MakeUseOf.com » addons

ChromePlus – A Google Chrome Alternative With Some Spicy Extras

Simon Slangen — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:01:12 +0000

Not many people know this, but Google Chrome is based on Chromium, an open source browser project. Everyone willing can download the source code, and make a few tweaks to their own Chrome-like browser. That’s right, Firefox isn’t the only contender showing off their code!

Although there are a whole bunch of Firefox spin-offs, Chrome is still pretty much solitary – at least, it used to be.

ChromePlus

Created by Maple Studio, ChromePlus is a Google Chrome alternative that uses the Chromium source code. They’ve released a Chrome spin-off, with some additional features that should make the browser even more fun to use.

ChromePlus looks pretty much the same as its Google brother, and also has the same basic features and strengths – but as a Google Chrome alternative it has a few extra presents under the hood. Read on for a sneak preview of those additions, and see why you’re going to uninstall your current browser in a few minutes time.

Super Drag

Super Drag is an incredible feature that’ll speed up your browsing and research work infinitely. It gives you two nifty extra functions.

Most straightforward is link-dragging. By dragging a link, and releasing it anywhere on the page, the link will automatically be opened in a background tab. This is especially useful on laptops, where you don’t have a scroll button and would have to work with Control-click.

If you start dragging around pieces of highlighted text, a whole other thing happens. Release your mouse anywhere on the screen and a Google search query will be opened in a new tab. Next time you’re reading a text and encounter something you don’t wholly understand, grab a hold and flick your mouse. This makes ChromePlus into an amazing research tool.

You can specify if the new tab needs to open in the background (default) or foreground of your browser in the options, or disable the function altogether.

IE Tab

IE Tab isn’t new. That is, to Firefox users. It’s one of the most famous Firefox add-ons. The biggest difference is that it’s now implemented in Chrome.

Innovating or not, IE Tab can be a life-saver. Although the practice is dying, some web-developers still feel the need to limit their web experience to Internet Explorer browsers. If you ever encounter a webpage that you can’t access with your Chrome browser, don’t close the app. By pressing the browser logo at the right of your address bar, you can make your browser seem like Internet Explorer.

New tabs should open up in Chrome mode by default. If they don’t, reversing the process is as easy as you’d think. This time, hit the Internet Explorer button to switch worlds.

Arrow Trace

We already told you how Super Drag was going to make your browsing a lot faster. Here’s another feature that’ll give your productivity a boost.

By holding your right mouse button, and drawing on the screen, you can execute a variety of commands; scrolling up and down, switching tabs, opening a new page, and so on. We call these “mouse gestures”.

To give you a general idea, here are a few examples:

straight down makes you scroll down a page
straight up makes you scroll up a page
straight left lets you go back in browser history
straight right lets you advance in browser history
up, sharp left makes you go to the previous tab
up, sharp right makes you go to the next tab (screenshot example)

They’ll take some getting used to, but can make your life a lot easier! If you don’t feel like it, you can once again disable it in the options.

Double-Hit-Close

Not that much of an innovation, but you can close a tab by double-clicking it. No more marksmanship required with that little ‘close’ button.

Download Manager Integration

Those using Chrome have probably noticed that it doesn’t support a hell of a lot of download managers. Most of the time, you’ll still be obliged to copy-paste your links.

ChromePlus has integrated download functionality for a whole bunch of popular download applications. Next time, just right-click your links to have them sent over to your download manager.

You can download ChromePlus here

Do you use Chrome yet? Why, or why not? Tell us about it in the comments section below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

10 Cool Extensions for Google Chrome

Saikat Basu — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:01:27 +0000

For a lot of us Google Chrome is still not hot enough. The reason? It’s still not extendable enough like Firefox. Ever since it came out, users have cried out for ways to tweak the browser to make it the Jack of all trades.

The easiest way of course is through add-ons as Firefox calls them or extensions as Google Chrome calls them. Chrome has a lot going for it despite the vacuum of extensions.

But Google had promised support for Google Chrome extensions and it is beginning to keep it. The official support for extensions has been announced and though it’s still not fully on in the standard version, one gets it with the developer version of Google Chrome.

A few posts back we saw how to download and install Google Chrome extensions in the developer version. Do go through that post again and come back here. In this post we will check out some of the coolest extensions to download and use with Google Chrome.

The population may be small but the seeds of popularity are being sown with these baby steps.

Google Chrome Backup

If the first thing you savor is peace of mind then the Google Chrome Backup is a must install. This is a small tool to create, backup, restore and manage Google Chrome profiles that holds all your bookmarks, history, saved passwords etc. This is not an extension in the strictest sense as it does not run within the browser but as a separate install. Nevertheless, it’s an important tool to have.

The 1.1MB download works with Google Chrome version 0.2.149.27 onwards and requires .NET framework.
AdSweep

A simple ad blocker extension that modifies the CSS rules on a webpage to hide the advertisements. The small javascript code recognizes ads (especially banner ads) based on specific patterns and blocks them. The extension may not work on all webpages because some ads may escape the recognition patterns used by AdSweep.

The 32KB AdSweep userscript works with Google Chrome developer version 4+.

Latest Article: Twitter: Best Practices and Tips [PDF Guide]

Session Saver

Something I really like because it harks back to the Save sessions and Manage sessions feature of Opera. It’s useful if you have to switch off and need to come back to the same tabs at some point later. This extension can save multiple sessions each with its own name. You can also save all saved sessions as bookmarks.

The 107KB Session Saver extension is compatible with Google Chrome developer version 4+.
TPGoogleReader

This is a Google Reader extension for Chrome. The extension makes reading and managing feeds a one click job. It installs as two little icons on the toolstrip and shows the number of unread feeds. In the normal mode, clicking on the items counter opens the first unread item and marks it as read. In the auto-mode, one click on the checkbox opens the unread items in background tabs and marks them as read.

The 9.7KB TPGoogleReader extension is compatible with Google Chrome developer version 4+.
Web of Trust

WOT is a free browser add-on that protects the user from online scams and risky websites. A pop-up opens from the bottom of the screen and indicates not only the trustworthiness of a website but also how things stand with a site’s vendor reliability, child safety and privacy. You can also contribute your own ratings and select the ratings you want to get alerts on.

The WOT extension is a 523KB download compatible with Google Chrome developer version 4+.
Smoothscroll

This extension simply adds the smooth scrolling behavior to Google Chrome. Smooth scrolling auto-scrolls the browser at a constant speed. Click the middle mouse button/scroll wheel and drag the mouse down to set the scroll speed.

The Smoothscroll extension is a 3KB download compatible with Google Chrome developer version 4+.
Bubble Translate

This Google Chrome extension enables you to do inline translations of a webpage into any language supported by Google Translate with a single click. You can set all language choices from its settings.

The Bubble Translate extension is a 34KB download compatible with Google Chrome developer version 4+.

Cleeki

This extension is basically a feature rich search accelerator for Google Chrome. Highlight any keyword on a webpage and a little adjoining icon gives you access to a lot of internet choices from Wikipedia to YouTube to get more information. The information opens up in a little inline window, so you don’t need to browse away. Search can also be done on multiple sites at the same time.

The Cleeki extension is a 56KB download compatible with Google Chrome developer version 4+.
LastPass

LastPass is an online form filler and password manager which got some high marks from us in a previous post. For error free performance, switch off Chrome’s inbuilt password manager (Wrench Icon – Options – Personal Stuff) and Form Autofill under the same tab.

The LastPass extension is a 315KB download compatible with Google Chrome developer version 4+.

Greasemetal

Familiar with Greasemonkey userscripts for Firefox? Those little pieces of code that help you customize your Firefox browser. Greasemetal is the Chrome incarnation of those handy javascripts which let you modify its behavior. It’s a good extension to have because a lot of userscripts continue o be developed and are made available from sites like Userscripts.org.

Greasemetal comes as a 1.2MB installer download for Google Chrome.

These ten extensions represent just a few of the many that are out there and slowly burgeoning with each iteration of the Chrome browser. Hopefully, it won’t be long before Chrome would give the Firefox add-ons gallery a run for its download. For us users, this is a war where we will get all the spoils.

True, ten is a very small number. Which is your extension you would have liked to have seen on the list?

Latest Article: Twitter: Best Practices and Tips [PDF Guide]

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

How to Install Extensions in Google Chrome

Saikat Basu — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:01:28 +0000

Call them extensions, plug-ins or add-ons; the terms probably owe their popularity to Firefox. The knock on effect is that it has almost become a gold standard for browsers to be judged by. Why not as these days we live inside the browser rather than anywhere else.

The need for extension support was almost a clarion call as soon as the browser hit the market. The ability to extend the browser’s prowess using little third party apps is what separates Firefox from the herd. And Google has been playing catch-up.

Has it caught up? No, but it is definitely a few yards closer.

The good news is that Google Chrome now officially supports browser extensions. That’s the little bit of good news along with the fact that there developers are jumping on the Google bandwagon and packaging new code to broaden the scope of the browser.

The little bit of bad news is that Google Chrome extension support is still not a feature of the stable version of Chrome but you get it in the latest build of the dev channel release. But as the Chromium team’s blog says, extension support is on the runway and taxiing towards a takeoff for all versions.

Not to get confused between Chrome and Chromium – Chromium is the open-source project behind Google Chrome which Chrome relies on for its final build.

So let’s get up and running with installing extensions in Google Chrome.

Download and run the 2MB Dev Channel installer from the Chromium Developer page.
The updated version (4.0.221.6) features an extension manager. The extension manager can be accessed in two ways –
- Type in chrome://extensions/ in the location bar of a new window or tab.
- Access it by clicking the wrench icon and then Extensions.
To those of us more attuned to the Add-ons box of Firefox, the extension manager will seem very basic. It features just three tools. The developer version gives you tools to load, pack and update extensions. Remember, Chrome still does not have anything similar to an add-ons gallery, so a direct route to search and select Google Chrome extensions is lacking.

To try out your first ‘official’ extensions, head over to these this Chromium page for installing any of the provided three sample extensions. The extensions download as CRX (Chrome Extension Installer) files. Chrome supports two formats for extensions-Compressed CRX files and its uncompressed (unpacked) counterpart which generally consists of files written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Click the install link below the snapshots and download the package and install in Chrome. If you have downloaded it to your hard drive, just drag and drop it into the browser window.

For valid extensions, the Installed extensions section in the Extensions manager, displays the confirming information.

Uninstalling or disabling the extensions is also just a matter of a single click from the extensions page.

But all this brouhaha for just three sample extensions! It could be a big letdown, if not for third party developers working behind the scenes on extensions of their own. I can straightaway suggest to you two sites that could empower your browser by a bit…

- Chromeextensions
- Chromeplugins

These sites are not associated to Google but are merely a place for independent developers. But they are the groundbreakers in every sense of the word as Chrome tries to become the internet’s Swiss army knife like Firefox. The salvo has been fired by Google. With time it could be a toss-up between browsers. We just have to pick the browser we want.

Do you think Chrome could soon match up? Do you know of any other sites offering Google Chrome extensions?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

10 Best Safari Browser Plugins (Mac)

Jeffry Thurana — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:01:49 +0000

In the kingdom of Mac browsers, there are two names that rule the land: Safari – with its speed and style; and Firefox – with its flexibility of functionalities. There are other browsers of course, with their loyal users if I may add; but these two share the biggest share of the pie.

