Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I am actually surprised at how many times I see people asking whether Firefox needs to have some sort of widget engine built-in. I think a lot of that stems from Opera having the built-in widget handler, so a lot of people think that Firefox is behind in the times as far as this goes.

One of the big reasons that Opera does have this feature is to allow people to add more to the browser since it is not extensible in other ways. For example, there is a widget for Opera that will retrieve and display the weather which is something an extension for Firefox already does. So it is kinda a tradeoff in some sense, but most people prefer to have extensions like Firefox offers over the widgets that Opera has.

Not only that, but you also have to keep in mind that widgets are all over the place already. Both Mac and Windows users can download the Yahoo! Widget Engine that is compatible with thousands of widgets users have already made. Well, Mac users already have a built-in widget system so they probably won’t need to use this and Vista users also have what are called gadgets and they too are the same thing. Widgets are very rapidly becoming more and more part of the operating system.

If you’re really a widget freak and you need to have them in Firefox, then you’ll want to checkout a service called YourMinis. It is yet another personalized homepage but I would say it is just as nice, if not better, than Netvibes. A few months back I started to tinker around with the service and have loved it ever since. What makes it unique?

One of the things I love the most about it is being able to see a view of all my tabs and actually drag-and-drop them from one tab to another. You can get to this view by using the little icon next to the Sign In/Sign Out links in the upper-right corner. It’s really just something you need to play with because you won’t realize quite how cool it is until you try it.

Yeah, I know it is just a website, so why bother mentioning it as a widget handler for Firefox? They actually offer an extension for Firefox that will let you overlay the YourMinis page onto any site that you are currently visiting. It makes the background semi-transparent so that you can still see the page that you were in the process of viewing (pictured to the right).

YourMinis definitely has its perks over a traditional gadget system. One of the biggest that comes to my mind is that your computer is not doing the bulk of the work, so your memory usage won’t be quite so high. In the past I have always been selective with the widgets I choose to use because each one will add more work to my computer. By using YourMinis, my computer can take it a little easier.

Not only that, but I’ll also have my widgets with me wherever I go, which I’m sure is huge for anyone that has more than one computer. It just makes some things so much easier, like checking my 6 different Gmail accounts from one convenient location. Or create a tab just for doing countdowns to upcoming events. With YourMinis you can create as many widgets as you want and you can even use their wonderfully designed feed reader to keep up on the latest news from around the Web.

There is one thing that I have found to be a little distracting with YourMinis though, and that is the load time for the widgets on your personalized page. I recommend creating multiple tabs and dividing up your different widgets, making sure to place only the most important ones on your main tab. Right now when I load the site it can take 15 to 20 seconds to completely load all 11 of my widgets, but after trimming them down to just 5 on my main tab it only takes about 5 seconds to load them.

So to answer the question that this article revolves around…no, Firefox does not need a widget system. I think a very limited number of people would actually use it, so it would hardly be worth the developers’ time to create a feature only a handful of people would use. Widgets are definitely making their way into everyone’s lives, but they don’t need to be built-in to the browser.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on April 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Google Talk is by far my favorite instant messenger to use, but for some reason I never quite understood why they restrict you from starting a conference call. This is a feature I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate, and being able to talk to multiple people simultaneously would be a great addition to the software.

In the meantime however, there is a hack that you can use to do conference calls. It isn’t exactly the prettiest thing in the world because you’re going to have several instances of Google Talk running simultaneously. Here’s how it is done:

1. Find the shortcut that you use to open Google Talk, then right-click on it and go to Properties.
   
2. At the end of the shortcut add /nomutex which is what will let you run multiple instances of the Google Talk Client.
   
3. Now you need to open one Google Talk for each person you want to chat with. That means if you want to have a voice conversation with two other people you will need to run two instances of the client:
   
4. Now just open up a conversation window for all of your friends that you want to talk with at the same time and start chatting.
   

Pretty much the only bad thing about doing this is that everyone will have to do the same thing…so if there are a total of 3 people in the conversation (including yourself) then each person will need to have two instances of Google Talk open.

This is good for more than just conference calling though, this also means that you can sign-in to multiple Google accounts simultaneously. That might be useful if you have a separate account for work and a separate personal account because you can use both simultaneously.

If conference calling is really an important feature that you think Google Talk should have available, then let them know over at the Gmail suggestions page.

Source: IPAhome

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on April 16, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Have you ever erased something from your computer, but were then concerned with whether the information would still be accessible? One situation I can think of is when giving away or selling a computer/hard drive, and the fear that the new owner may try to recover the information that you left behind on the drive.

