Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Web browsers are becoming more and more important to our everyday lives because they help keep us connected, informed, and productive. So it’s no wonder that there are several different people competing to be successful in this area including Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and now even Google.

Today we wanted to take a look at an awesome new WebKit-based browser called Cruz. I wouldn’t have found out about it if it wasn’t for one of our readers, Yansky, who pointed it out. And I must say that it has some unique features that might be able to pull Mac users away from their current browser of choice.

(Click to Enlarge)

–The Awesome Features–

Here are some of the best features I’ve found in Cruz:

• Site-specific Cover Flow. As you can see in the screenshot above there is a Cover Flow system that is able to integrate with certain sites (Google Search, Flickr, Wikipedia, Digg, and Facebook, are a few examples). What it does is scan the page for links based upon certain CSS attributes that you specify. Digg is a great example of how it works because it shows thumbnails of each site listed on the page your currently viewing.
• Sidebar Sites. You can have a sidebar open on either (or both) side of the screen, and each one can serve up a website. You can also adjust the user agent for each sidebar independently from the primary viewing area, which is handy for viewing iPhone-only sites within your browser.
• Userstyles and Userscripts Built-in. If you’re a fan of Greasemonkey or Stylish in Firefox you’ll be happy to know that the functionality of both add-ons are already incorporated into the browser.
• Create TinyURL’s. You can right-click on any link inside the browser to have a TinyURL created for it. The shortened link will then be automatically copied to your clipboard.
• Google Search Thumbnails. If you’re more of a visual person you can choose to show thumbnails of websites next to each Google Search result.

–The Other Features–

Here are some of the other things that is included with Cruz:

• Open Plug-in Architecture
• Global Keyboard Shortcut
• Single-Window Browsing Mode
• Session Restore
• Full-Screen Mode
• Customizable Shortcuts
• Integrated Gears-loading (InputManager)
• Hidden “Closed” Windows
• Automatic Software Updates
• Custom User-Agent Strings
• Full WebInspector
• Custom Window Opacity/Level/Style

–More Screenshots–

And finally here are some more screenshots showcasing some of the browser’s features and preferences:

(Click to Enlarge)

–Overview–

Since the browser uses the same rendering engine as Safari most sites I tested worked just as you would expect them to. While some of the features are cool I don’t see Cruz pulling me away from using Firefox as my primary browser. But in their defense this is a very early release, and they might still have some other aces up their sleeve.

Cruz Homepage
Thanks Yansky!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

One of the new things in Ubuntu 7.10 is the one-click enabling of restricted drivers (a.k.a. proprietary drivers). This is important because it will give users the best experience possible, and I’ve received several inquiries in our Ubuntu 7.10 from people wondering how they are supposed to enable these drivers in Ubuntu.

After you install Ubuntu 7.10 it will check to see if there is any hardware on your computer that has a corresponding restricted driver. If a match is found, you should see a little icon and balloon pop up in the tray notifying you of the available drivers:

If you happen to close out of the balloon, or you lose the icon there is still an easy way for you to get it back. You’ll find a menu option for enabling the drivers by going to System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers Manager:

From there you can enable restricted drivers in Ubuntu, or you can also disable them by using the checkbox next to the respective device. When I tried to do this for my ATI X1400 graphics card I got hung up with an error message saying “xorg-driver-fglrx is not enabled“. I didn’t really have any idea what this meant, but I quickly found out that I had to enable a few more settings before I would be able to proceed. If you go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources you will see a checkbox that you can tick for “proprietary drivers for devices (restricted)“. I checked that box, and then I started receive an error “Could not apply changes, Please fix broken packages first“. So out of desperation I checked all of these boxes:

• Canonical-supported Open Source software (main)
• Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)
• Proprietary drivers for devices (restricted)
• Software restricted by copyright or legal issues (multiverse)

Low and behold I was able to go back to the Restricted Drivers Manager, and enable the proper drivers for my ATI graphics card (click screenshot to enlarge):

There were multiple reasons that I wanted to get the proprietary drivers installed, but the biggest one was that Ubuntu doesn’t recognize my native widescreen resolution without them. The other reason was to get the 3D support so that I could have some fun with Compiz Fusion, but that opened up another can of worms! I ended up getting Compiz Fusion to work, but I’ll save that story for another day.