Being the native Mac OS X browser, Safari – which should have been a no brainer choice for Mac users – faces a fierce challenge from Firefox – the browser that can be anything you need it to be. Add-ons are Firefox’s ultimate weapon.

But Firefox is not the only browser that can add functionalities using add-ons. The Safari browser also has plugins to expand its ability. While there are far less Safari browser plugins than there are for Firefox, not everybody needs everything.

So for anybody who are still deciding which one of the two should be the main browser, maybe these list of Safari browser plugins can help you choose sides.

Multifunctional

1. Glims is on top of my list of all other Safari plugins. It has expanded the search box functionality of Safari plus some other bonuses such as: re-opening closed tabs, automatically re-opening the tabs from the last session and full-screen browsing. It’s been discussed here.

2. SafariStand also adds a few helpful features to Safari such as: Stand Bar (for quick access to bookmarks), history, Stand Search with Spotlight support, an Action Menu, option to restore last workspace, a site alterations preference window with the option to put custom CSS layouts on specific sites, and syntax coloring in viewed source. Go to more detailed explanation here.

Please note that you need to install SIMBL 0.8.2 or later before you can use SafariStand.

Searchbar

3. Inquisitor beautifully extends the functionality of the search bar. It auto-completes your search term, gives you search recommendations and lets you quickly see the results for your specified terms on another sites. If you need to have the powerful searchbar only without additional extra functions choose this one over Glims. Inquisitor also supports IE and Firefox. More about it here.

Multimedia

4. CoolIris (Preview and PictLens) will transform Safari into a picture and movie viewer – in style. ‘Nuff said.

We’ve covered CoolIris before, and it’s nice to know that this product is also working fine under Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux; and for other browsers like Firefox, IE 7 and IE 8, and Flock 2. Safari under Windows is not supported though.

Blockages

5. Safari AdBlock and SafariBlock are the ultimate tools to block ads and provide cleaner browsing. Most web publishers would hate these two as parts of the publishers’ revenue come from advertising. But for users, blocking ads means less clutter and more browsing speed.

6. Click-to-flash – will prevent any flash content from automatically loading and will replace it with an empty grey box. Just click on the box to load the content. Anyone with a slow internet connection will find this webkit plugin indispensable.

Social Media

7. Safari140 is the tool to tweet. This plugin will allow you to send direct tweets from Safari, auto filled with the current site while the long URL’s are shortened.

8. DeliciousSafari is self explanatory. This is the tool to create and use del.icio.us bookmark from Safari.

Tools

9. Greasekit is the comparable Firefox’s Greasemonkey in Safari. It gives users the scripting ability to change looks and add new functionality to their favorite sites. Greasekit is compatible with most Greasemonkey scripts.

Just like SafariStand, Greasekit need SIMBL.

10. Firebug lite is the answered prayer for users who want to have Firebug ability – once Firefox exclusive – in other browsers. There are two ways to activate Firebug under non-Firefox browsers: insert the code in the site, or use the bookmarklet.

This one is not exactly a plugin but it is the solution for those who said that the only reason he/she stays with Firefox is Firebug.

11. Pimp My Safari – is the place to go to find more Safari add-ons in the form of plugins or bookmarklets. Please note that not all of the plugins are free.

This list is far from complete, but I think it’s a good start. So if you know (and use) other good Safari plugins, please share them using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

5 Tools to Harvest the Potential of Your Firefox Bookmarks

Tina — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:00:12 +0000

Firefox is an incredibly versatile and flexible tool that offers a lot of possibilities for individual customization.

An integral part of browsing the internet is collecting URLs or favorites, better known as bookmarks within the Mozilla browser family.

The integrated Firefox bookmarks however are rarely used to their full potential.

Here is a selection of tools that will help you get quick and easy access to your most important bookmarks.

Bookmarks Toolbar

The Bookmarks Toolbar provides instant access to a small collection of your most favorite and most visited websites. You can even add folders with bookmarks to this toolbar.

However, with just text, the Bookmarks Toolbar is rather bleak. You can easily spruce it up and save a ton of space by installing the Smart Bookmarks Bar extension, which replaces the text with the site’s favicon. Further settings are up to you.

I love the Bookmarks Toolbar, but I notoriously run out of space and have to pool URLs into folders or move them to the main bookmarks section. If that is not an option for you, maybe Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar extension can help. It does what it says and extends the toolbar to multiple rows.

Bookmarks in Tabs

A pretty cool option seen in Google’s Chrome browser is when thumbnails of your favorite pages appear once the browser is loaded as well as in every new tab. There are extensions for Firefox that provide you with similar features

Fast Dial integrates this feature, which was originally introduced by the Opera browser, into Firefox. You can choose whether you launch a tab with your favorite websites manually using [CTRL] + [T] or make it your homepage by defining “about:blank” as such. Per default it will appear in every blank tab.

Mark has reviewed Fast Dial in detail in his post Access Your Websites Quickly With Firefox’s Fast Dial.

Auto Dial is similar but different. Rather than listing your favorite sites, something that you can influence by manually adding pages in Fast Dial, Auto Dial displays only your most frequently visited pages in a blank tab. Furthermore, it does not display thumbnails, which makes room for many more bookmarks.

Bookmarks Tab has a slightly different approach. It displays all of your bookmarks in the center of every new tab you open. This may serve both as a reminder of all the links you have collected as well has a HUB from where you can dive into the net.

With these extensions you will always have your favorite bookmarks right at your fingertips. Which bookmark tools do you love to make use of?

Don’t forget to check out other popular MakeUseOf posts on Firefox addons:

10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons
4 Cool Firefox Extensions To Capture Screens
4 Firefox Extensions to Search & Record Browsing History
3 Firefox Add-Ons To Help You Blog More Easily
5 Speedy Tips For Faster Browsing In Firefox

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Recommendations On Movies, Music, Books From Glue [Firefox]

Stefan Neagu — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:00:02 +0000

Glue, a social network coupled with a Firefox add-on, manages to bring usefulness to the feature list – providing you with recommendations from your friends and from the Glue community, on movies, music, restaurants and more directly in your browser. It was created by Adaptive Blue, a New York based startup launched in 2006 by Alex Iskold. Glue is based on the so-called “semantic recognition technology”, a new buzzword that probably attracted the investors from Union Square Ventures and RRE Ventures.

The semantic web, as Wikipedia puts it, is:

an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

In this case, semantic recognition technology means that Glue can figure out when you are visiting a web page about the same “books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists” as your friends, but not necessarily on the same website.

If your friend left a comment on, let’s say, Slumdog Millionaire’s page on IMDB, that comment would also show in the Glue toolbar when you are visiting the Wikipedia page of the same movie. The technology basically aggregates information from across the web and serves it back according to ‘semantics’.

After you go to getglue.com and install the 500KB add-on, you’ll be presented with a bar at the top of the page you’re visiting. This bar shows friends that have liked the same thing you’re looking at as well as their comments. You can add it to your favorites or leave replies/comments.

It’s extremely easy to use Glue, it doesn’t seem to slow down Firefox and it only shows up when it detects one of the aforementioned categories i.e. you won’t see Glue popping up on the Wikipedia page for LHC.

It connects to Facebook – which makes importing friends easy for you and gives them a great opportunity for exponential growth. They also invite you to give your Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Linkedin, FriendConnect and Myspace in order to allow fellow Glue users to “instantly see your books, music, movies, and more!”. However, it’s vey easy to close your account from: Glue For You>Account>Delete Account.

If you’re not sure yet whether to install Glue or not, check out this short video which explains how Glue works:

Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

Glue is definitely a very interesting and useful Firefox add-on, and I invite you to try it and let us know in the comments what you think about it.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

How To Make Microsoft Office 2007 Look Like Office 2003

Saikat Basu — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:04:22 +0000

I remember the first time I set my eyes on Microsoft Office2007. It was love at first sight because everything seemed so stylish. At second sight, I found myself a bit lost among the buttons of the new Ribbon menu. I knew there was a bit of a learning curve ahead of me. Though I mastered it in a short while, I must confess that it did take some getting used to. That was me…but then there were some (and still are) who found the learning curve a bit steeper. Accustomed to the older pre-2007 classical interface, they thrashed about with the new one. Baffling for most, I guess.

Necessity is the mother of invention and so someone thought up UBitMenu (and thankfully made it free!)

UBitMenu is a small plugin for Microsoft Office 2007 (Excel, Word, and PowerPoint) that makes Office 2007 look like Ofice 2003 by giving the menu – the Office2003 makeover. It gets added on as an additional menu tab in the three Office 2007 applications.

While you will get back your old usage habits, do also realize that the new Ribbon interface was designed keeping fluency in mind (take a look at the Quick Styles feature in the Ribbon). The Ribbon interface allows for first level access to the commands we use most often.

For instance, I personally find the Ribbon interface a better help in MS PowerPoint. One point to remember is that shortcut keys will continue to behave as they do in Office2007.

The add-on benefits…

UBitMenu lets the bewildered switch back and forth at will between the older and newer style interfaces. That’s great because it doesn’t replace the newer feature rich menu with the classical one but merely adds an extra tab. And kilobyte-sized, it’s no extra flab.

UBitMenu does not interfere with the new features of Office2007 in any way. The contextual tabs like the Mini-formatting toolbar works just as well with the classical menu active.

UBitMenu also retains any extra features that may have been installed through other plug-ins. For instance, documents can still be saved to PDF or XPS from the File – Save As submenu.

UBitMenu is based on standard Microsoft® Office-Add-in technology; therefore it seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office2007.

This 359KB freeware application lets you keep the best of both worlds. UBitMenu is available for download in several languages from here.

Are you still one of those (Office2007 has been out for some while) who wished they could cut the ribbon and make Office 2007 look like the classic Office 2003 in Windows XP? Then you just might see the utility of this small software. Give us your freewheeling opinion in the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

7 Great Plugins For Windows Live Writer 2009

Charnita Fance — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:00:46 +0000

I have been using Windows Live Writer 2009 for about a month now; for me, it was love at first use. If you haven’t used it before you should really take advantage of the new Windows Live Writer.

For me, Windows Live Writer really makes blogging enjoyable and I especially love the ability to add plugins. There is an extensive list in the Windows Live Gallery but these are the 7 that, in my opinion, are a must have for Windows Live Writer users.

But before we begin, I strongly recommend you check out earlier MakeUseOf article Five Things To Do After Installing Windows Live Writer. It shows you how to

- Turn on Spell Check
- Use Link Glossary
- Configure FTP
- Learn the Shortcuts
- Set Blog Pings

Now, back to plugins.

Flickr4Writer

If you use Flickr for uploading and sharing your photos then this is a great plugin for you. With Flickr4Writer you can browse photos from your own account as well as anyone else and then insert the images into your blog post. You can choose to search all images, photosets, or certain tags. One you find an image that you like, you can then specify how you’d like it to appear in your post. You can customize the alignment, spacing, border, CSS class, and you can even choose whether or not to include a link to the image.

xPollinate

This plugin is for all of you Ping.fm lovers. xPollinate lets you cross post to other blogs linked in your Windows Live Writer and social sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more through the use of Ping.fm. You have the option to customize the setup of how your blog posts, micro-blog posts, and status messages will look. For others blogs that you may choose to cross post to already added in your Windows Live Writer, you can also include a footer and/or header.

