Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One of the things that really seems to draw people to CyberNet is the posting of Firefox Portable builds for pre-release versions of Firefox. Right now Mozilla is testing out Firefox 3 Alpha builds, and the ability to play with it appeals to a lot of people. A while back I wrote a guide on setting up your own version of Firefox Portable, but that was still when the application was called Portable Firefox.

I receive requests all of the time for providing nightly builds of Firefox 3 in a portable fashion so that there is no fear of messing up your stable profile. Heck, I’ll even show you where to copy the contents of your existing profile to in the Firefox Portable so that it is really easy to see if your extensions will work. Let’s go ahead and get started…

–Setting Up Your Own Firefox Portable–

1. The first thing that you’ll need to do is download my “blank” Firefox Portable ZIP file. I say that it is blank because it doesn’t include the actual Firefox files that are needed to run the browser. You’ll be adding those in a few steps from now. Also, it is important to note that the installation I am providing to you is setup to not show a splash screen and to allow multiple instances of Firefox to be running side-by-side. That means you’ll be able to run your nightly build at the same time you’re running your stable build! See this article for an explanation on how I did that.
2. Extract the contents from the file you downloaded in Step 1 which should result in a folder called “FirefoxPortable“.
3. Download the latest nightly trunk to play with the bleeding edge version of Firefox. This is the most recent that you can get, and to find the file that you want to download look for the most recent date that has a “win32.zip” extension.
4. Extract the contents from the file you downloaded in Step 3 which should result in a folder called “firefox“.
5. Drag the firefox folder from Step 4 into the FirefoxPortable -> App folder from Step 2:
   
6. That’s all, now just go back to the FirefoxPortable directory and run the FirefoxPortable.exe file. This is what your directory structure should now look like:
    
7. Note: For future reference, you can update Firefox Portable the same way that you update regular Firefox by going to the Help Menu -> Check for Updates.

–Copying Your Current Profile To Firefox Portable–

When you’re testing out Firefox, it would be nice to just copy all of your settings, bookmarks, and extensions over to the portable version so that you can see what works and what doesn’t. No problem! It just takes a few steps to copy everything over:

1. Locate your existing profile:
   Windows 2000/XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<Windows login/user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Profile name>\
   Windows Vista: C:\Users\<Windows login/user name>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Profile name>\
   
2. Copy ALL of the files and folders of your existing profile into the FirefoxPortable -> Data -> profile folder (make sure to delete everything in that directory if it is not already empty):
   
3. That’s all, the next time you start Firefox Portable it should run your existing profile.

–Overview–

That is basically what I do each time that I test out Firefox builds. Similar things can be done using the portable versions of Thunderbird and many other applications. After you have done it once you’ll be able to do the whole process in a matter of seconds because it really is that easy. The thing that takes the longest to do is download the files. Enjoy!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Updating Portable Firefox with a ScriptCyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryPortable Firefox 3 for Mac OS XPortable Firefox 2.0 Alpha 2 DownloadDownload Firefox Portable 2 RC2

This article was written on March 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Fun Friday

When people get tattoos, often times there’s a special meaning behind the design whether it be a symbol for good luck, or the name of a family member. Apparently video games, video game characters, and computer and Internet companies hold special meaning to some people out there and so thanks to them, we have a nice collection of geeky tattoos for your viewing pleasure…

Mario Tattoos

Source Source

Apple Tattoos

Source Source

Microsoft Tattoos

(the second is the blue-screen of death message)

Source Source

Zune Tattoo

Source

Google Tattoos

Source Source

Firefox Tattoos

Source Source

Sonic the Hedgehog Tattoo

Source

NES Controller Tattoo

Source

Atari Tattoo

Source

Just Plain Geeky Tattoos

Source

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Screencasts are becoming the way of the Web and are a great way for people to visually explain how to do something. A screencast, for those people unfamiliar with them, is a recording of a user’s computer screen that is often used to demonstrate the capabilities and features of a software application. Anytime I see a software product that I’m interested in I always look for a screencast because it will give me a better idea of whether the software is right for me, without even downloading it.

