Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

There has been some good news lately on the progress of Firefox 3. Mozilla was able to get the backend of Places back into the latest nightly releases, but as of right now you won’t notice many differences. Once Places has been completed, it will offer a central location for users to manage things like their RSS feeds, website history, and bookmarks.

Firefox 3 Alpha 5 is due out around June 1, and by that time they will have Places functional, but it is doubtful that they will get around to polishing the frontend (the actual interface) by that point. Here are some tips that were pointed out in the forum regarding the use of Places as it stands right now:

• Backup your bookmarks before running the latest nightly of Firefox 3! The file that you need to backup is called bookmarks.html and is located in your Firefox profile folder. Of course, there is an automatic backup created called bookmarks.preplaces.html just in case anything terrible should happen and for those who are too lazy to back it up themselves.
• When you run the Firefox 3 nightly for the first time it will migrate from bookmarks.html to places.sqlite. The places.sqlite is the new storage location for your bookmarks, but Firefox 3 will also keep the bookmarks.html file up-to-date in case you want to switch back to Firefox 2. However, if you switch back to Firefox 2 and modify your bookmarks the changes will not appear in Firefox 3 the next time you launch it. This is because Firefox 2 doesn’t keep the places.sqlite file up-to-date like Firefox 3 does for bookmarks.html.

Here is a quick screenshot to show you that there is no difference to the interface yet, even though the backup file for Places has been created which verifies that Places is running:

Click to Enlarge

I also did a little digging, and noticed that in Firefox 3 Alpha 6 (due out June 29) more functionality will be added to Places, including tagging capabilities. I eventually came across this image that demonstrates four different methods of implementing tags in the bookmarks:

Click to Enlarge

The problem that they are trying to conquer is getting around those people who don’t understand what tags are and how they are used. Judging by the smiley faces in the mockup, they have determined the last option (the one furthest to the right) to be the best. I would have to agree with that because if I was going to bookmark or tag a site I would want to have a nice unified interface for doing it. This solution provides just that. The only thing that I’m hoping they implement is an auto-complete feature that will show a listing of matching tags as the user types them.

So what do you think about the tagging being built-in to Firefox?

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on February 14, 2012 by CyberNet.

There are a lot of screenshot extensions for Google Chrome, and many include excellent annotation capabilities. For some users all of those features might be overkill, and that is where Blipshot comes into play. This is a one-click screenshot utility that works exactly how you’d expect it to.

To use Blipshot all you have to do is click the camera icon in the Chrome toolbar. A screenshot will immediately be taken, and when it is done you will see something along the lines of what’s in the picture above. A thumbnail of the site you were viewing is set off to the right side in an overlay, and saving it to your computer is as easy as dragging the image on to your desktop (or into a folder), or right-clicking on the screenshot and using the Save Image as option. If you decide you don’t want the screenshot just click anywhere in the gray/dimmed part of the page (away from the snapped screenshot) and it will immediately get discarded.

The Blipshot Chrome extension is an great demonstration of how easy it can be to take a full-page screenshot of any website.

Blipshot Chrome Extension

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 31, 2007 by CyberNet.

I wish I could say that I’m surprised, but AOL has decided to kick the can on further Netscape Navigator developments. The Netscape team will publish security updates for one more month (until February 1, 2008), and after that Netscape Navigator will just be a memory. Here’s what the Netscape blog had to say:

While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.

Without Netscape one can only wonder where the web would be. They were a major stepping stone for Internet use, and I’m sure many of you remember using early versions of Netscape Navigator. Now it will be nothing more than a story we tell our kids.

Netscape’s latest attempt to provide a version of Firefox with a custom theme and extensions didn’t take off as well as they had hoped. Many of the features available in Netscape 9 were also available in Firefox as extensions, which gave existing Firefox users little reason to switch to Netscape.

Now I’m left wondering where existing Netscape users will go? Switching to Firefox would make the most sense, but something in my head says that people are going to make the move back to Internet Explorer.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the things that’s always nice to know is what you can remove from your hard drive to quickly regain hard drive space. Maybe there are some enormous games on your computer that you don’t play anymore, or files you’ve downloaded that have never gotten deleted? By using hard drive visualization tools you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly what is eating up your hard drive storage.

