Nuevos: Huevos Web Search in Your Menubar
Originally downloaded 3/20/06. You gotta hand it to Mac developers… they’re nothing if not real creative! Always trying something new to solve age-old problems. Like search. Everybody wants to be your search portal… from Quicksilver and Butler to Safari and Firefox. Nuevos is a small freeware tool that you can use for any web search you like. It lives in the menubar or a floating window, and either can be activated by a menu shortcut. Not sure I need it, but I’ll check it out.
Update 8/30/06 I had earlier had high praise for a similar freeware search project called Charlotte, which not only attempts to cover similar ground in terms of search, but also employs a similar-looking menu extra. Unfortunately, neither Charlotte nor Nuevos has seen much development action in recent months, but of the two, Neuvos probably needs further development less than Charlotte does. Why? Two reasons:
- Nuevos is easily extensible by anyone familiar with AcidSearch or other means of setting up custom search forms, so no developer assistance is needed to make Nuevos fully useful as is.
- Charlotte is still relatively unstable and crashes more often than I’d like. In addition, to be as useful as Nuevos in covering a sufficiently broad spectrum of search sites, Charlotte needs additional “plugins” to its framework.
Having played around with Neuvos again today, I’ve concluded that for now, I’ll be replacing Charlotte with Nuevos in my menubar for the time being. Besides the weaknesses in Charlotte just mentioned, I’m doing this because I can no longer use AcidSearch in Safari. Unfortunately, AcidSearch—and SIMBL generally—is incompatible with recent builds of WebKit, and Safari and WebKit share the same plugin framework. I don’t want to give up WebKit, so AcidSearch has had to go. I wrote to the AcidSearch developer a couple of months ago, but so far, no movement there.
Nuevos preferences
Fortunately, Nuevos does pretty much everything I used to use AcidSearch for, and it does it in beautiful style. Further, I can use Nuevos even if I’m not using Safari or WebKit, which is a nice bonus. It’s simple to add your own search engines to Nuevos, and as in AcidSearch you can assign keyboard shortcuts to each, as well as icons and colors. One nice touch is that you can configure your mousewheel to scroll the engine list.
Nuevos as menu extra
Like Charlotte, Nuevos uses a Spotlight-style menu extra and user interface for the search entry. Unlike Charlotte, Nuevos passes the search request to your default web browser (a configurable option in Charlotte), whereas Charlotte can use its own gorgeous, fun, and innovative WebKit-based browser that’s specially designed for handling its search results. How I wish the Neuvos and Charlotte developers would put their heads together and combine the best of their two apps… then you’d have an ultimate web-search machine for the Mac!
Another thing I like about Nuevos is the help page, which includes information on how users can help development by having Nuevos send basic usage stats to them. Of course, it’s optional, and no personally identifiable information gets sent. It’s just a nice way to help out, if you’re not ready to donate some cash. Speaking of the developer, they note that Nuevos is based in large part on Racheros Software’s open-source freebie, Huevos. Nuevos can operate in a mode very similar to Huevos—that is, in a small floating window that can be summoned with a keystroke. But the Nuevos project has simple taken Huevos to the next level by enabling it in the menubar and by adding a bit of visual pizazz and other user-interface niceties.
Version as tested: 0.9.3