As far as professional screencast software goes there are two that I recognize as the industry leaders: Techsmith’s Camtasia and Adobe’s Captivate. Before you pull out your checkbook to purchase these it is probably good for you to know that Camtasia busts-the-bank at $300 and Captivate doubles that at $600, making these two software packages unreasonable for most home users. That is why I wanted to focus more on the great freeware solutions that are available for you to use.

–Cropper (Homepage/GIF Plug-in)–

Out of the three solutions that I am going to discuss Cropper is the most unique. It doesn’t create a video or Flash file like the others and the actual purpose of Cropper is to capture screenshots. It is written in C# so the program will only work in Windows but the true power isn’t applied until you get the Animated GIF plug-in. Once the application and the plug-in is installed you’ll be able to create animated screenshots like this one:

–CamStudio (Homepage)–

CamStudio, not to be confused with the non-free Camtasia mentioned above, is probably one of the most popular screencast applications available. Using the software you’ll be able to record portions of your monitor or even the entire screen if you desire. After everything has completed and you’re done recording you can have it save the video as an AVI or generate a Streaming Flash (SWF) file.

The SWF file is particularly useful if you want to host the video yourself because it is a compressed version of the video, but then again the AVI file is great if you want to upload it to a video site like YouTube. Another way to knock down the size of the output file is to make the region your capturing a little smaller and then enabling the autopan to move the recording area with the mouse.

I had some problems getting CamStudio to record a screencast in Windows Vista despite it looking like it worked. The output would be a video that is all scrambled and switching codecs resulted in the same mess. The CamStudio blog has announced that version 3 of the software is just around the corner with a target release date in January of 2007 (it has been 3 years since a new version was released) but no details are given about what new features to expect. I’m crossing my fingers that Vista-compatibility is on the list.

–Wink (Homepage)–

Wink is probably my favorite screencasting software out of the ones that I have mentioned here. It has an extremely large set of features and a unique frame-by-frame editor. Another really nice thing is that you can have it export your screencasts not only as a SWF flash file but also as a standalone EXE file that anyone can just double-click on to run. Or you can even have it generate an HTML file that will embed the screencast into a website for you which saves even more time. There are just too many features to sit here and name so here are the ones that Wink highlights:

• Freeware: Distributed as freeware for business or personal use. However if you want to redistribute Wink, you need to get permission from the author.
• Cross-Platform: Available for all flavours of Windows and various versions of Linux (x86 only).
• Audio: Record voice as you create the tutorial for explaining better.
• Input formats: Capture screenshots from your PC, or use images in BMP/JPG/PNG/TIFF/GIF formats.
• Output formats: Macromedia Flash, Standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML or any of the above image formats. Use Flash/html for the web, EXE for distributing to PC users and PDF for printable manuals.
• Multilingual support: Works in English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.
• Smart Capture Tools: Capture screenshots automatically as you use your PC, based on mouse and keyboard input (great time saver and generates professional captures).
• Performance/Quality: Creates highly compressed Flash presentations (few kbs to few hundreds of kbs, much smaller than competing commercial products) ideal for using on the web.
• Tools:
  • Navigation buttons to move to next/previous/random frames in the presentation, you can use custom bitmaps for these buttons (full transparency/alpha channel support).
  • Callouts and shapes for displaying text explanations. The inbuilt Callout Editor is used to create custom shaped callouts as you want.
  • Intuitive drag-n-drop editing of the frame, callout, cursor, navigation buttons and the title elements.
  • Advanced features like templates, cursor editing, palettes, background images, control bars & preloaders for the flash output etc.
  • Completely PC and Web ready with exports to PDF, HTML, SWF and EXE formats.
  • Innovative compression techniques applied to reduce filesize of output Flash file. Generated flash file plays in Flash players from version 3 and above, giving you widest array of target audience.
  • Uncompressed output to allow you import the output of Wink into other Flash editors.

