentations, Outlook emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and even PDF’s.

If you have one or more KallOuts open and decide you want to refer back to them later, you can dock them by clicking the minimize button in the KallOut title bar. Doing so, folds them up into the dock which auto-hides itself. To bring them back, move the mouse to the top-center of your screen and the dock will come into view allowing you to click the KallOut you want to restore.

You’ll have to download the application to start Kalling Out, and as I am wary with most downloads because I don’t like clogging my computer, I can tell you as a wary person, this one’s worth it.

If, because of KallOut, we increase internet-based productivity because we no longer have to open superfluous windows, we may have enough power to shoot ourselves out of the credit crisis. Well, probably not, but it can’t hurt.

To download KallOut, just click the KallOut box at at the top of this page!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under In Beta, Innovations, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.