Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

As we’ve shown before, Opera is an extremely customizable browser, but it does so much that it can be difficult to remember it all. Then again you would have to know what it does in order to remember it. 🙂

Today we want to walk you through a dozen tips and tricks that will inch you closer to becoming an Opera grand master. So lets go ahead and jump into it, and as always, hit us up with your tips in the comments!

–Bookmark & Folder Nicknames–

Opera has a nickname feature for bookmarks that I’m guessing most people use. With it you can enter in an abbreviation for a bookmark that can quickly be typed into the address bar to pull up a particular site. One thing that you may not have realized is that the nicknames can also be assigned to entire folders of bookmarks, and entering that into the address bar will open every site within that folder:

–Bookmark & Open Multiple Links–

Let’s say you’re on a sight such as Digg, and you’re trying to quickly go through all of the news. Enter Links Panel! The Links Panel (a.k.a. sidebar) will let you handle hyperlinks throughout the page in bulk. You can Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click to select multiple links from the current page. Then just choose the bookmark or open the option from the right-click menu.

–Click to Save Images–

Do you find yourself frequently saving images from websites? Instead of right-clicking on an image to save it each time, just Ctrl+Click on it. You’ll immediately be prompted with a Save As dialog box for you to enter in the name, or you can just press Enter to use the image’s current name.

[via Opera Watch]

–Customize the Browser’s Name and Icon–

Did you know that you change the name of the browser, and even replace its icon with your own? Yep, that’s all built-in. To change the icon you’ll need to enter opera:config#UserPrefs|ApplicationIcon into your address bar, and then provide the location of the icon you want to use.

To change the browser’s name, just enter opera:config#UserPrefs|Title into the address bar, and in the box type the name you want to appear. Additionally, you can use these combinations to insert dynamic items:

• %t for page title (entering just %t in the box will remove the browser’s name all together, which is what I currently do)
• %s for build number
• %v for version number

In this example I choose to display the browser’s name before the title of the page:

[via Tamil]

–Detach/Move a Tab–

Want to open a tab up in a new window? Just drag it onto the title bar of the browser. You can also move tabs between multiple windows simply by dragging and dropping them from one tab bar to another.

–Fast Navigation–

If you’re trying to open several links on a page, you should try using Shift+Arrow keys to move between the hyperlinks on the page. The nice thing is that this doesn’t jump back up to the beginning of the page where the first hyperlink appears. It starts with the first hyperlink in the area that you are looking at.

Shift+Ctrl+Enter will then open the currently selected link in a background tab.

–Fit to Width–

When you come across a site that requires horizontal scrolling, why not try and enable the Fit to Width feature (located in the View Menu, or press Ctrl+F11). The site will be adjusted so that no horizontal scrolling is necessary, and for the most part it won’t look all that bad.

–Hide the Menu Bar–

I hardly ever need to use the Menu Bar, and it takes up more room that I’m willing to part with. So what I do is I add a button that will remove the Menu Bar, and at the same time provide all of the menu options in a single condensed drop-down list. Just click here to add that button, and for more menu buttons visit the Opera Wiki.

–Hide the Tab Bar for a Single Tab–

In Firefox when you only have one tab open, the tab bar is not visible, and there is an option in Opera to do the same thing. Just right-click on the Tab Bar, choose the Customize option, and then check the box that says “Show only when needed.” The tab bar will now be hidden anytime only one tab is open.

–Right-Click Address Mapping–

It’s super easy to map any address on a site using your favorite map service. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Open up your favorite map service (ex. Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps).
2. Right-click in the service’s search box, and choose the Create Search option. Enter in a keyword (it’s required by Opera, but isn’t used in this trick), and then press Save.
3. The next time you see an address on a site just highlight it with your mouse, right-click, and then go to “Search with.” You’ll see a list of all the possible search engines that you’ve added to Opera, and all you have to do is select the mapping service.

–Promptless Downloading–

If you’re like me you probably save all of your downloads to the same folder so that you don’t end up with things scattered all over your computer. In Opera you can set your default download location in the Options, and then when you right-click on a file or image, there will be a “Save to download folder” option. Clicking on that will initiate the download without prompting you for any information.

–Speed Dial Homepage Button–

This is something that I was yearning for, and luckily the Opera Community came through. For reasons unknown to me, the Opera developers never associated an address to the Speed Dial page. That meant you couldn’t assign it as your browser’s homepage, but dragging this button onto the address bar will do the trick. It will take on the look of the homepage button, but it will actually open the Speed Dial page.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

Foxmarks has rightfully become an outrageously popular Firefox extension. I love it because I’m able to sync/backup my bookmarks with multiple computers. What makes it really nice, however, is that it integrates right into Firefox’s bookmark system. That essentially means you won’t even have to think about the extension once you’ve got it setup.

Just last week the Foxmarks team introduced a profile synchronization feature so that you could control which bookmarks get synced with each individual computer. Once they got that out of the way they began working on their next project, which happens to be Internet Explorer support.

They are currently accepting Alpha/Beta tester registrations for those of you who feel brave enough to run a pre-release version, but there are some caveats. For starters it doesn’t work with Internet Explorer 8 Beta, and it has troubles remembering the order of your bookmarks due to the way IE handles the reordering. They are currently looking for some IE experts that can help them work around the problems.

If you have User Account Control (UAC) enabled under Vista then you might run into some additional problems. This stems from the fact that Internet Explorer runs in a protected mode when UAC is enabled, and prevents things such as Foxmarks from accessing necessary information on your PC.

As of right now other advanced features like profile support and synchronizing with your own servers aren’t even available. Taking all of this into consideration it’s probably not a good idea to jump on the “Foxmarks for IE” bandwagon quite yet. That being said I’m sure there are a lot of you who are excited for this to reach the final form, because there will finally be a good solution to sync your bookmarks between the two browsers.

Sign-up for the Foxmarks IE Alpha/Beta Program

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on January 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

A GMail user recently wrote an article on why he prefers to use GMail to write his essays as opposed to Microsoft Word. While reading the article you start to think to yourself ‘why am I not doing this also?’, or at least that is what I thought. GMail does a way better job of backing up files as you work on them and you won’t lose all of your files if your computer crashes. Heck, for that matter you won’t have anything to copy over when you get a new computer. Here are the reasons that he uses GMail over Microsoft Word:

1. As I have now adapted to Gmail writing, I am comfortable writing from any computer in the world. Who needs Software? As long as there’s an Internet connection, Gmail will be there for me.
2. If the data is ever erased on my computer everything will be secure and sound in the Gmail safe house.
3. Gmail’s rich formatting options are easier for me to use for whatever reason. I also find the spell check less obtrusive.
4. Gmail automatically autosaves the drafts that you’re working on. I cannot count the amount of times I finished writing something in Word and then my battery dies or something of that nature. Then I’d have to pray that Word saved a backup.

News Source: Revenews

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

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