That’s quite an impressive list, huh?  It’s hard to believe but Wink is missing something that I think is crucial for a lot of people using screencast software. While it can export a screencast to a SWF file it does not support AVI at this time. That means you would have to get your hands on an SWF to AVI converter if you want to upload the screencast to a video hosting site like YouTube. I tried to find a freeware converter that worked but I came up empty handed (I tried several, including SUPER, and they all gave errors for some reason). If Wink ever gets AVI compatibility then I will be really happy.

–Summary–

There you have it, three great ways to demonstrate something to your audience without ever having to pay a dime. Of the three Wink is my favorite but the lack of AVI compatibility is really disappointing. I couldn’t even get CamStudio to work properly on Vista so I couldn’t accurately compare the output of the applications but it seems to have a lot of similar features to Wink. If you know of another great freeware screencasting utility make sure you let us know so that we can try it out!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 21, 2006 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

One of the biggest things I hate about installing new programs is the clutter that they add to your computer’s startup process. There seems to be an increasing number of programs, such as Adobe Acrobat, that love to preload their software so that it will seem lightning fast when you run it. The reality is that it will just increase the amount of time it takes for your computer to startup.

I typically hunt down a program to fix any problem that I have, but I didn’t want to find another program to fix something that other programs did…it just doesn’t seem like a good thing. So I make the changes myself using the built-in Windows tools that are available.

The first thing that I typically do when I want to edit my startup programs is run MSConfig to see a list of everything that is currently running when my computer boots. You can do that by going to the Run command, typing in msconfig and then pressing Enter. You will see a window with several tabs but the one we are looking for is cleverly called “Startup”:

I love using MSConfig to see my startup items because it will show you the ones located in multiple locations. If you see a program on there that you don’t want just uncheck the box. This will disable the item from starting the next time you reboot your computer but it does not delete it. I always disable the items before I go and delete them just to make sure I don’t screw something up.

If you reboot your computer and it is running okay then you may want to (which I do) permanently delete the items. In the MSConfig it shows you the location that you need to find either in the Registry or your Windows Startup folder. All of the ones I have pictured are located in the registry and you’ll notice the two different values that I have circled:

• HKLM – Stands for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE which are items that run for ALL users.
• HKCU – Stands for HKEY_CURRENT_USER which are the items that will only run for you.

NOTE: You should only edit your registry if you are familiar with doing so. If you make a mistake it could destroy your Windows installation.

Once you have figured out the items that you want to delete you can start the Registry Editor by going to the Run command and typing in regedit. After the Registry Editor has opened you can browse for the key that you need to delete. The registry key will likely be in one of the following locations:

• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
• HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

If the item is not in the registry then it is probably located in a Startup folder which can be found in a profile:

• %userprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
• %allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

That is really all there is to it. I normally only go through and edit my startup items after I have installed a fresh copy of Windows along with all of the software that I need. I will often find that Adobe, along with many others, love to throw some things in that I don’t necessarily care about. So I delete them.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

–Introduction–
Web browsers have been downloaded millions of times and come in a variety of flavors. There is Mozilla Firefox, Avant Browser, Opera, Internet Explorer, Flock, Maxthon, and the list goes on and on. The problem is that there are some features that you would just love to grab from one browser and put in your favorite browser. My goal here is to cover different features and list which browsers I think are the best for those features. I know there are many Firefox extensions available but I will focus more on the out-of-the-box features.

–Tab Browsing–
One of the most important features in a Web browser are tabs. To many people this is absolutely essential which is why Firefox and Opera have the popularity that they do. Even Microsoft realized the importance of having tabs and currently have a tab system implemented in their latest version called Internet Explorer 7.