There are a lot of different programs that can be used for this purpose, and we thought it would be better to put together a more comprehensive list instead of just covering one or two of our favorites. We’ve broken them up according to operating system below, and for each one we provide a brief description accompanied by a screenshot. That way you’ll be able to figure out which free app is right for you.

Note: You can click on a screenshot for a full-size version.

–Windows Hard Drive Visualization–

• JDiskReport [Homepage]
  This is a Java-based tool that gives you a few different options for visualizing your hard drive. The screenshot below shows the typical pie graph, but you can also switch to a distribution graph. As you drill into folders it will update the graph accordingly.
  
• WinDirStat [Homepage] [Full Review]
  This free program is pretty cool because of how it breaks up your hard drive into chunks so that you can see at a glance where the large space-hogging chunks are. The various types of files are also color-coded for easy identification.
  
• SpaceMonger [Homepage]
  This definitely isn’t the most glamorous application we’ve seen, but the way it breaks up the view of your hard drive is very intuitive. Just like with WinDirStat the boxes are proportionally sized to the percent of the hard drive they consume, but what’s nice about this is that some of the files and folders are clearly labeled on the diagram.
  
• TreeSize Free [Homepage]
  TreeSize is a more Windows Explorer-like interface for finding those large folders on your computer. As you can see in the screenshot below it puts the largest folders at the top of the list, and you can continue to expand them to see the largest files and folders inside each of those.
  
• OverDisk [Homepage]
  What really makes OverDisk unique is that it’s visualization method looks more like a pie chart that has exploded. You can use the navigator along the left side of the window to traverse through the directories on your PC, and the chart will adjust accordingly.
  

–Mac Hard Drive Visualization–

• Disk Inventory X [Homepage]
  Look at this the same way as the WinDirStat application for Windows above. It has the same visualization technique, and color-codes the files based upon their type.
  
• GrandPerspective [Homepage]
  Yet another block visualization tool. It’s very similar to Disk Inventory X, and both have nearly the same features and interface.
  
• JDiskReport [Homepage]
  That’s right, you saw this program in the Windows section above as well. Since it’s made using Java it’s available on multiple platforms which is a nice benefit. It uses standard pie graphs and distribution charts to plot the data on your hard drive.

–Linux Hard Drive Visualization–

• KDirStat [Homepage]
  This is the original application that used the block-like view many of the different programs mentioned above now incorporate. It also comes with some cleanup utilities to help reclaim the disk space.
  
• Baobab [Homepage]
  Baobab has a clean and intuitive interface for navigating through the folders on your computer. For each line it has a color-coded bar that indicates how much space it is taking up, or you can always switch over to one of the more graphical views. The best part is that this is already included with the GNOME desktop, and is referred to as the Disk Usage Analyzer.
  

–Overview–

So those are the best hard drive visualization tools that we’ve come across throughout the years. Let us know in the comments what you use to find the pesky files and folders taking up all of your precious hard drive space.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 21, 2010 by CyberNet.

I’ve been using Google Latitude with some friends and family ever since it was released last week for the iPhone. I noticed that it used very little battery on my phone, which made me wonder how frequently it actually sends updates. To get this information I went ahead and enabled the history functionality that keeps a log of all the coordinates that your device has sent.

I found that if I was relatively stationary for a period of time, such as being at home, that no updates would be sent to Google. In that respect it is pretty smart. That got me curious as to the logic that Latitude uses on my iPhone to determine when to send updates. After a little searching around I came across this article that explains the update interval for the different platforms. Interestingly enough Latitude takes into account how fast your moving, how much battery life is left, and whether you’re switching between cell towers. Here’s a breakdown of how it works on your device:

Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian:

The background location update frequency isn’t a fixed amount of time. The update frequency is determined by several factors, such as how much battery life your phone has, if you are moving, or how fast you are moving. Background updating will only use cell ID or WiFi location detection depending on your device. GPS will not be used in the background to preserve battery life.

iOS-only (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad):

Your location will only update in the background when you’re moving (exceptions: when you switch the app from foreground to background mode, or go from a “moving” to a “stationary” state, the app will continue to update your location for a few minutes).

The background location update frequency isn’t a fixed amount of time. The update frequency is determined by several factors, such as how much battery life your phone has, if you are moving, or how fast you are moving. Background updating will only use cell ID or WiFi location detection depending on your device. GPS will not be used in the background to preserve battery life.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com