Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

IE7Pro is the single biggest browser add-on that I’ve ever seen. We’ve previously outlined some of the features that it enhances Internet Explorer 7 with, but we thought that it was time to take another look at it. Heck, in the last 5-months it has received 7 updates, and almost every update adds at least one new feature.

Looking through the changelog these are the things that stood out to me the most:

• Support for Internet Explorer 6
• Greasemonkey script support, with several popular ones included such as the YouTube video downloader.
• IE7Pro can update itself with just one-click.
• Autofill function
• Improved plug-in support: IE7Pro includes weather, Alexa/PageRank, and site information plug-ins by default. All of those display in the Statusbar as shown in the screenshot below.

And then there is the biggest feature which was just added at the beginning of June: inline spell checking! Just like in Firefox 2 you can have Internet Explorer 7 check the words you type for misspellings. If it finds that you spelled a word incorrectly it will be underlined in red:

The latest version of IE7Pro added spell checker support to both Gmail and Yahoo Mail as well, which is probably the two most popular locations where people would want it. You can even add additional dictionaries to make spell checking in other languages a piece of cake.

I don’t use Internet Explorer very often, but if I did there is no way that I would use it without IE7Pro installed. It adds a lot of functionality that I feel is necessary for Web browsers to have these days, although it does still lack session restoring. I guess IE7 does have session restore capabilities built-in, but it only pops up when you go to close the browser with multiple tabs open:

Thanks to Dark Shroud for pointing out the IE7Pro spell check update in the comments.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Imagine if you will that you’ve got an idea for a program/website that you’re working on, but you’re trying to play around with a bunch of different layouts to see which ones would look the best. What tool do you use to create your mockup? Photoshop? Some expensive program that costs hundreds of dollars? How about a free Firefox extension?

That’s exactly what the Pencil extension was designed for. It has many of the tools needed for fast prototyping of websites, applications, and much more. I for one was shocked at just how much stuff it included:

• Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
• Multi-page document with background page
• On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
• PNG rasterizing
• Undo/redo supports
• Installing user-defined stencils
• Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…
• Cross-platforms
• Adding external objects

Once you launch the Pencil extension after getting it installed the configuration screen will open in a new window. From there it feels like an entirely separate application from Firefox, but it’s really not:

(Click to Enlarge)

I’m sure this type of extension won’t appeal to everyone, but something as simple as this can sure beat trying to tinker with heavy graphics applications for jobs that should normally be simple. And how can you beat the price? Free!

Pencil Firefox Extension [via Digital Inspiration]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

Tutorial Thursday

Seam carving (also known as content aware image resizing) has been the hit lately when it comes to photo editing. It all started with the presentation by Ariel Shamir who put together a nearly breathtaking demo. In it he showed how scaling images could be done without losing or distorting the important aspects of photos.

Just three weeks ago we got a glimpse of what an implemented version of such a technology could actually do, and as expected, applications and plugins are popping up all over that make use of the technology. This article will focus on one free application called Liquid Resize that has made huge progress over the last few weeks. Below we’ll highlight some of the features, and you can watch a video we put together on how to use the program.

–Liquid Resize (Free Windows/Linux Application)–

The primary way that you’ll want to use seam carving is with the free program called Liquid Resize. It has almost everything that the original demonstration included, and it produced decent results from the few photos I tried. It’s available for both Windows and Linux, and doesn’t require any installation to begin using it!

Here are some of the features it has:

• Increase or decrease the size of the image using the seam carving algorithm.
• Animate the process of scaling the images (as seen in the video demonstration below).
• Mark areas of the photo that you want to be removed first, and other areas that you want to be removed last. This is actually pretty easy to do because the program offers a resizable brush to designate the respective areas (called masks).
  • You can temporarily store and recall masks, which is important because the masks are removed once you begin resizing the image.
  • You can also save and load masks which is meant for more long term storage.
• Zooming capabilities are a nice touch if you’re working with a large photo.
• A “Reset” option to restore the original image.

I would say that this works pretty well, and it’s actually not a bad way to quickly crop someone out of a photo (by marking the person as an area to be removed first). Sometimes you get unexpected results, but it’s normally only if you try to resize a photo more than 50% of the original size. And be careful when trying to use this on large images because the process can take quite awhile, and in cases like that I would disable the animation.

Here is a video that I put together to show the Liquid Resizer in action:

–Other Alternatives–

Liquid Resizer is the best seam carving app that I’ve come across, and it’s especially nice since it’s free! There are a few less-detailed alternatives available, and so I thought I would present those as well:

• GIMP Liquid Rescale plugin – This just gives you input options for the desired width and height, and then makes the appropriate changes. Definitely not as extravagant as the standalone program I mentioned above.
• Picutel Photoshop plugin – I didn’t actually try this one out because the free version only works with images up to a resolution of 640×480. Beyond that you’ll have to pay a whopping $95 for the plugin!
• Web-based Flash version – This is a nice way to quickly try out the seam carving, but you’ll have to pick a photo that is already online. This is also extremely limited in what you can do.