Twitter Notify

This is great for all you Twitter lovers. Twitter Notify allows you to send a tweet for any newly published blog post. With the TinyURL integration, you don’t even have to worry about long URLs; a shortened link to your blog post will be automatically created. You will be prompted to customize your message format You can customize your default message and will be prompted to do so before publishing a post.

DiggThis

This is a very simple plugin that allows you to manually add a Digg button or badge to your blog posts. There are 4 styles to choose from and can set it for right or left alignment.

Tag Generator

This plugin automatically generates tags based on the content of your blog post. Tag Generator allows you to generate tags for Technorati, Windows Live Writer, WordPress, and Blogger. After selecting all of your blog text and clicking on “Generate Tags” your next step will be to edit them. As you can see below, you can modify, delete and add tags. Even though this plugin is more geared toward beginning bloggers, it’s still a tool that can come in handy for anyone.

The final 2 plugins are personal favorites of mine; I definitely could not live without either.

Text Template

This plugin is a must for anyone who uses repeated text or html in their blog posts such as banners, signatures or an invitation for readers to leave comments. With Text Template you can create and save templates containing text and/or html for later use, and then quickly and easily insert them into your posts. Templates that you create can also be put into categories to make them easier to find if you have a lot saved.

Screen Capture

Currently there are 4 screen capture plugins available but this one is by far my favorite and the easiest to use in my opinion. First you’ll need to decide and specify if you want to capture the full screen, browser window, or a customized area. Whatever you choose to capture, it will automatically appear in your blog post. Once inserted you can customize the layout, size, rotate, crop, tilt, contrast, watermark and even add special effects. If you use WordPress, when publishing or saving your blog post these images will be uploaded to your media gallery.

Which plugins do you use and which are your favorite? Please feel free to let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Access Files, Folders, Emails & Twitter – All From A Menu

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:01:29 +0000

Ever get tired of all those windows open on your desktop? Want an easier alternative way to browse and quickly access your folders? Have a look at Hawkscope.

A 2 MB download, Hawkscope requires JRE (Java Runtime Environment) to be installed on your computer. If you don’t have it installed, it will take you to the download page.

With the downloads out of the way its time to check Hawkscope out! Fire it up and you will see a Hawk (icon) in your system tray, clicking on which gives you access to all your files and folders. The default configuration shows your home folder, all the partitions and few more options for settings and for exiting the application.

Hover over any of the entries and you see next the contents of the folder, hover over any subfolder and you will see the contents of the subfolder and this can go on and on till you reach the required file.

If you are an adept user you might be thinking all this can be achieved by adding “My Computer” as a toolbar. Yes it can be done but the real power of Hawkscope lies in its customization and plugins.

Click ’settings’ and you can configure Hawkscope according to your liking. You can choose the icon theme, a reload delay value, show/hide common extensions and others.

My favorite feature is however the Quick Access list. You can add the folders you access frequently to this list and they will show up next to your home folder.

There is also a blacklist functionality that allows you to add locations that will not show up in the menu while you are browsing from folder to folder.

The Hawkscope plugin page lists a few plugins that you can use to enhance Hawkscope’s functionality. There is a plugin for Gmail, Google Search, Twitter and to execute commands from the comfort of your Hawkscope menu.

Once you download the plugins you need to place the jar file within the “.hawkscope-plugins” folder under your home directory.

While the plugin list is not overwhelming by any means, it surely lists some good plugins and one can expect the plugins to increase over time as Hawkscope gets popular.

Hawkscope is good and you will enjoy it, especially if you take some time to configure your “Quick Access” locations wisely. A hotkey to summon Hawkscope would be at the top of my wishlist for the application. This single feature alone would make it even more useful as one could then browse folders quickly with the keyboard itself using hotkeys. It is still a work in progress though and let’s hope we see hotkey support in the future.

Hawkscope is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Do you use any other software for similar purposes? Tell us in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

3 Microsoft Word Plugins To Boost Your MS Word Experience

Simon Slangen — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:01:02 +0000

Although there are many great open source office suites, Microsoft Word remains my number one choice. It belongs to the elite few applications I’m willing to pay for in the big world of software.

However, nothing is perfect. And although imperfections create the uniqueness and beauty in most cases, we want software to be as close as it can get.

This is the main reason why plug-ins were created; one might say to pimp out your applications to fit your preference. Ask any three Firefox users why they use the browser, and I guarantee that you’ll hear the word ‘add-on’ more than once.

However, Firefox add-ons have been discussed multiple times over, but I was stunned to see nearly no one took on the job of looking into Microsoft Word Plugins. We even covered Open Office extensions, but never looked at free Plugins for Microsoft Word.

Save as PDF or XPS in Office 2007

Converting documents from and to PDF is a matter that keeps a lot of tongues occupied. But why all that hassle of converting if you can just save your document to PDF out of Word?

Microsoft released Save as PDF or XPS, a free add-in which adds the PDF format under the save-as menu, together with XPS (Microsoft’s own PDF-like format), and works quicker than many premium solutions I’ve tried before (including the official Acrobat one).

You can also send your documents over the internet in an email, in PDF or XPS format, with a few clicks of the mouse.

The Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS add-on works with the following Office 2007 applications:

Word 2007
Access 2007
Excel 2007
InfoPath 2007
OneNote 2007
PowerPoint 2007
Publisher 2007
Visio 2007

The plugin can be downloaded here.

Open and save Docx files in Office 2003

One of the biggest bothers that came with the splendid looking Office 2007, was a new file format – the only bother, if I might say.

OK, I get it. It’s smaller in size, stores additional style types, and so on – honestly, if I could just open it in previous word versions, I’d love it.

I’ve always worked around this problem by either saving it in doc format myself, or by converting it if I was using a non-2007 computer. It wasn’t long ago that I discovered the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. We have already looked at different ways to view docx files.

This download makes all the applications in your 2003 suite compatible with their Office 2007 companions. When installed, you can not only open, but also save docx files.

The plugin can be downloaded here.

Open ODF (OpenOffice) Files In Word

A friend once asked me to print out a document for her. With her liking freeware, she sent me an odf file.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with it, odf is the standard format for OpenOffice documents, an open-source Office alternative.

Luckily for you and me, Sun Microsystems (the guys we know from Java) developed an Office plug-in. It’s compatible with both Office 2000, 2003 and 2007, and it allows the user to open, edit and save in the odf format.

The plugin can be downloaded here.

Do you know of any other Microsoft Word plugins? If so, let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

How To Use Scripts & Plugins in GIMP

Varun Kashyap — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:01:16 +0000

Actions? Aren’t all the menus, dialog boxes and commands enough, why would you want actions?

Well if you do any kind of task repeatedly inside GIMP – like resizing images to a particular size, adding your site’s watermark or the “friendly admin” to the images like Karl does, or you want to add some functionality that is not already or directly provided by GIMP, you should consider using actions to simplify and reduce the number of steps involved.

In the GIMP world however, such actions are called scripts and these are analogous to Photoshop Actions and Macros inside Microsoft Office.

How to use scripts and plugins

Search and Download

First of you will need to find a script that meets your requirements. You can create your own scripts in Python, Perl or Scheme, however if you are not the programmer type, there are all kinds of scripts all over the Internet. Just head over to Google and type in your requirements.

In particular, GIMP Plugin Registry is an excellent place to go to search for scripts and plugins.

Install

Generally you are required to unarchive the downloaded file and copy them to ~/.gimp/scripts directory or /usr/share/gimp/2.0/scripts if you want the scripts to be available to all users. You can also find out the location by going to Edit > Preferences > Folders > Scripts if you want to be sure.

You might need to refer to the documentation or author’s site in case this is not what is required. Once you have copied the scripts to the appropriate directories, go to Filters>Script-Fu>Refresh Scripts or restart GIMP altogether.

Using

Depending on what the script does and how it plans to do it, you might see a dedicated menu in the menu bar for your script, or a menu entry under the appropriate bar, or a right click context menu entry activated when the script’s functionality is applicable.

Plugins vs Scripts

You might be wondering which of the two I am talking about. Plugins and Scripts are the two ways to extend GIMP’s functionality. What is the difference? I am not sure either. Apart from the obvious differences in the way these are developed and used, plugins and scripts tend to provide overlapping functionality and the terms are used interchangeably on forums and other GIMP hangouts.

How to create your own plugins

Here is a nice tutorial to get you started. Once you know the syntax start hacking into the scripts that are already available on your systems (shipped by default with GIMP). You can then develop your skill further from here on.

Some Great Scripts/Plugins

While you would have to wait till another day for a list of some of the best plugins out there, here are some recommendations to get you started: The Fx-Foundry Scripts Pack – A collection of useful scripts to perform a variety of tasks, from animations to layer styles and more, Mask for Prints – A very useful plugin that shows you what part of your photo will be printed on the current paper size, UFRaw – For working with RAW files.

Do you use plugins and scripts to good effect in GIMP? I find them one of the most important features. What plugins do you use? Have you written your own scripts? Mention them in the comments and let us check them out.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

13 Gedit Plugins to Make It a More Useful Text Editor [Linux]

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:10:01 +0000

Few days back we looked at how to customize Nautilus to get most out of the context menus and write custom menu entries as per your requirement. Today let’s pay some attention to the good old text editor – Gedit. Gedit is the default text editor for most of the Linux distributions using Gnome as the desktop environment. As it turns out and as we shall see shortly Gedit supports plugins and there are some very useful plugins for Gedit.

How to install additional Gedit plugins

While Gedit ships with a set of default plugins, you can surely add as many as you like. To install a plugin for Gedit, you must first download it to a local folder and then extract the contents to ‘~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/’ directory. Also look for a package named “gedit-plugins” in your distribution’s package manager, this package contains some additional plugins for gedit. Once you have installed the plugin you want, you need to enable it via Edit>Preferences and then the Plugins Tab.

And finally here is a list of the top plugins you should definitely check out if you do a lot of text editing:

Align

Lets you arrange blocks of text into columns easily and quickly. Just select the text to be arranged, go to Edit > Align, specify the column separator and presto you have instant columns. No more pressing tabs and arranging text manually!

Auto tab

Autotab detects the indent/space settings in a file and adjusts tabbing accordingly on the fly. Very useful if you have to edit code written by others using different editors.

Browser Preview

Allows you to preview the webpage code you are editing in gedit in different browsers like Firefox, opera, IE, konqueror etc. A dream come true for any web developer.

File Browser (included in default install)

Lets you browse through directories and files in the side pane. Choose the file you want to edit, double click and away she opens in a new tab.

Character Map (included in gedit-plugins)

So you want to type in a different language? Keyboard problems? or do you wonder from where does µtorrent gets its µ? Look no further than the character map plugin. Enable it and you will be able to view the character map in the side pane. Just click on the character you want to insert and it gets inserted in the file.

Class Browser

As the name suggests, this plugin provides you a class browser for browsing source files. You can get an overview of various identifiers used in the code in the gedit side pane once you enable this plugin.

Document Words Completion

This plugin brings Auto Complete to gedit. While you are typing, this plugin will attempt to complete the current word, based on the words that have appeared previously in the current document. You can configure it to AutoComplete or offer suggestions when you hit Ctrl+Enter

External Tools (included in gedit-plugins)

External tools plugin allows you to add custom entries to the tools menu. The entries can run external commands on the current file. A totally indispensable tool considering what all can be achieved with text files and the Linux command line. Highly recommended if you do any kind of repetitive work on text files.

