Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 07, 2006 by CyberNet.

Mozilla just released Firefox 1.5.0.8 but it apparently does not have the built-in upgrader for users switching to Firefox 2 (I tried to do an update after the upgrade and it said no updates were available). I was expecting Mozilla to place that feature in this release so that people would be prompted to complete the upgrade to the new Firefox but they apparently decided not to do it. It is still very easy for people to upgrade because they just have to download Firefox 2 and install it. The installation process will automatically upgrade your current installation without any problems but it does take a few extra steps compared to Firefox doing it all for you.

Firefox 1.5.0.8 also has some security fixes integrated and Mozilla will continue to release security updates until April 24, 2007 for the Firefox 1.5 branch. They do recommend that you upgrade to Firefox 2 for the best security though.

If you would like to download Firefox 1.5.0.8 you can go here or just use this downloader:

I do wish that people would be prompted to upgrade to Firefox 2 just because there are a lot of people I know who never go check for updates themselves. If they see that an update is available without having to go download and install it then they would definitely be more willing to go through with it. Maybe they just haven’t initiated the major upgrades?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the features in Mac OS X that often gets some attention is what’s called “hot corners.” It’s a simple concept that gives the user an opportunity to assign actions that are performed whenever their mouse hits a corner of the screen. With the help of some free Windows apps you too will also be able to bask in the goodness known as hot corners!

We’ve got a variety of solutions that we’re going to show you, and all of them make use of hot corners. With them you’ll be able to show your desktop, put your computer into standby, enable the screensaver, activate Vista’s Flip3D, and much more. That’s right… all of that without using any keyboard shortcuts!

–Application (Homepage)–

This is a small free app that will bring hot corners to life for your Windows computer. Once you go through the brief setup process the program will immediately start running in the System Tray. The first thing you’ll want to do is configure Hot Corners so that there are some actions associated with the corners of the screen. Here are the different actions you can assign to each of the four corners:

• Open the control panel
• Lock/Switch User
• Open “My Documents”
• Run any application or open any folder
• Start your Screensaver
• Search Google
• Show your desktop
• Put your computer into standby mode
• Disable/Enable your Screensaver
• Close the current window

Hmmm… the problem is that there are so many good choices, but only four corners to work with. See that extra tab in the configuration screen labeled “Mouse Move?” You can actually assign up to four more mouse gestures using these! To activate the mouse gesture you’ll want to hold down the Windows key+X, and then move your mouse up, left, right, or down respectively.

Here are some screenshots of what the configuration screens looks like:

(Click to Enlarge)

–Vista Gadget (Homepage)–

If you’re running Vista then the Hot Corners gadget will likely be one that you’ll love. Bundled with it is a homebrew version of Mac’s Expose so that whenever you hit a corner of the screen that you specifed all of your active applications will be tiled. Alternatively you could have it activate Vista’s native Flip3D application switcher.

One thing that I want to point out is that this gadget doesn’t really turn a corner of the screen into a mouse-activatable area… it’s more like an edge. As you can see in the screenshot to the right the edge has a customizable height, which means it can essentially become as large or small as you would like.

There are two tricks that I’ve found while using this:

• You can’t set the gadget to be 100% transparent, but you can come close. You can take the opacity down to 20% by right-clicking on the gadget. This will make it nearly invisible.
• Remember, you can have multiple “copies” of nearly all Vista gadgets. Just drag as many as you want onto your desktop, and then move them into position. That way you could use one corner/edge of the screen for Expose, and another for Flip3D!

–AutoHotkey Script (Homepage)–

This is geared for the slightly more advanced users out there that are familiar with AutoHotkey scripting. This is currently only available in a script fashion, and you’ll need to have AutoHotkey installed to compile it. The reason why I wanted to share this is that it’s one of the more powerful hot corner solutions available, and the possibilities of what you can do with the hot corners is nearly endless thanks to how extensive AutoHotkey is.