All of the browsers that I mentioned in the introduction have some sort of tab system (well, IE6 doesn’t but IE7 will). Firefox has the ability to have features easily added with the use of extensions and Tab Mix Plus is known to be THE extension for getting the most out of your tabs. However, I still believe that out of all the Web browsers Opera is the best at handling tabs.

It has the most features that are built-in and ready to go immediately after downloading, and also has some features that you won’t find in Firefox. It can cascade or tile all of your tabs so that you can easily navigate between them which means you can truly maximize or minimize your tabs.

Another nice feature with the tabs is a trash bin. Both Opera and Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 have this feature which will let you open some of the most recently closed tabs. I have accidentally closed so many tabs before that this is definitely a needed feature for me!

–Bookmarks–
Bookmarks are probably one of the most used features in a Web browser. The biggest issue is that some people have thousands of bookmarks at home but when they are at work they lose access to them. Sites like Del.icio.us conquer this problem by giving users access to their bookmarks from anywhere. There are currently Del.icio.us extensions available for Internet Explorer and Firefox but Flock has it ready-to-go immediately after installation.

After you setup your Del.icio.us account in Flock, click on the blue star to bookmark a site. Clicking on the blue star will immediately bookmark a site without any kind of prompts. If you want to add tags to the bookmark, click on the small arrow on the blue star. You will then be prompted with a dialog box that will allow you to add all the information you need.

The bookmarking system in Flock works great and no extensions/plug-ins are needed. If you don’t use Del.icio.us, you may find Flock’s built-in Shadows service more useful because it operates the same way as Del.icio.us would in Flock.

–Spell Check–
I don’t think I would have ever realized how useful spell check would be in a browser until Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 brought it to my attention. Their inline spell check acts just like the spell check in Microsoft Word and puts a red squiggly line underneath your misspelled words.

It is nice to have the inline spell check for small things that you’re writing, however, if you are writing a longer article it’s nice to have a spell check system like Flock’s. Theirs displays a dialog box and walks you through all of your misspellings so that you don’t have to scan all of the text looking for the red underline.

I would say that the perfect spell check system would offer both options much like Microsoft Word does. It will check your spelling as you sit there and type but it will also walk you through all of your spelling mistakes if you initiate a spell check.

–Feed Readers–
One of the easiest ways to keep up with the news is by using RSS feeds. They let you keep track of multiple sites and watch for new articles to be posted which saves you some time and eliminates frequent check backs to websites for updated information. Firefox does not exactly have a feed reader but has a system called Live Bookmarks. The Live Bookmarks let you subscribe to a site’s RSS feed and Firefox will display “bookmarks” that link to different articles on the site. When new articles are published the bookmarks will automatically update themselves.

For some people the Live Bookmarks do not cut it. That forces people to turn to a Firefox extension to do the job, find an external reader, or use a completely different browser. Flock, Opera, Avant Browser, and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 all have an integrated feed reader. Out of those, I would say that the reader in Flock is the best. Besides offering a one or two-column layout, they also have many other features that give you a fully customized experience. One of my favorite features in their feed reader is the “Front Page” which provides a summary of your different feeds. It almost reminds me of going to Google News except that this is customized to display only the news sources I want!

–Session Restore–
It is always nice to be able to pick up where you left off. That is one feature I have always wanted in Windows but for now, it doesn’t look like I will get it. It is very useful in Web browsers, especially when the browser unexpectedly crashes. Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 has a built-in session restore feature but it is currently very limited. Without modifying it the session restore will only work if Firefox crashes, or you restart Firefox after installing an extension.

Opera on the other hand handles the session restore perfectly. It has multiple options that you can choose from like automatically restoring your tabs every time or maybe you want it to ask you what to do each time. Either way Opera takes care of all your session restore needs.