Sort and Spell Check (included in default install)

What good is a text editor without the ability to check your spellings? Yet most text editors lack this functionality.Enable the Spell plugin to add Spell Check functionality to gedit. The Sort plugin on the other hand allows you to sort elected text. You needn’t use sort/sed/awk to sort the file for you. It can be done right from within gedit

LaTeX Plugin

The LaTeX plugin helps you to write and compile LaTeX code. With features like LaTeX code completion, coupled with the power of other plugins, gedit with LaTeX plugin can greatly simplify your work. The LaTeX plugin can be used for BibTeX bibliographies as well.

Session Saver (included in gedit-plugins)

Session saver allows you to save you current workspace within gedit as it is, so that when you restore a session at a later time you can start right where you left your work.

Snippets (included in default install)

Snippets plugin allows you to insert frequently typed phrases and text by using hotkeys or a shortcode. You can configure your own snippets so that if you type something like MUO it automatically gets substituted with MakeUseOf.com. Snippets is one of my personal favorites and can save you a lot of typing.

Tabs Extend

Adds Firefox like useful features to gedit tabs, including the ability to undo a closed tab, close all other tabs, close all tabs and close tabs to the left of the current tab. Very useful if you are working with a lot of files simultaneously

More?

If you are a programmer who uses text editor every now and then to edit some code, gedit has some awesome plugins to make your work easier. The color picker (gedit-plugins) lets you visually choose a color and insert its hex value into your code,code comment lets you comment/uncomment selected text with a single command, there are plugins to tidy up your HTML, indent code, match braces and then there is the python console and many many more. If you use gedit for general purposes you can explore bookmarks, splitview and directly mail the text file from within gedit with plugins. All these and many more are mentioned on Gnome Live. Some of the links are broken and some plugins don’t work as expected so you might be in for some hit and trial.

What really prompted me to write this article was that many people don’t realise that a program such as gedit (viewed as a simple text editor) can support so many additional functionality via plugins. A reason could be that people hardly care about setting preferences for text editors and the plugins option is buried deep inside preferences. I am curious to know how many of our readers knew about gedit plugins? The geeks would have known for sure, so we can expect some plugin suggestions in the comments too. Which ones are your favorites?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Securely Synchronize Your Browser Passwords With LastPass

T.J. Mininday — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:01:01 +0000

It’s hard not to find a website these days that doesn’t require some type of registration or login. With every login of course, there is almost always a password. With the password comes with whatever requirements the website has to improve security.

So after you’ve registered at your bank, your three credit cards, your Facebook, your Digg and your blog, you’re so exhausted with usernames and passwords, you begin using your browser’s built-in “Remember This Password” feature. The problem with using this handy feature is that you’re never required to enter another password again. Remembering all those passwords can be quite hard, unless of course you have a method to create strong passwords that are easy to remember.

Now you go home for Christmas, hop on your parents computer to check your latest stock portfolio, and you spend the next hour trying to recall your password. This is where a program like LastPass saves the day.

LastPass is a Firefox or Internet Explorer browser add-on that stores all of your passwords locally and synchronizes all of them to any other browser (with the same add-on) using 256-bit AES encryption. The only two requirements is one strong password and one of the previously mentioned browsers.

After going through the incredibly easy flash-based installation tutorial, the application asks for a strong password as protection and then offers the option to import passwords from Firefox, IE, RoboForm, KeePass, Sxipper and a few others.

Once you have all of your passwords imported, they’ll fill all of your identifiable username and password boxes appropriately.

If a site isn’t stored in the database, it will simply ask you to remember the password, as your current browsers already do.

Again, all of these passwords are stored locally. LastPass uses highly sophisticated code to allow this to happen, so nothing sits out in the cloud.

Once stored, the database is easily accessible to view form information if it needs to be modified in any way.

Along with its great password capabilities, LastPass also includes:

Form Filling

Whether it be for credit card payments or simple site registration, once the they have all the correct information, LastPass takes care of all of the typing.

Password Generation

Generate incredibly strong passwords if you can’t come up with your own.

Site Sharing

Share a site with another member of your family.

Site Logging

Monitor what sites are being logged into, when and where.

As you can see, LastPass has what many of the commercial form fillers, like RoboForm have, plus the added sync capability. The form filling also separates it from password managers, such as PassPack and Clipperz.

If you are already willing to locally store all of your passwords through your browser, you really can’t go wrong with LastPass. It does the exact same thing, in a much more secure fashion.

Again LastPass works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, on Mac, Linux and Windows.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any better sync solutions? Concerns?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Improve Your Photo Booth With 90 Free Effects [Mac]

Jackson Chung — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:01:15 +0000

Every Mac that comes with an iSight is loaded with Photo Booth. When I was Mac-less, I used to frequent Apple stores and somehow Photo Booth seemed to appeal to me then. Sadly, after I bought a Mac for myself, the attraction didn’t last very long and later, I sort of forgot about this nifty application which attracted me in the first place.

To bring back the romance, I went on a search to see if I could add more effects to Photo Booth. There were only a few interesting pre-packaged ones and most of them had something to do with image distortion (squeeze, bulge, dent, mirror etc.). That was fun for a while but I need the “Wow” factor back desperately.

In my search, I managed to uncover a few sites that offer a good collection of free Photo Booth effects.

From B-L-A-C-K-O-P, I found CatEye, which is a collection of 5 sets of effects. Each set has its own theme:

RetroPixels – adaptation of 60’s and 70’s video effects.

Love For 80s – bringing back Space Invaders, Pong and VHS (yes, that’s video tape quality, ladies and gentlemen!).

Bent Pels – optical image distortion with a twist.

BoobToob – a set of TV screen effects.

FewTile – tiled-images effect.

I especially like the BoobToob set, it makes me feel like I’m on television. If you’re sick or bored with the default Photo Booth effects, this will definitely bring back some fun.

CatEye will only work on Leopard and is free (direct download link)

From another site called Macpoupou Factory, I found a collection of Mac Photobooth effects which has been around for quite some time: MoreIchatEffects. After adding these effects, I realised that I have been missing out on a lot of fun! The effects are incredibly awesome beyond the ones Apple provide, especially Hologram – if you’re a Star Wars fan, you’ll love this one. It’s strangely uncanny.

Besides that, several other effects like ASCII art and Line Overlay are pretty cool.

MoreIchatEffects bundles 48 different effects and will only work on Leopard.

I can’t remember how I managed to find this next site but it offers 4 Photo Booth effects (Leopard only), from which I only like one. Visit the site and guess which one it is and let me now in the comments. (Hint: Did you know that Photo Booth has the ability to record video? You can ask Bush what he thought about the shoe).

Finally, a Photo Booth effect that must not be left out: Obamafy. Following in the footsteps of President-Elect Barack Obama, you can now quickly and simply create your “Hope” posters. Remember, Leopard only.

Depending on the user-level for which you save these effects (for ‘All Users’ or for ‘This User Only’), they will either be saved in /Users/{your username}/Library/Compositions or /Library/Compositions. In order to remove unwanted effects, just delete them from the appropriate folder. Keep in mind that if you add a lot of new effects at once, Photo Booth will crash while loading them. It’s best to add one set at a time.

Also, these effects will work with iChat! So, you can fool your friends into thinking that something’s gone wonky with your iSight or that they’re really seeing you through a hologram.

Got more effects to share? Know about other ways to bring back the fun to Photo Booth? Share with us in your comments. Lastly, if you’d like to use your iSight for something more productive, check out my article on Gawker and Eyesight.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

10 Great Thunderbird Addons You Must Have

Damien Oh — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:20:21 +0000

More than a year back, Aibek wrote a great list of 35 must-have thunderbird addons. Since then, a lot of great addons have been created and some of the older addons have also evolved to become better ones.

As such, it is time for us to re-visit the list of Thunderbird addons and update our readers with the latest list of must-have Thunderbird addons. (If you never heard of Thunderbird before, it’s an email client from Mozilla, just like Microsoft’s Outlook but a lot more customizable.)

1. Lightning and its related addons

If you are looking to use Thunderbird to replace your Outlook (or Evolution in Linux), then Lightning is a must-have extension. It adds calendar and task management capabilities to Thunderbird and allows you to manage your daily schedule all within Thunderbird.

At the same time, there are also several Lightning-related extensions that further enhances the functionality and capabilities of Lightning.

ThunderBirthday

MoreFunctionsForAddressBook

.vcs support: This extension allows you to export your Lightning entries to .vcs format. Currently it only supports .ics, .csv and .htm format.

Remember The Milk Integration: This is still an experiemental addon, but it is in no way inferior than the rest. If you love Remember The Milk, then you are going to love this extension as well. As its name implies, this extension will integrate and sync RTM with Lightning.

2. Thunderbrowse

When someone sends you a link, wouldn’t it be great if you can open the link and browse the Web right within your Thunderbird? Thunderbrowse is here just to serve that purpose. After you have installed this extension, whenever you click on a link within your mail, the message pane will become a full-fledged browser and allow you to view the website without having to open up a browser window.

Like Firefox, it supports tabbed browsing and javascript. In addition, with Thunderbrowse, you can install the Thunderbird extension within itself. There is no need to download the xpi file and install it via the Tools -> Addons section.

3. Foxclocks

If you are like me who always corresponds with partners all around the world, you will appreciate the usefulness of Foxclock. Foxclock is an extension that lets you keep watch of the time around the world by putting small clocks in your statusbar. Next time when you send an email to your partner, you will know why he doesn’t reply to you instantly. He could most probably be sleeping in his country.

In addition, Foxclocks also integrates well with Google Earth. If you don’t know where Budapest is, simply right click and choose ‘Google Earth…’. It will bring you to where it is.

4. Quicktext

Quicktext is useful for several purposes:

1. It allows you to create templates so that you don’t have to spend lot of time replying repetitive emails.
2. It allows you to create multiple signatures and insert them accordingly to the person you are sending to.
3. It allows you to substitute specific text with a predefined variable, such as [[TO=firstname]]

If you are one who has to send repetitive emails all the time, this extension is the one that you must have.

5. Thunderbird Biff

Thunderbird Biff checks your email in the background and notifies you (in Firefox or Sunbird) when new mail has arrived. To get this extension to work, you will need to install the Thunderbird Biff server version of Thunderbird and the client version in Firefox/Sunbird. Once it is installed, it will display an icon at the status bar. Whenever a new mail has arrived, the icon will pop up and notify you.

6. Sync Kolab

Sync Kolab uses the Kolab technology to synchronize your address book and calendar (Lightning) with several other computers and platform. Basically, it makes use of an IMAP server to do the synchronization. It supports vCard/iCal/xml format and is compatible with a lot of other mail/calendar clients.

7. Auto Address Cleaner

Auto Address Cleaner cleans up your address field and eliminates any chances of offending the recipients by using wrong (possibly mistyped in the address book) names in the To/Cc fields. Instead of displaying the name of the recipient, it will only show their email address.

8. Google-related addons

For those who are fans of Google apps or you simply can’t live without Google, here are some of the extensions that integrates Google apps into Thunderbird.

Gmail IMAP setup

Google Contact

Provider for Google Calendar

9. Check and Send

Have you ever sent an email and realized that you didn’t attach a file to it? The Check and Send extension checks your message content, subject and address before you send the message. You can define a specified keyword for it to look out for (such as ‘attachment’, ‘attached files’) and inform you when no attachment was found. You can also use it to check if certain words exist in the message or if the recipient is in the address book.