Utilities like WipeFile are great in these scenarios. Not only is it free, but it’s also portable which means you don’t have to install it if there are just a few files you want to erase. The best part about WipeFile is that you can list out all the directories on your drive that you want to remove, and you can even go as far as to restrict it to certain files based upon name/extension.

After you’ve selected all of the paths you can move on to picking one of the 14 different methods that can be used to securely eliminate the files. One of those methods was designed by Peter Gutmann, which consists of 35 passes that tries to make it economically infeasible for anyone to recover the data that was on the drive. Obviously the more passes the application has to make the longer it will take, but that’s the price we pay for security.

WipeFile Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on July 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mac only
When it comes to managing dual monitors I would say that there are some things that the Mac does better than Windows, while Windows does some things better than the Mac. I’ve used an external monitor with my laptop for years, but in my book neither operating system gets it exactly right.

To elaborate on that the Mac generally has better features for managing your secondary monitor. For example, I can rotate the screen orientation without needing a third-party application or a video card control center installed. The thing that drives me bonkers on a Mac, however, is the fact that the Menubar can only be located on one screen. This isn’t like the Windows Taskbar being located on only one monitor because the Mac Menubar includes all of the application-specific menus. So even though you’re working in an application on monitor #2 you actually have to move your mouse back to monitor #1 to access any of the menus. The only thing you can do is choose which monitor the Menubar appears on.

I went looking around for a solution, and to my surprise I couldn’t find a single application that could duplicate the Menubar on a secondary monitor. The closest thing I found was a free app called DejaMenu that is capable of displaying the contents of the Menubar in a drop-down list, but the only way to initiate it is through a keyboard shortcut. It’s good enough for me:

Windows users don’t have this problem since the menus for each application are stored within the application window. I’m sure you can imagine how unproductive this can make be when you’re frequently moving your mouse back and forth between monitors. On my Mac DejaMenu has saved me a bunch of time because of this.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on August 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

The WordPress development team is on the home stretch to releasing the next milestone! WordPress 2.3 is scheduled for an official release on September 20, and right now they are looking for people to test out the first Beta.

Before we tell you what’s new in WordPress 2.3 we wanted to clarify that this is a Beta release of the blogging platform. It probably shouldn’t be used on any production sites, and the development team has requested that those who participate in the Beta feel "comfortable troubleshooting PHP issues, filing tickets, and backing up your data religiously." Not only that but the new version might possibly break some of your existing plugins.

Okay, here’s a sneak peek at WordPress 2.3 features:

• Tag Posts
  
• Import Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) tags or convert select categories to tags
  
• Improved Post and Draft Management using filters
• Improved publishing workflow with a new post status of Pending Review
• WordPress and plugins upgrades available notification
• Terms tables (combined post categories/link categories/tags)
• Canonicalize more URLs
  
• Upgrade to "800% faster" jQuery (1.1.4), and some parts of the WordPress dashboard have been converted to jQuery.
• MovableType/TypePad and WordPress Importers memory usage has been greatly improved
• Several bundled libraries were updated to the latest versions. TinyMCE is now at 2.1.1.1, Prototype is at 1.5.1, and script.aculo.us is at 1.7.1 beta 2. More updates to script.aculo.us and an update for TinyMCE Spellchecker are on the way.
• The files in wp-admin were reorganized to make things easier to find.

The new tagging system is a bit of a disappointment right now. It’s extremely basic, and I would have liked to see it recommend existing tags based upon the content of the article. Not only that but there is no way to know what tags you’ve already created, which makes it hard to know whether I’ve already created a similar tag.

After WordPress 2.3 is released in about 3-weeks work will begin on the next version. There was some discussion in the mailing list about bumping the version number up to "3." Mark Jaquith, a contributing developer to WordPress, had this to say about WordPress 3:

There is one nice solution for the "marketing problem" that I keep throwing out there every couple months: WordPress 2008. Do it like a sports video game franchise does it. For multiple releases within a year, we can do WordPress 2007.2 or WordPress 2007b. This works well with our new 4-month cycle. And people will be made aware of exactly how long it has been since they’ve upgraded.

The problem with skipping numbers is that before you know it, you’re shipping WordPress 14.5, which just reeks of version inflation. What makes good marketing sense for 2.2-to-3.0 bites you in the ass down the road.

My first choice, though is to stick with 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 until we’re ready to rewrite 50% of the code and really break stuff for a groundbreaking, spoon-bending, mind-blowing 3.0 release.

So don’t expect to see WordPress 3 anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that the development team won’t be adding new features in the upcoming versions. Keeping with their 4-month release schedule, WordPress 2.4 is currently scheduled for December 12, 2007 and WordPress 2.5 is expected on April 1, 2008.

Get WordPress 2.3 Beta 1

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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