Hopefully this solves any issues you may be having with trying to install the restricted drivers on Ubuntu. I was hoping that it would be a one-click solution, but it didn’t quite turn out to be that way. Luckily the workarounds necessary were not all that tedious.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 10, 2008 by CyberNet.

Here you thought that the only big announcements today were going to be from Apple. Looks like you were wrong! We’ve got another new version of our CyberSearch Firefox extension, and this time it packs more than just bug fixes.

P.S. I apologize for releasing these updates so frequently, but I’m trying to make the extension the best it can be.

–Keyword Icons–

The new CyberSearch 0.9.9 has two main features that are accompanied by a handful of bug fixes. The first thing that we’ve added is a slightly intelligent system that will try to guess what icon to use when you’re creating a new keyword. Basically what it does is grab the first URL you specify in the “Website URL” field, attach “favicon.ico” onto the end, and then paste it into the Icon URL field:

To have the icon URL regenerated you can click the “auto” link at any time. We also wanted to show a preview of what the icon looks like, and CyberSearch now does that by replacing the “help” image located next to the URL field. If the field is blank you’ll still see the question mark icon, and you’ll still be able to get help for that field by hovering over the icon even after it’s been replaced.

–Smart Keywords–

I know that we all love the keyword system that CyberSearch offers, but sometimes it can be difficult to remember all of your keywords once you have more than a handful. That’s why we came up with what we like to call “smart” keywords.

How do they work? Well, there isn’t really anything that you have to setup in order to start using them (they are enabled for everyone by default). That’s why they are so great. Just type a URL, followed by a space, and then the text you want to search for. You will instantly see results from only that site:

We, however, wanted to minimize the amount of work you needed to do in order to take advantage of this feature. Thats why you can also just press the spacebar after a full URL in the address bar to immediately search the contents of the site you’re currently on. Here’s an example where I was viewing the Firefox add-ons homepage, and all I had to do was press the spacebar followed by the extension name I was looking for:

Notice how all of the results are from the Mozilla add-ons site? Cool, huh? You don’t have to spend time setting up an extensive list of keywords that you’ll never remember, and yet you can still search your favorite sites!

Keywords take precedence over the domain searching, and so any keywords you have setup will override this functionality. If you want to disable the setting all together you can do so in the General tab, and then uncheck the Automatically search domains option.

–And More–

We also threw in a couple of more minor fixes in this release:

• When configuring keywords CyberSearch will truncate long URL’s that may appear in the drop-down menu.
• HTML characters that appeared in the titles of results (ampersands, quotes, etc…) should show up as expected.

We’d very much appreciate it if you can kick around the new release to see if there are any bugs. The smart keywords won’t work with sites that have some special characters in them, such as question marks, and the reason we did that was because Google doesn’t like searching those kind of sites. Other than that anything should be fair game.

If you get a spare second don’t forget to leave a review for our extension. We’re currently sitting at 4.00 out of 5 stars, and we wouldn’t mind seeing it go up a little more. 😉

Get CyberSearch Extension for Firefox

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Avant Window Navigator (Awn) 0.2 was just released, and there is no doubt that it is one of the best looking docks I’ve seen on any operating system. There is a video below that shows all of the cool icon effects, including the sweet reflection. Before we get into that let’s take a look at what’s new:

• Icon effects – choose whether your icons bounce like cartoon characters, spin like a coin, or have a spotlight cast on them.
• Awn Manager – a unified interface for managing all of the settings Awn has to offer.
• Applets – you’ll soon be able to get things like weather, system information, and more all from the comfort of your own dock. Things like Stacks and a clock are also in the works.

Below is a video that demonstrates the various icon effects, and you better sit down if you haven’t seen it before. The 3D turning with the spotlight is my favorite.

Source: The Dude Abides [via Digg]

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on May 23, 2006 by CyberNet.

It looks like another Windows Genuine Advantage workaround/crack has been found. 9Down has published a simple file overwrite that will work with both Windows Update and Microsoft Download.

Is Microsoft ever going to get a validation system that is fool proof? Maybe, but they will have a lot of hackers to go through in order to get there! I guess we will see how long it will take Microsoft to patch this one.

News Source: 9Down.com

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com