10. Tags Toolbar

Are you missing your favorite tags in Gmail? You can have it now. Tag Toolbar allows you to add tags for your email. You can define your own tags, specify the color and there is a nice toolbar that makes it easy for you to tag your emails.

Do check out Aibek’s article for the other 35 must have Thunderbird addons.

Also, don’t forget to download the Thunderbird cheat sheet that contains plenty of excellent shortcuts for Thunderbird users. Highly recommended.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Get More Browser Addon Suggestions With “Fashion Your Firefox”

Varun Kashyap — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:01:57 +0000

So you are a huge Firefox fan? You have it customised to your liking and are always on the hunt to find out a theme or extension that would make your browsing more productive? Great, then you must keep up with Firefox Vogue with help from Fashion Your Firefox

Through Fashion Your Firefox, Mozilla offers recommendations to some of the most popular and useful addons. The recommendations are based on what you really use the internet for. So if you are a search junkie or like to research about topics on the web, then check out the “Finder and Seeker” category and see what addons can be used in your work. If you are an adept Firefox user than chances are you might already be using some of them. If so, just pat yourself and check out the other categories.

There are recommendations for all kinds of users:-

Finders and Seekers

Social Butterflies – A set of addons to go along with your social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Shutterbugs – A set of addons to help you download, browse and upload photos and videos to a large number of sites.

Digital Pack Rats - Addons to help you sync and keep track of your bookmarks and sites you visit often and your favorite blogs.

Rock Stars – Very cool addons to help you control your media player, discover music and go to your favorite Last.fm stations from the Firefox address bar.

Shopaholics – For those of us who can’t get enough of online deals and auctions.

Decorators – Some awesome themes to spice up your browsing.

News Junkies – Get weather, news and website updates delivered to you instead of you running behind one of these!

Executive assistants – Addons to aid in your day to day tasks with calendars, to do lists, alerts, password management and so on.

Hmm….let’s see, I am a bit of a Finder and Seeker, a News Junkie and perhaps even a Shutterbug if we limit it to discovery and download! Anyway, what’s your poison? Let us hear in the comments. Oh and by the way, you don’t have to install each and every one of them, just check the ones you find interesting and let it know when you are done. You will get only the ones you selected instantly. Not only this, sometime in the future you might also get the ability to share your fashion with friends and let them know what you are running to have them come along.

If these Mozilla recommendations are not enough for you then check out some of the best extensions that won accolades in the Extend Firefox Contest held some time back.

So much for Mozilla recommendations, how about we throw in some MakeUseOf recommendations to the list? Here we go.

First check out some addons to help you get the most out of tabs in Firefox. Find out some extensions that help you capture screenshots and others that are best for microblogging. Finally, check out our round-up on best extensions to manage your bookmarks better.

Phew….those are some addons. However knowing the Firefox user you are, one can never say that the list is exhaustive. There is always room for something new that I may not have covered. So let us know if you have a favorite extension that missed Mozilla’s or our eyes. You know we would love to hear about it!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Bullfighter – Simplify Your Writing & Gain Results

James Yeang — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:01:39 +0000

Having difficulties trying to get people to understand you?

One way to get your message across in a more effective manner is just to simplify what you’re trying to say. Cut the jargon, use simpler words, and you’ll be surprised how much more receptive your audience or readers may be. This is often simpler said than done, and for that reason I introduce to you… one of my favorite pieces of writing freeware – Bullfighter.

Bullfighter was released in 2003 by Deloitte Consulting, to help with better writing but has since been released for free to the public. What it is really, is a Microsoft Office add-in for Word and Powerpoint which will analyze your work, tell you how complex it is, and potentially help you simplify and make it better.

For example, after I had recently finished a report, I ran the Bullfighter add-in which then analyzed my work and confirmed that my document had no jargon (bull-free). In case you’re wondering – yes you can add your own jargon to the list of words Bullfighter will mark down as ‘bull’, so its really quite flexible in that respect.

Bullfighter also analyses sentence length, and syllables per word to help ensure waffling is minimized. On top of that, it also gives you something called the Flesch score. This famous test was designed in the 1960’s and is still relevant today, and is used to indicate comprehension difficulty when reading a passage of English. Higher scores indicate material that is easier to read; lower numbers mark “more difficult to read” passages.

Where a score of 90–100 means that it is easily understandable by an average 11-year old student
60–70 would easily be understandable by 13- to 15-year old students
and 0–30 would be best understood by college graduates

To give you an idea of what that means, according to Wikipedia:

Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30’s.

So as you can see, a low score doesn’t necessarily mean a bad score – it just means that it’s better understood by a wider audience, which in most cases – is a good thing.

Finally, Bullfighter also comes with a nifty online tool called the ‘Mystery Matador’ which helps you to analyze and anonymously send scores by email to some of your friends or colleagues who just love to ramble on and on. All you need to do is copy and paste their letter or any other document text in the mystery matador. Bullfighter will measure the jargon and verbosity, and send an email with a link to their score for free.

Do you use other cool writing tools? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

9 Must-Have OpenOffice Extensions

Damien Oh — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:00:43 +0000

Like Firefox, OpenOffice also comes with extensions that you can use to improve its functionality. Here, we have tested all the extensions and sorted out those that are useful for everyday use. Some of them are for general use while some are only meant for Writer, Calc or Impress. (For those who haven’t heard about OpenOffice before, it’s a popular free alternative to Microsoft Office)

Before you carry on reading, here are some things that you need to do/know:

here

To install the extension, you have to go to Tools -> Extension Manager in any of the OpenOffice applications. Click ‘Add’ to install the extension that you have downloaded.

Let’s proceed onto the 9 must-have extensions for your OpenOffice.

1) Sun PDF Import Extension

Normally, OpenOffice only allows you to export your file to PDF format, but not to import and make changes to it. With this PDF Import extension, you can now import your PDF files and make changes to the date, numbers or even a small portion of text.

By default, this extension imports the PDF file into the Draw application rather than Writer, even though it may contain a full page of text. You may be wondering why, but if you remember that when the PDF format was first created, it was designed not to allow any editing at all. As such, importing as a text document into Writer may prove too difficult a thing to do.

With that, capturing the content as a Draw object now seems the easiest and most logical thing to do. When you import your PDF file into your Draw application, every single line of text will be treated as a draw object and you can edit the text and rearrange it as you like.

Sun PDF Import Extension is still in beta and only works in OpenOffice 3.0.

2) Professional Template Pack II – English

With more than 120 professionally designed document templates at your fingertips, it is hard not to create a high quality document or presentation.

This extension adds various kinds of templates, ranging from business correspondence, budgets and project plans, event posters, invoices, notes, minutes, press releases to personal letter templates.

You’ll never have to spend your time writing up the whole document again.

After installation, the templates can be found under File -> New –> Templates and Documents.

3) OpenOffice.org2GoogleDoc

This extension allows you to export and import documents from Google Docs, Zoho and any WebDav server. Files supported include OpenDocument Text (.odt), StarOffice (.sxw), Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods), Microsoft Excel (.xls), Comma Separated Value (.csv) and Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps).

Java 6 is required to use this extension.

4) Writer’s Tools

If you are just like me, who spends a great deal of time sitting behind OpenOffice writing articles, then Writer’s Tools is the extension that you must have. Writer’s Tools is a set of utilities designed to help OpenOffice users perform a wide range of tasks. You can back up documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics. Some of the useful functions of this extension include:

Lookup word from several sources, including Cambridge Dictionaries, WordNet, and Google Define.
Backup a copy of your current document by sending an email to a specified address.
Wikify Word tool links a selected word or text fragment in the current document to a Writer document, which is created on the fly
Quick Converter that lets you convert between the metric and imperial systems easily.
Bookmarks tool allows you to bookmark often-used documents, so you can access them with a few mouse clicks.
Word of the Day tool picks and displays a random word and its definition from the accompanying WriterDB database.

and many more…

5) LanguageTool

What use is there if you can’t check your grammar and other language errors in an Office suite? The LanguageTool extension is an Open Source language checker for English, German, Polish, Dutch, and other languages. It is rule-based, which means it will find errors for which a rule is defined in its XML configuration files. Rules for more complicated errors can be written in Java. You can think of LanguageTool as a tool to detect errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect, e.g. mixing up there/their, no/now etc. It can also detect some grammar mistakes.

The Language Tool extension does not include spell checking.

6) Creative Commons Licensing

If you are always creating open source projects with the Creative Commons License, this extension will come in handy to you. The Creative Commons Licensing extension provides the ability to select and embed a Creative Commons License in Writer, Calc and Impress documents.

7) Data Form

In the Excel application in Microsoft Office, there is this feature – Data -> Form – that allows you to key in data easily. What this extension does is to replicate that feature in OpenOffice. The Data Form extension generates a data input form for tables in the Calc application that you can use to enter values.

In Calc, create a table with at least one row and the headline, for example:

Then, click on a range or any cell of the newly created table (not on empty cells), and go to Data – Form. That’s it. A form should appear letting you insert other records, or edit-delete the old ones.

Modern Impress Template

The Modern Impress template extension installs more than 30 beautiful templates that you can use for your presentation. All the graphics in the template are based on open-source art.

After installation, you can access the template at File -> New -> Templates and Documents -> Templates -> My Templates

9) Sun Presenter Console

For those who need to give presentations regularly, wouldn’t it be great if during the presentation, you can view what the next slide is and read the note that you have written all from the screen? It will take the guesswork out of you and also keeps you away from the troublesome paper notes scribbled with tiny text. What this extension does is to project different views to different monitors and allows you to see your upcoming slide and note while the audience only sees the current slide and the slide effect.

There are three views that you can configure in the Presenter Console. The first view displays the current slide for your audience to read while the second view shows the speaker’s notes in large, clear and scalable type plus the current and upcoming slide. The third view is a slider sorter view with the slide thumbnails. In your Impress application, go to Slide Show -> Slide Show settings and you can decide which view is to be projected to each monitor.

Do you use extensions for your OpenOffice? If so, which one is your favorite?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Quickly Create Temporary Email Addresses with YopMail

Ross McKillop — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:42:27 +0000

Sure there are plenty of services that offer free, temporary and anonymous disposable email addresses. What makes YopMail a bit different is how easily you can create and access them. YopMail provides Firefox, IE and Opera extensions that allow you to create an email address and access the mailbox for that address in seconds.

To get started, just download the addon for your browser. If you’re using Firefox or IE, download and install this search addon. Once it’s installed, just select YopMail.com from your search drop-down list. Enter in a random string of characters, and that will become your @yopmail.com email address. Hit enter, and you’ll be taken to the mailbox for that address. Couldn’t be easier!

Opera users can download this widget. Once it’s installed, open the widget and click the “lightning” button to generate a random address. Then click the Mailbox button and Opera will open a new tab and display your newly created mailbox.

Creating random temporary email addresses is perfect for those web signup forms if you don’t want to get hit by spam mail. If you value your privacy online, these browser addons are perfect for creating one-off “use them then toss them” email addresses.