There’s just a small amount of code that you’ll need to modify located near the top. To help make this even more unique it is designed to allow up to four different actions per corner. How’s that possible? In addition to the typical mouse-over it also recognizes whether you’re holding down the Control, Alt, or Shift keys. I’d have to believe that once you get over a dozen hot corner actions assigned that it would be pretty hard to remember what each of them do.

–Overview–

So I think it’s time to give your fingers a break from all of those keyboard shortcuts. Setup some hot corners to help satisfy your need for speed!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 11, 2009 by CyberNet.

I was going back and forth whether I should write about this, but I wanted to see what everyone’s thoughts were on this. I posted on Twitter a week ago about news of OpenOffice.org working on a ribbon-like design for an upcoming version of their office suite. When I saw the news on an official Sun blog I was rather disappointed, which is why I wasn’t even going to mention it here on the site.

On Twitter people were responding to me with similar feelings, but for different reasons. A lot of what I heard from others was in regards to how people hate the ribbon design in Microsoft Office 2007. Obviously anytime you’re dealing with a new interface it will take some getting used to, but personally I love the ribbon in Office 2007. It’s exposed me to features I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, and people I dealt with who had previously struggled with using Microsoft Office seemingly found their way around much better. So I think Microsoft is on the right track.

Why then am I disappointed that OpenOffice.org could be moving to a similar design? Lack of innovation. Anyone can copy the features, functionality, and design of another application. You have to think outside the box if you want to set yourself apart though. Think about Firefox. They didn’t get to where they are today by “playing catchup” to IE6… they innovated. They came up with a browser that could be slim and simple, or unbelievably powerful with the use of extensions. Mozilla looked at the direction the browser market was heading instead of watching the direction their competitor was heading. As a result they made the market leader trying to play catchup with them (in terms of functionality).

So what should OpenOffice.org do to innovate? Well, the first thing I think they need to address are the reasons users and companies are afraid to adopt their software. They need to make sure that their software is able to save the common file formats (DOC, XLS, etc…) exactly the same way that Microsoft does. I should be able to flip back and forth between the two office suites without ever having to worry whether something is going to get messed up in the transition. Right now, however, it’s like playing a game of “telephone”… you never know if what’s going to come out on the other end is what you actually said. That’s a risk people don’t want to take when it comes to sending stuff to friends, family, coworkers, and clients.

Once they’ve got all that ironed out I think that’s when they need to move on to innovative stuff. Things are moving to the cloud, and that’s something I think they need to start embracing. Integrate with online editors like Google Docs and Zoho, or let users save/open files on sites like Box.net or maybe even to a personal FTP account. Sure there are add-ons for OpenOffice.org that do stuff like this, but it should be so tightly integrated into the office suite that I forget I’m even dealing with the cloud. For example, if I try to save a file to Google Docs while I’m offline I don’t want it to give me the usual yada yada about not being connected to the Internet. All I should see is a little sliding window in the corner (requiring no interaction) notifying me that this happened, and that once I am connected to the Internet again it will just go ahead and automatically save it. Don’t make me remember to save it again when I already told you I wanted to do it.

So those are my thoughts. When I saw this blog post by Sun I felt like I lost a little respect for them, and it’s not often that I feel that way with an open source project. It also solidified in my mind why it’s going to be so hard for them to get any kind of mass adoption.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows; Mac
I’m one of those stat geeks that love to know everything I can about what my computer is doing. It’s not that I use the information to do much, but a quick glance at the CPU or memory usage has, at times, helped me figure out why my computer is going so darn slow. For example, a spike in memory usage is typically the result of an app that likely needs to be restarted.

There are dozens of different applications and widgets out there that will monitor these things for you, and today we’re going to show you some of our favorites. We’ve got a mixture of programs and widgets for both Windows and Mac, and hopefully one of them will do exactly what you’re looking for.

–Performance Monitor (Homepage)–

Windows only
Performance Monitor is a compact application that can show disk, memory, CPU, and network usage in a couple different ways. It’s not only a free program, but there is also a portable version available that you can carry along on a USB drive.