–Overview–

There are still some things that I would like to see Liquid Resizer do, such as “blur” the seams that it adds/removes to the photos. That way the edges wouldn’t always look so jagged. Other than that I would say that this technique definitely has a good future in image resizing, and I can’t wait to see where it is taken.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 29, 2009 by CyberNet.

At work I use Outlook to manage my email and calendar, but I was looking for a way to sync my calendar with Google. It wasn’t that long ago that Google decided to release an Outlook syncing tool so that you’re able to do exactly what I wanted. Well, almost what I wanted.

The only problem I was having was that it wanted to sync with the default calendar on my account. I use the default calendar for personal stuff, and I didn’t really want the two intermingled. Similarly I wanted to leave my personal calendar as the default since that is what I add the most events to.

So how could I get around this problem? I was casually talking with a friend and I brought up how unbelievable it is that Google wouldn’t give you the option to pick which calendar you want to sync with. This kind of thing seems like a no-brainer to me, but it’s ultimately their product and they’re the ones calling the shots. He ran into the same issue, and his workaround was rather clever.

What he does is use two Google accounts: one is his primary account and the other is a secondary account dedicated solely for work events and appointments. He syncs Outlook with the secondary account, and then shares that calendar (both read and write access) with his primary account. Pretty clever. Here’s a breakdown for those of you that like pretty numbered lists:

1. Create an extra Google Calendar account, or you can just reuse one of the many you probably have already.
2. Share the default calendar from the secondary account (a.k.a. the work account) with your primary account. This can be done in the Google Calendar settings, and you’ll want to be sure to give the user both read and write access to the calendar.
3. Download the Google Sync tool, and get it installed on your machine. Configure it to use the secondary account that you just created.

That’s all there is to it. Once you’ve completed those steps you will be proudly syncing your Outlook Calendar to the non-default Google Calendar located on your primary account. It might sound like more work than it’s worth, but I guess it all depends how badly you want this kind of setup. Really though, it only takes a few minutes to get it going.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Secure and safe Web browsing is undoubtedly hard to come by these days. We’ve introduced two great pieces of software that will help keep your browsing safe, and we have yet another. About two-weeks ago Ashley wrote about a nifty little program called BufferZone that prevented things you downloaded from leaving the “buffer zone.” We have also done another post about using Tor-enabled browsers to ensure your anonymity while on the Internet. Both of those solutions are really great…and now we have one that is kinda a cross between the two!

Meet LivePC by moka5! It is a great concept that I am sure will continue to become more popular. LivePC utilizes VMware Player so that you can run a virtual PC on your existing operating system without needing to find, download, and configure a bunch of things. This means you can do a lot more with your Windows machine in just a few clicks!

There is a “Garage” for the LivePC’s that people have uploaded and already configured for you. There is everything from a Kid Safe Desktop all the way to a Fearless Browser. Heck, you can even try out the OS that is shipping on the computers for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

What we want to focus on today is the Fearless Browser LivePC. It has several great features to make your Web browsing safer, more secure, and anonymous:

• Completely anonymized browsing using Tor
• Key storage inside the virtualized disk
• Linux-based environment for security
• Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email client with Enigmail
• GAIM Instant Messenger with Encryption
• Automatic use of OpenDNS for phishing protection and fast DNS lookups
• Flash player 9 support

The Fearless Browser is not restricted to just a Web browser, but also includes a mail client and an instant messenger. So how long will it take you to download this? Well, the download for the actual application is 30MB and then if you’re wanting to download the Fearless Browser, that will be an additional 100MB. However, the initial download for Fearless Browser is only about 4KB because the LivePC will download it when you actually want to use it. This is all done from the application’s main control panel:

Once it finishes downloading you’ll be able to start doing all of the things you love to do the most on the Internet, but a lot safer! Here is a screenshot of what it looked like after I had it up and running:

Even though this is running Linux you can’t actually access any of the Control Panel options or anything that you might be used to. They have really locked it down so that it is both secure and small. I had no problems getting this running since VMware does a great job of integrating the virtual PC with your current operating system, so my experience with using the Fearless Browser was remarkable.

There is also another instance where this could be extremely useful. Think about those people who aren’t very familiar with PC’s and all they want to do is browse the Internet and chat with friends. This is perfect for them because it has everything built-in that they would be using on the Internet…and you won’t have to worry about them getting infected with a virus or spyware.

My only complaint with it is that it still has Firefox 1.5.0.7 installed, and I think Firefox 2 would be much better and even more secure. Since it is so locked down I haven’t found a way to be able to update it, but from the looks of it they do a good job of keeping it updated.

Live PC Homepage
Fearless Browser Homepage

Thanks for the tip Pasch!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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