You might also want to check out 5 “DISPOSABLE” Web Accounts to Keep Your Identity Safe by Aibek and Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You by Tina.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Access Your Websites Quickly With Firefox’s Fast Dial

Mark O'Neill — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:17:01 +0000

The one and ONLY thing I like about the Opera browser is its ’speed dial’ feature, where you can click on thumbnails of websites and be taken to those sites immediately. I loved having my favourite websites on the screen as pictures that I could just click with my mouse. So a few weeks back, I decided to see if there was a similar function available for Firefox. I finally settled upon Fast Dial, speed dial for Firefox. I now love it so much I can’t live without it.

Upon installing it, Fast Dial then lives in your blank Firefox tabs. You can insert any of your favourite sites inside each of the boxes (there is space for up to 100 sites if you fiddle around with the customization options) and when you insert the URL, a thumbnail picture of the site then appears. Any of the boxes are easily editable if you want to change the URL later or update the thumbnail picture.

You can also change the background colour to anything you want. The default colour of the home screen is white but I changed mine to black. You can also change the size of the boxes, the number of the boxes….everything is customizable.

Another very nice feature is a right-click option on each Firefox tab which says “add to Fast Dial”. So if you are on a website and you decide that this should go into your Fast Dial, just right-click on the tab and choose “add to Fast Dial”. The next time you go to your Fast Dial page, you’ll see the page there.

I absolutely love this extension because I have been able to get all my frequently used webpages all in the same place in a nice easy-to-view arrangement. I have found my productivity much higher as a result because no longer do I need to go searching through bookmark folders looking for links and no longer do I have to sit there and tediously type out URL’s. Now all I have to do is open a new tab and click on the thumbnail for the page I am looking for.

It works perfectly. This extension should be built into Firefox as a default feature and everyone should use it! There’s no better time-saver! Plus it looks very cool on the screen – I’ve lost count of the number of people who have stopped to gaze in awe at it – “where did you get that screen?!”

Install it and try it! Right-click on the Fast Dial window, go into the options and customize it to just the way you want it! I guarantee you won’t want to let it go afterwards!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Ubiquity – Extend Firefox and Improve your Browsing Experience

Damien Oh — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:27:44 +0000

If you have used Quicksilver on Mac, Launchy on Windows or GnomeDo on Linux and you love the user experience, then I’m sure you will love Ubiquity too. Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that uses a command pane to help you get information quickly or to get a job done easily.

Once you have installed the extension, you will be brought to the Welcome page where you can configure the shortcut key to activate the command pane. I changed the hotkey to Ctrl+Alt+Space since the default shortcut key Alt + Space conflicted with one of my Ubuntu shortcut key. If you are Windows user, most likely your default hotkey is Ctrl + Space. Mac user should be able to access it via Cmd + Space

At any Web page, or at any point of time inside your Firefox browser, you can activate the command pane via the hotkey, type the command and get it to perform tasks on the fly. Here are some tricks that you can do:

Embedding Google maps in your Gmail

Let’s say you are sending a party invitation (via email) to all your friends and you wanted to include a map to your place. Rather than going to Google Maps, find the location and then paste the link in the email, you can simply open Ubiquity and type in ‘map [your location]‘. Ubiquity will automatically fetch and display the map in the pane. You can click on the link to embed the map image into your email.

Checking up Wikipedia, without visiting Wikipedia.org

If you come across a word, phrase or a jargon that you are not sure of, rather than loading a new tab, go to Wikipedia.org and check up the term, you can highlight the word, activate Ubiquity and type ‘wiki’. It will automatically query Wikipedia for the highlighted term and display the result in the pane.

Translate page on the fly

While doing your research, you come across this Japanese Web page that could possibly contains the information you want. Well, you don’t have to learn Japanese to understand what the page is about. Highlight the content, right click your mouse and go to Ubiquity->Translate. The highlighted content will now be replaced by the translated text. Cool, isn’t it?

Before translation:

After translation:

There is in fact a great list of things that you can do with Ubiquity, ranging from sending emails, add events to Google calendar, Web search to debugging from your code. To find out the list of command supported by Ubiquity, simply type ‘command-list‘ in the Ubiquity pane. If you want more, you can even create your own command via the built-in command-editor (type ‘command-editor‘ in the Ubiquity pane to access the editor).

Ubiquity is only a prototype of the Mozilla Lab experiment and is not in the addon repository yet. If you are interested to test it out, you can download the extension here.

(By) Damien Oh is an all-out technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at MakeTechEasier.com where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Watch Videos In The Firefox Sidebar With YouPlayer

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:02:07 +0000

Who doesn’t love watching videos online ? Whether it’s a video of a recent live concert, your favorite song or a tutorial on something, you name it and you’ll find the video on the popular video sites. This is the reason why YouTube is one of the top 3 websites on the internet. It just seems to have all your favorite videos and hence you love spending time on it.

YouPlayer is an innovative Firefox extension which further adds to the joy of watching those videos by letting you play them in your Firefox sidebar. Afterwards you don’t need to go to the site again and again – you can just play a video in the sidebar and also carry on some other work, like checking emails. It lets you create a playlist of videos and the playing order can be customized.

After installing YouPlayer you’ll notice a small ‘ YP ‘ symbol in the Firefox status bar. Clicking on it lets you open or close the YouPlayer sidebar. This an awesome extension which comes with a host of features.

1. Support For Many Sites

Apart from supporting Youtube, it also supports Google Video, Daily Motion, Metacafe and MySpace. There is a small search option in the lower right hand corner of the sidebar and you can easily change to one of these sites and play videos on them.

So those of you who love watching videos on other sites apart from YouTube can utilize this extension too.

2. Drag And Drop Links

You can easily drag and drop links from the website onto the sidebar playlist. Once you hit the play button or double click the link, it starts playing. This drag and drop works vice versa as well, which means that you can drag a link from the playlist window to the browser address bar or right click to open it in a new tab.

3. Play Other FLV files on the Hard Drive too

YouPlayer goes one step further and allows you to drag and drop FLV files from your hard drive and play them in the sidebar playlist window. You’ll need to check the ‘Use new player (experimental)’ option from the player options when you want to play an offline flv video. However, it doesn’t support playing of other files like .mp3 or .avi .

4. Customize the Playing Order

Yes, you can easily customize the playing order in the YouPlayer playlist. Whether you want to play the videos in succession – one after the other – or you want them to be played in a random order, you can easily achieve this in one click.

5. One-click Download of the Videos

Here comes the icing on the cake. When you right click on an item in the playlist, you find these options – Add URL, Edit item, Open new item… and Download ! Yes this is another quick way in addition to the 4 quick ways to download Youtube videos which I discussed before. In fact this also lets you easily download a MySpace or Metacafe video easily. Cool!

I’m already enjoying this add on. I haven’t had any errors or troubles and it works just perfect. Like Winamp, it also allows you to choose from a few skins. So overall, this is a great add-on to play multiple online videos and also multi-task at the same time. Give it a shot !

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

The Winners of ‘Extend Firefox’ – Best Firefox Addons

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:01:53 +0000

Firefox is close to our hearts. In the past, we’ve reviewed a number of Firefox add-ons here on Make Use Of. Any guesses what this article is about? Yes, you’ve guessed it – it’s the ever popular Firefox add-ons list compilation.

However this time, its a list with a difference. The add-ons in this list are the Winners of the Extend Firefox contest organised by Mozilla Labs.

The add-ons are classified into three categories.

Best New Firefox Add-on

Pencil

Pencil is a GUI prototyping and diagramming add-on. This means that you can use Pencil to create mockups of windows, buttons, panes etc. Some of the features of Pencil are:

Built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping
Multi-page document with background page
On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
PNG rasterizing
Undo/redo supports
Installing user-defined stencils
Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…
Cross-platforms
Adding external objects

This may not seem useful for an average user but it means and speaks a lot about the capabilities and the extensible nature of Firefox (apart from the countless uses for developers and UI designers)

Tagmarks

Firefox 3 offers a neat feature for bookmarking webpages that you visit by clicking on the star in the address bar. If you thought that was clever and useful wait till you have a look at Tagmarks. Tagmarks adds a set of icons to the quick bookmarks, allowing you to quickly add tags to your bookmarks by clicking on each icon. A lot like Gmail Superstars which let you classify your mail and then search them based on the star you applied to the conversation.

HandyTag

Can’t think of relevant tags for the page you are bookmarking? Fear not HandyTag comes to the rescue!. Handy tags simply provides a set of the most relevant keywords in the bookmark’s edition panel. These keywords are retrieved from many different sources so that you don’t have to think much!

The following add-ons are the runners up in the ‘New Addons’ category. However I like some of them better than the winners! Read on ahead and see if you agree or disagree.

Webchunks

This is one of my favourites and one of the most anticipated add-ons. First off you need to know what a webslice is. A webslice is a new way that allows you to subscribe to only a part of the webpage. Using webslices you could subscribe to the area containing the most recent article here on Make Use Of. This is an Internet Explorer 8 feature, but Firefox can’t be left behind, can it?

In fact Firefox does it even better than Internet Explorer because using IE requires the author of the webpage to specify an area of the page as “Webslice”. However using Firefox with Greasemonkey, you can get webslices on any page on the Web and then subscribe to that slice using webchunks.

Check out this link to know what I am talking about.

Badges on Favicon

Badges on Favicon allows you to put a rounded badge over the tab favicon of some pages.

These badges will show numeric snippets of information from the page, for example your unread mails from Gmail or the stock quotes from Yahoo Finance.

This way you can always see that data, even if you’re navigating on another tab.

The extension uses little scripts, called badgets. Each badget is designed for a particular webpage and you can get more here. There are not a huge number of badgets available at this time, however it is an interesting concept, especially when you combine it with the Faviconize Tab add-on.

Devo

This one is again one of my favorites. Devo is like Enso Launcher for your browser. Hit SHIFT+X to open up the UI. Just type the action keyword followed by the parameters (if there are any).

(i.e) to search Make Use Of on Google you would: Hit Shift + X, type google and then type in Make Use of and hit enter. There are many more complex commands like “play.song”. You can even write your own commands for Devo.

Close ‘n’ Forget

Close n Forget is simple and useful. It lets you close the current tab and practically forget about the visit. This means that it removes the related cookies and the whole domain’s pages from the history (if it is configured to do so). I can see some mischevious uses for this one!

Callout

Callout allows the web applications and Greasemonkey scripts access to the notification area of your operating system provided that they use the Callout API. Not many web applications and scripts use the callout API yet, but this certainly has a potential to become huge.

Reasy

Reasy is a RSVP (Rapid Sequential Visual Presentation) Reader. In English this means that it presents a word or two at the same place at a rapid rate to help you read better. Select some text ( > 25 words) and a pop up appears, click on the text and the Rapid Sequential Visual Presentation starts. Great for reading large chunks of text on a web page. Check out spreeder which is a similar web app.

Best Updated Firefox Add-ons

Read it Later

Read it later has already been covered on Make Use Of before here and here . Some of the newer features include offline reading, sync between computers, and RSS feed creation.

TagSifter

If you have lots of bookmarks in your browser, consider using tags to sort and classify them. Then if you use tags, Tagsifter is a must. Tagsifter provides you an efficient way to browse your bookmarks by tags. Tagging helps in managing your bookmarks and tagsifter helps you to find that link which you bookmarked two months back but only vaguely remember what it was about.

Bookmarks Previews

If you liked the Pogo browser but couldn’t use it, then Bookmarks Previews allows you to get some of those features. This extension allows you to view you bookmarks in style! You can choose from among the coveted album flow animation, thumbnail view of the bookmarks and a tool tip preview of you bookmarks. Excellent to jazz up your browser a little while still remaining useful.