The most appealing way to monitor the various sensors on your computer is through the live graphs that will appear on your desktop after you run the application. There are four graphs by default, and you can customize their positioning simply by dragging and dropping them. If you hover over one of the graphs with your mouse it will give you the actual numbers that correspond to it:

You can enable a “click-through” option for the graphs so that you are able to click any buttons or menus that might appear behind them. That way you can leave them on top of other window and still have access to anything appearing underneath.

If the graphs occupy too much space you can always turn to a System Tray icon for each of the sensors. Although the icons are a little small in the System Tray they are still able to show live graphs for the various stats, and you can hover over the icons to see the current state of the sensor.

Worried about wasting system resources on a monitoring tool like this? When I was using Performance Monitor it consumed just 7MB of memory, which is less than most other tools that serve the same purpose.

–iStat (Homepage)–

Windows; Mac
Most Mac owners are probably aware of iStat because it comes in two powerful forms: an application and a widget. What you might not know is that there are also iStat widgets available for the Vista gadget system, and also for the Yahoo! Widget Engine. They aren’t quite as powerful as the Mac alternatives, but they are still useful.

For Mac:

On the Mac side there are three notable iStat offerings. The iStat Menu is an application that is constantly monitoring the data on your computer, and it displays the results in the Menu bar. The layout can be completely customized, and clicking on any of the results will expand a menu with more details.

When it comes to Dashboard widgets there are two different solutions: iStat Pro and iStat Nano. The names of the two pretty much giveaway the differences, and they are that iStat Pro offers a more complete set of statistics while iStat Nano shows only the basic information. Here’s what iStat Pro looks like:

(Click to Enlarge)

For Windows:

What’s interesting with iStat for Windows is that there really isn’t an all-in-one package available like there is for the Mac. Instead there are different widgets for monitoring CPU, memory, battery, and wireless information. If you’re a Vista user these things are available as Vista Sidebar Gadgets, otherwise you can use the Yahoo! Widget Engine.

An example of what the widgets look like are pictured to the right, and all of them come in two different forms. You can get the classic “bar graph” design, or a more stylish gauge. If you grab the Yahoo! widgets both designs are included in one package.

–Overview–

There are so many different ways to monitor your memory usage, disk space, and CPU utilization that there’s no way they could all be covered here. That’s what we have the comments for though! Let us know in the comments what you use to keep track of your precious resources on your computer.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 23, 2010 by CyberNet.

Mac only
I resize images quite a bit on a variety of different computers, including ones running both Windows and Mac OS X. On Windows I typically use an Explorer add-on like this one, but I had never taken the time to find something to use on my Mac. During some browsing around the web I recently stumbled upon a free utility, called ThumbsUp, that handles the job quite nicely though.

I’m sure a lot of you have seen the Mac image resizers that use a mixture of the Finder context menu and AppleScript, but this one is a bit different. It is a standalone app that you keep in the Dock. You can then resize just one or multiple images by dragging-and-dropping them onto the icon. The output is thrown into the same directory as the original images, which makes them easy to find.

You can also configure some of the settings by simply clicking on the icon. Doing so will bring up the same preference pane that is pictured to the right, and here’s a breakdown of the settings that are available:

• General
  • Extension inserted before (Prefix) or after (Suffix) the name of thumbnail files or name of subfolder where the new thumbnail files are stored.
  • Image format of thumbnails (TIFF, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG or JPEG 2000).
  • Quit when done (only if the application is launched by a drag-and-drop operation, otherwise the application displays the preferences panel).
• Create thumbnails – thumbnails with icons or only icons for the original files.
• Sizing
  • Maximal width and height of thumbnail images, or scale images by percentage.
  • Set the scaling to 100 percent to convert images to other formats.
• Compression – JPEG compression (the higher the quality is, the bigger the resulting files are).
• Antialiasing – No, low or high antialiasing of scaled thumbnails.
• Sharpen – Light, medium, strong or no sharpening of thumbnails.

This is a great app for anyone who regularly has to create thumbnails for images. The only option it lacks is a way to delete the original images if you wanted to, but this apps focus is more on creating thumbnails and not actually replacing the original image.

ThumbsUp Homepage (Mac only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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