–Searching–
Searching is done so similarly between all browsers that there isn’t really one that searches any better than another. However, I would give Firefox 2 Beta 1 a small edge over the others because of the Search Engine Manager. It makes it easy to add, remove, and reorder your search engines with just a few clicks. Opera also has a similar search engine manager but Firefox makes it a bit easier to add additional search engines.

–Integrated Email–
There will always be applications that manage your email like Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird but I like having a Web browser that takes care of that. The great thing about having an integrated email client inside the browser is that you’re always notified of new emails immediately if your browser is open. I never have to worry about leaving Thunderbird or Outlook open to know when I get emails because my web browser is always open! Opera does a great job of handling all my emails and makes it extremely easy to respond to them with the Quick Reply box located towards the bottom of the window.

Click To Enlarge

–Downloading–
Because I am trying to stick to the out-of-the-box features I would have to say Opera is also the best for the built-in download manager. It keeps all of your downloads in a nice tab interface and also supports BitTorrent downloads. As nice as the BitTorrent compatibility may sound I have had very slow download speeds while using it.

I do feel like I have to mention that Firefox has an okay download manager as well. That aside, I prefer Firefox’s over Opera’s if I have the Download Statusbar extension installed. This extension will show all of your current downloads in its own separate bar located immediately above the Status Bar. If you do not have any downloads active then the bar will disappear.

–Extensibility–

I am sure many people will agree that the award for extensibility goes to Firefox. Mozilla has created a central location for developers to submit extensions so that other Firefox users can make their browsing experience more enjoyable. Unfortunately this is one of Opera’s downfalls which they tried to compensate for by creating widgets (The CyberNet widget is also available). While the widgets can be useful for some things they just can’t bring some of the cool features that can be found with the use of Firefox extensions.

–Site Rendering & Compatibility–

Site compatibility is one of the biggest reasons that I use Firefox or Flock (Flock is based off of Firefox’s code so it renders sites the same). While Opera does render almost all sites properly it can still be a problem for certain sites that check which browser you are using, like Google. If they find that you are not using a compatible browser then they will notify you and may not even let you use their service.

If you want to make sure that you are running the browser that is compatible with almost every site, you’ll want to use Internet Explorer. With around 80% of the world still using Internet Explorer, you will be hard pressed to find an unintentionally incompatible Web site. Firefox, however, is quickly gaining on Internet Explorer and currently has 15% of the U.S. market share. More sites are starting to make sure their sites work properly with Firefox as well.

–Security–
Security can be looked at from several different angles. The first one that came to my mind was how fast bugs are fixed in a browser. It seems like Firefox and Opera both stay on top of any security-related bugs that arise. Internet Explorer, however, is always being exploited and Microsoft sometimes falls behind on releasing patches.

The other way that you can look at security is how well the browser protects the user from phishing threats. Firefox 2 Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 both have anti-phishing mechanisms in place to prevent users from losing valuable information. I am sure the anti-phishing feature will start to become standard in Web browsers and we will soon start to see it in Opera and more.

–Eye Candy–
This is the last topic that we are going to cover! Nobody wants to use a browser that doesn’t look great and that’s why skins were developed. Once people download a browser like Firefox or Opera, one of the first things that they do is to go searching for skins (Opera Skins here and Firefox Themes here). Both browsers offer such a large assortment of themes that will take a long time for people to go through them all. The funny thing is that the number 2 theme in both the Firefox list and the Opera list make the browsers look like Internet Explorer 7. Does that mean nobody wants to use IE7 but they like the look of it?

Flock has also become highly recognized because of the unique theme they use. In fact, people started to like it so much that a Firefox theme was made to look like Flock. Kinda funny how there are themes made for a browser to make it look like another browser. Oh yeah, and there is an Opera theme to make it look like Firefox! It almost seems like a never ending circle!

–Overview–
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed what I have found to be the best features in multiple Web browsers. If we combine all of those features together into one simple browser, the result would be absolutely amazing. Make sure you let us know which features you want to see in a browser. Developers may see this and get a few ideas!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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