Best Music Addon

And the award goes to…

Fire.fm

Fire.fm allows you access to last.fm’s music library. You can listen to music related to your favorite artist, and discover new artists and music in the process. You can find Last.fm users with musical tastes similar to your own. Quickly access your favorite stations by just typing a few letters into the location bar. If you are into music, you must check it out.

Please note that some of these add-ons are still experimental and may require you to login with your Mozilla account (which is free to create), or alternatively you can download the extensions from the developers’ pages.

Which ones are your favorite add-ons that can perform similar tasks? Tell us about your dream add-ons and functionalities that you wish existed.

(By) – Varun Kashyap who loves Firefox add-ons. He blogs about latest on the web, firefox, tech tips, tweaks and hacks on TechCrazy Blog

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Leave Repetitive Browser Tasks to iMacros

Blake Elias — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:01:56 +0000

A Firefox extension called iMacros will save you some time by recording a group of routine tasks in Firefox and letting you repeat them whenever you want, with absolutely no programming required!

Once you get the hang of it, you can do more than just repeat a set of steps, and start scripting some very complex tasks in Firefox. You can call your mini-program from a library which goes in the sidebar on the left side of the screen. Or you can bookmark your macro: it behaves just like any other bookmark in your list (it can be organized and tagged, put in the bookmarks toolbar, etc.) but calls your macro instead of a web page.

Just click the ‘Record’ button on the ‘Rec’ tab of the iMacros pane, do some things in Firefox, click ‘Stop’, and you’ve got a macro. Then, find your macro in the list, hit the play tab and click ‘Play’ to do the task in the macro.

Of course, once you’ve made a macro in the visual interface, you can go to the ‘Edit’ tab in the iMacros side bar, select your macro from the list and click the ‘Edit Macro’ button to view and edit the code it generated. It’s easy to pick up the basics of the scripting language iMacros uses just by recording a macro and viewing its code, but there’s a more detailed reference of all the commands and how to use them here.

If you decide to code some macros from scratch, write code in the text editor of your choice, save it as a plain text file, then go to the ‘Rec’ tab in the iMacros side bar, choose ‘Load’, and find the file with your code in it.

Here’s a screencast demonstration of iMacros and how it works:

This extension is one of those tools that can do wonderful things, and is only limited by your imagination.

Do you use macros or a similar tool to automate your tasks? If so, what has it done for you? Share them in the comments!

(By) Blake Elias is a computer addict, always learning about new technologies and figuring out ways to do things better. He writes about his thoughts and activities regarding Linux, Google, useful programs, web development and computers in general on his personal blog, The New Geek.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

4 Cool Firefox Extensions To Capture Screens

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:04:16 +0000

If you are a blogger or a web content writer then I’m sure a screen capture tool is in the list of your must have tools for daily usage. With the help of a good screen capture tool you can generate screenshots relevant to your article and then put them in the post and publish it. And if you are a tech blogger like me then it becomes an almost indispensable tool.

Apart from being in-built into most of the operating systems available, there are various screen capture tools available, ranging from desktop softwares to web apps, from free ones to their more sophisticated paid counterparts. And if you are one of those who love to work entirely from the browser then there are some cool firefox add ons which let you capture screens in the snap of a finger (the click of a mouse button actually )

1. Screengrab

Screengrab is a nice firefox extension to capture screens. You can save an entire webpage, a particular selection or a frame in the JPEG or PNG format. You could drag and select a particular portion of the page or save the entire scrolling window. You can even save flash screens with this extension. When you install this extension, you get a small screengrab icon on the right side of your firefox status bar. When you click on it, it gives you the various options to save or copy the screen. Yes, you can even copy the screen to clipboard. Quick and simple.

2. FireShot

FireShot goes one step ahead of Screengrab and apart from allowing you to capture screens partially or completely, it also allows you to modify the captured images. It lets you edit and annotate the screenshot and add graphics and text messages. Screenshots can be saved in 4 formats – PNG, JPEG, GIF and BMP. Like Screengrab, FireShot also allows you to save or copy the screenshot to the clipboard. You could also directly email the captured screen. When you install FireShot, a small icon is added to the toolbar and options to capture the entire page or just the visible portion are added to the context menu.

3. Kwout

The Kwout Firefox add on is another cool app to easily capture and save webpages or online images. It also gives you the code for the screenshot which can be immediately embedded in your website. In fact Kwout has many more options and Kyle did a good job describing it elaborately in this post.

4. Page Saver

Page Saver is a simple browser extension for capturing screenshots and has limited features in it’s free version. It lets you capture the entire page or just the visible portion of it and save it in JPEG or PNG format. You can also configure keyboard shortcuts for doing the same by going to Add on options after installing it in Firefox.

All the above mentioned add ons are compatible with the latest version of Firefox. So if you were to use a firefox add on to capture screen, which of these add ons will you use ? Do you know of any other Firefox add on which does this task efficiently ? Let us know in comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

The Ultimate Extension for Windows Explorer

Karl L. Gechlik — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:00:55 +0000

Is it just me or do you hate Windows Explorer too?

I have used file managers in the past but have given them up for the ease and simplicity of integrating and using StExBar. Its functionality is ridiculously simple. StExBar gives my Windows Explorer a helping hand at getting things done quicker. It adds a tool bar to your Windows Explorer with common tasks.

This seems like such an obvious maneuver – even Microsoft should have picked it up and ran with it. Since the author just updated the application I decided to share it with you all at Make Use Of. If you use something similar or better, don’t be shy – let us know in the comments!

This is how Explorer looks on my Windows XP machine without this extension:

After installation (in Windows XP) you enable it by right clicking and enabling the StExBar like so:

On Vista you need to enable the menu bar by hitting File > Edit > View > Tools and selecting StExBar.

And this is how it looks with StExBar installed:

You know I love new buttons! Lets check them out and show you what she can do.

First off there is a button to get to your options. That screen can be seen here. All the options are pretty self explanatory except for the bottom…

Yup you read that correctly. You can create custom commands to embed in your shiny new toolbar as well as using the ones already provided by default.

The next button labeled ‘Show System Files’ may be a little misleading! It allows you to not worry about selecting system files in your navigating or performing functions. Click once to enable and again to disable.

Next up is the ‘Command Prompt’ button… Yes it is pretty obvious but how come Micro$oft didn’t think it was necessary?

How about a button that can copy all the names of files in a directory? Or how about anything you select, you can paste as text? This is awesome to me and all my junior admins! ‘Copy paths’ allow you to copy the paths of folders or files again to text via the clipboard.

See that ‘rename’ field? Type something into it and the extension highlights all the files or directories that match your selection. As you can see in the example below I typed in *.png and all my files with the extension .PNG were highlighted for me. This is a great trick when looking at loads of log files like I do daily…

While I could not figure out how to get the rename function to work (but while trying to) I found some awesome hot keys that my Windows Explorer now has:

Create a new folder by hitting Ctrl-Shift-N,
Open a command prompt in the current folder by pressing Ctrl-M
Copy a full file path with Ctrl-Shift-C.

All in all, this 370KB download sure is a workhorse and I have not noticed ANY decrease in system resources while using it. It is available as a XP 32/64 bit application and only the 32 bit version works on Vista.

Also make sure to check out Shankar’s article on 7 Windows Explorer Addons for Power Users.

Does anyone use something similar? Let us know in the comments!

(By) Karl L. Gechlik is a superhero of the IT industry who wears many hats and changes in telephone booths. Karl mostly uses his powers for good and the occasional hysterical prank. Get your geek on & follow his geeky antics at NEW askTheAdmin.com today.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

8 Most Useful Plugins For Gnome-Do

Damien Oh — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:02:43 +0000

Gnome-Do is a quicksilver-like application for Linux. By itself, it is only a simple application launcher, and seriously speaking, I find that there is nothing great about it on its own. However, if you make good use of the plugins in the repository, you will discover that there are tons of things that you can do with it. Some of them are really a great time-saver and are able to make your life easier.

So here it is, my recommendation of the 8 most useful plugins for Gnome-Do:

1. Locate files

I am definitely not the type who likes to dig several levels down the filesystem to locate a particular file. That is where the ‘Locate file‘ plugin is useful. Load up Gnome-Do (by pressing “Win + Space” key), type the first few characters of the filename and it will fetch the required files for you, no matter how secluded it is.

2. Twitter

Send your tweets from the Gnome-Do without having to open your Twitter client. A good and quick way to update your twitter without having too much distraction.

3. Rhythmbox

If you are like me, who enjoys playing music in the background while working, then this plugin is particularly useful. You can control your Rhythmbox to start playing your favorite track, pause, mute, unmute, volume up/down, change to next/previous track or to display current track info, all within the small Gnome-Do box.

4. Gnome Terminal

Gnome Terminal is useful because it eliminates the need for you to launch the Terminal. Being someone who love the command line interface more than the GUI, I simply love this plugin that allows me to type and run in the command line from Gnome-Do. (I used to have a Terminal shortcut icon on my dock so that I can launch the Terminal quickly. Ever since, I installed this plugin, I have removed the shortcut icon from my dock as I have no longer any use of it)

5. Apturl

Rather than typing ’sudo apt-get install package-name’ everytime you wanted to install a package, now you just need to type the package name and Gnome-do will do the installation for you. The only caveat: this works only if you know the full name of the package and spell it correctly.

6. Opensearch

Opensearch allows you to search from your desktop using a variety of search engines. From Google, Yahoo, eBay, CreativeCommon, Answer.com, Amazon.com to Wikipedia, depending on what you want to find, you can easily get the information you want from Gnome-Do. I particularly like to use CreativeCommon to find photos for my blog.

7. Flickr

Quickly upload your photos to Flickr without accessing your Flickr account in the browser. You can choose to upload one photo or a bunch of photos from a particular folder. It works quietly in the background and does not provide any distraction.

Tomboy Notes

Do you feel disoriented without your Tomboy notes? Well, I do. I use Tomboy notes to keep reference to articles that I have read online. That’s why I find this plugin particularly useful. It provides you with a quick and neat way to create a new note or to dig up material from your existing Tomboy notes. It is very handy when you have all the information at your fingertips.

(To install plugins, load up Gnome-Do by pressing ‘Win + Space’ keys. Click on the arrow at the top right hand corner and select ‘Preferences’. Go to the ‘Plugins’ tab and check the plugins you want.)

What are your favorite Gnome-Do plugins?

(By) Damien Oh is a technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at MakeTechEasier.com where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

11 Firefox 3 Extensions That I Can’t Live Without

Karl L. Gechlik — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:00:18 +0000

I love Firefox and I love extensions!

There I said it. I am an extension junkie!

I did a clean install today on a new laptop and I decided to document some of my favorite Firefox extensions. But before we get into the list …

I wanted to warn you that each additional extension you install uses more memory and can slow down your Firefox or computer. So try out as many as you want, keep what you need and disable/uninstall the ones you don’t to keep your fox running nice and quick.

As I created a list of my favorite extensions, I realized I had more than 30 on the list. I whittled it down to about 21 must have - cant live without – kills my productivity to use your crappy extensionless browser.. extensions I couldn’t live without.

So in no particular order here are 1 through 11 and watch out for the next bunch in a few days …

I guess I should start out with what an extension is and how you install / use them for the n00bs out there.

An extension is a small program or add on to Firefox and they have been around for as long as Firefox has. These extensions give you a super power if you will (or at least lets you do something you couldn’t do before.) Like automate things you do often or integrate a service right in your browser. Are you excited?

I didn’t think so but hey it was worth a shot. Continue on to the top ten Firefox extensions after the jump.

1. Flashblock

Flashblock is an absolute must-have for blocking Flash advertisements, auto-starting videos or annoying games. Using Flashblock will help you retain more of your memory and some of your sanity while browsing the interwebs. It has a white list as you can see below and requires Javascript to be enabled.

From the developers site:

Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.

2. Secure Login

Do you have problems remembering all of your passwords? Do you hate typing in your usernames and passwords over and over again? Want to automate logging into websites? Then SecureLogin is for you!

• Works out of the box without any configuration needed.
• Login with one click or a keyboard shortcut (automatically submitting the login forms).
• Easy and convenient selection for multiple logins (multiple users)
• Provides direct login to any site from the bookmarks (using the “Secure Login Bookmarks”).
• Integrates with Mozilla Firefox password manager.
• Provides easy access to the saved passwords.
• Prevents malicious JavaScript code to automatically steal your login data.
• Provides an option to protect your login data from all JavaScript code during login.
• Websites requiring JavaScript for the login process can be added to an exception list.
• Can prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks to steal your passwords without having to deactivate JavaScript.
• Helps to protect you from phishing.
• Shows the login URL(s) and the number of available logins in a tooltip of the toolbar button and the statusbar icon.
• Can be set to automatically search for login data and highlight form fields.
• Can be used with a toolbar button, a statusbar icon, a keyboard shortcut or via the context menu.
• Completely customizable interface (buttons, icons and menus can be enabled/disabled).
• Provides a customizable keyboard shortcut
• By default only active on login so it doesn’t consume any system resources while surfing.
• Can fill out additional form fields using the Autofill Forms add-on.
• Possibility to play a sound when logins are found or when logging in.

3. Del.icio.us Add-in

Are you a heavy Del.icio.us user? Do you want to have instant access to your saved bookmarks through Firefox? Then you should check out this del.icio.us extension and go get your browsing on! Very tight Firefox and Del.icio.us integration. This is a huge help to me during my hours of web surfing.

“Our new extension for Firefox tightly integrates your bookmarks into your browser, making it easy to search, sort, and view your bookmarks. It automatically syncs throughout the day with your del.icio.us account and makes it easy to keep your bookmarks at your fingertips on any computer you use.”

4. Read it Later

Do you want an easy way to clip pages to read later? Then try out ReadItLater and eliminate flooding your bookmark area with one visit wonders. Consider it your temporary area where your new websites live so you can decide if you want to add it to your bookmarks or give it the old heave-ho.

This Firefox extension allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. A commenter (Chris) summed it up very well: “It’s a ’staging area’ for bookmarks.”

Our favorite part of this extension is click to save mode. Here you can hit Control-M and then tag links. Instead of opening them it will add them to your ReadItLater list! Awesome for use with digg! Sweet.

Also check out Mark’s review and Abhijeet’s review of Read It Later and 4 Tools to Save Pages for Reading Later.

Save pages to a reading list to read when you have time

Offline Reading Mode – Read the items you’ve saved for later on the plane, train, or anywhere

RSS Feeds – View your list from anywhere with automatic rss feeds of your items

Sync Between Computers – Sync your reading list with any number of computers, work or home

After reading, bookmark pages on your preferred bookmarking service

Click to Save Mode – Quickly batch a reading list just by clicking on interesting links

5. FireFTP

There really is not much more to say about Fireftp besides what the author decided to post. But I will add that it comes in very handy to be able to use a full featured ftp client instead of the old browser interpretation of one!

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

6. IE Tab

So you love your FireFox but occasionally there are those web sites that need to be viewed in Internet Exploer (Ug) This nifty extension lets you embed an Internet Explorer browser in a tab inside Mozilla/Firefox…

7. TinyURL Creator

Do you TinyUrl? Working in the world of tech support I use it on a daily basis. Now with this Firefox add-on you can shrink URL’s very easily.

Easy shrink any long URL or link in the page to something you can email or Twitter using the TinyUrl service with a single click in your browser.

8. Colorful Tabs

Do you want to be able to easily distinguish between tabs at a glance? How about if they were all different colors? Wouldn’t that be a huge help? You better believe it is. Plus it makes your browser all pretty in the process.

The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface.

9. Customize Google

Are you a customizing freak? Do you like things the way you like them? Do you hate how the results from Google are displayed? Customize them!

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam). All features are optional and easily configured.

10. Download Statusbar

Next to installing extensions I love downloading stuff almost as much! Isn’t it wonderful? But if you are like me, your downloads can get out of control and you can lose track of exactly what is going on. Check out what Download Statusbar does to your Firefox status bar. This is another one I could not live without. Why isn’t this built into the Fox yet?

View and manage downloads from a tidy status bar – without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.

11. Download Them All

Doing research? Want to grab all that porn a lot of songs from a page? Need to download a lot of stuff from a single page? Why not use this plugin to save you the leg work? DownThemAll makes this a snap. I wish I could go back in time and give this to a younger me.

The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!

Did I miss some of your favorites? Do you HATE some of the ones I have listed above? Do you know of any extensions/add0-on’s that screwed up your machine? Share your favories and experiences… guess where?

In the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

Offline Browsing Anywhere Anytime – Part One

Tina — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:36:17 +0000

It may sound like a threat, but the internet is not quite everywhere, yet. So what do you do when there’s no internet available to you? First, take a deep breath!

The answer is actually quite simple. You plan ahead and take the internet with you. Or at least parts of it. It may not be an efficient way to cater your online cravings, but you may finally catch up on some long due reading and best of all, it’s free.

I have two alternatives for you, and I will start with the smaller solution.

ScrapBook is a Firefox addon that integrates with the Firefox Navigation toolbar. After installing the extension you will also notice buttons in your toolbar and status bar. They look like the favicon icon seen in the screenshot below: a blue book with a white back.

When you come across a page you would like to save, you have multiple options. Go to the ScrapBook menu in the Navigation toolbar and select Capture Page or hit the shortcut [CTRL + SHIFT + L] or right-click into the page and select Capture Page or drag and drop the website’s favicon into the ScrapBook sidebar. You only have to remember one of these, relax.

To capture only parts of a site, select these parts, then right-click and choose Capture Selection from the menu. Similarly you can capture a link or rather what’s behind it. Just right-click on it and choose Capture Link from the menu. Moreover, you can capture frames, files, all tabs, images, and instead of capturing anything, you can just bookmark a site with ScrapBook. Easy.

Per default, captured pages or selections are saved in the ScrapBook extension folder located in your Firefox profile directory. This can be changed via the options menu of the extension. In the Organize tab you can even enable a function called Multi-ScrapBook and you can then store data in multiple locations and switch between them using the ScrapBook toolbar button.

Coolness doesn’t stop there. Besides saving a whole site you can edit the page before you capture it. This is actually the greatest part of it! You can remove any part of the page using the DOM eraser, you can add comments, highlight text or add stickies and inline annotations. It’s all done through a small menu bar at the bottom of your screen. The bar comes up when you click the ScrapBook icon that sits in the status bar and select Edit Before Capture.

To best access your captured pages, click the ScrapBook icon in your toolbar which will open the ScrapBook sidebar. You can also go through the Navigation Toolbar menu or click [ALT + K]. The sidebar looks much like your Bookmarks sidebar and you can organize it just as easily. Add folders, drag and drop items or search your collection. Click the word Tools in the top right corner of the sidebar to gain access to even more functions, like import/export, sorting, the combine wizard and more.

This extension may seem simple at first, but it’s ingenious and when you dive in to discover all its features and little details, you may well be overwhelmed at first. This is a great tool to organize online research material, perfect for writers or anyone saving bits and pieces of information. The only thing it’s missing is the ability to automatically capture more than just the active page or a list of predefined URLs.

And that’s why I dare you to stay tuned for part 2 of this mini-series. In the next part I will introduce you to a tool that can do just that: save whole websites, including sub-sites, links and everything. Excited yet?

(By) This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

6 Cool GreaseMonkey Scripts To Rock Your Friendfeed

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:48:28 +0000

There’s no doubt that Friendfeed, in a short space of time has gained immense popularity as the best social media aggregator and also as a prominent networking and interaction tool. Friendfeed has also done a great job in successfully leveraging the user base which was frustrated by Twitter downtimes and looking for an alternative micro-blogging platform.

Friendfeed is a cool service no doubt and if you use certain Greasemonkey scripts (which I am about to mention), Friendfeed can turn into a really awesome tool. So if you haven’t been bitten by the Friendfeed frenzy yet, sign up for a free account and install these user scripts and start rocking with it!

1. Google Reader in Friendfeed

There are two ways to use Google Reader in Friendfeed. One is a bookmarklet which is suggested by Louis Gray and if you have signed in to your Friendfeed and clicked on the bookmarklet, it will immediately open the Friend’s shared items tab of your Google Reader.

Another way is to install this Greasemonkey script. Once installed, you will get a tab on the right which when clicked takes you to your Google Reader homepage (see the 2 screenshots below). There are many other similar scripts for different sites. However I particularly like this one.

If you’ve added Google Reader to your list of services, then while browsing through your feeds you could share the ones which you like and then start a discussion on them with your friends as they feeds appear in your Friendfeed.

2. Read Later

Read Later is a cool script for Friendfeed which allows you to store a particular Friendfeed item for reading later. Once you install this script you’ll see a small link named ‘Later‘ under each item.

Once you click on it, it is saved in your account and can be easily accessed through a separate Read Later Tab.

3. Better FriendFeed “subscribed to me”

The Better FriendFeed “subscribed to me” Greasemonkey script adds a ’subscribe’ button under each of the friends who are subscribed to you but you aren’t subscribed to them. Hence it makes the process of subscribing back to those who subscribe to your Friendfeed easier.

4. Twitter For Friendfeed

This is my favorite. The twitter for friendfeed script allows you to access Twitter right inside Friendfeed and therefore allows you to use both the tools simultaneously inside one browser tab. When you install it, you get a separate tab for Twitter inside Friendfeed (as you can see below ).

Once you click on the tab, you can access your Twitter account right inside your Friendfeed account!

5. Friendfeed Filters: Friends & Groups

The Friendfeed filter Greasemonkey script could turn out to be a very important Friendfeed addon in the long run. It lets you filter the noise and access the Friendfeed items which you care for. After installing it, you’ll find a drop-down menu on the right in your Friendfeed account.

Now from this drop down menu you can create different groups of friends and then access their Friendfeed items through a separate tab. It then allows you to further customize your Friendfeed. For example as you can see in the screenshot below, I’ve created a group and named it ‘ Tech Bloggers ‘ and accessing the group feeds through a separate tab.

6. Friendfeed Tweak Refresh Rate

Yes, probably the simplest of the Friendfeed scripts but certainly a useful one. The Friendfeed tweak refresh rate script lets you specify a time interval (in minutes) after which you’d like your Friendfeed to be auto-refreshed.

If you like Friendfeed then I’m sure you’ll like these scripts too. If you know about some other cool Friendfeed scripts then let us know in the comments. And most importantly, make sure to join MakeUseOf room on FriendFeed.

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts