Hasta La Gadget!

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

There has been all kinds of controversy in the Digg arena the past week with two big companies, Dell and Yahoo, both creating Digg-like sites to receive user feedback. While both sites credited Digg for their style, Yahoo! decided to leave things alone and not mention anything else about subject…after all they didn’t want to try and feed the fire. Dell, however, wanted to make sure that the public knew their intentions were not to compete with Digg:

Dell IdeaStorm is not a news site. Its purpose is to allow customers to voice and discuss ideas that they’d like to see. We are not building a Digg competitor and have no intention to do so.

The thing that makes this whole thing so funny in my mind is that these are just feedback/suggestion sites! Sure they are being released by these large corporations but they aren’t trying to pull users away from the Digg community. In fact, they probably won’t even get that much traffic. So maybe the Digg crowd should focus on some of the real Digg-clones…

Pligg is a piece of software that you run on a server to create a community driven site similar to Digg. The funny thing is that this software is being used all over the Web with other people hoping to create the next Digg. The default theme has a really nice appearance to it that gives a site a nice look out-of-the-box, and far enough away from Digg’s default look that it shouldn’t be much of a problem (test out the default theme with the Pligg Demo here). However, there are always some people out there who want to create Digg sites that look so much like the original Digg that you will have to do a double take. One example that we had previously mentioned is SuperGu which had a similar layout to Digg and even sported a Digg Spy clone. Now there is a new Pligg theme in town I reckon that it wants to be just like Digg:

Even though that is in Chinese I’m sure you can see the resemblance to the original Digg site. There is an English version of the theme available (download mirror) so anyone can make their own site that looks just like Digg. Unfortunately I didn’t see a demo available of this theme so I am just using the screenshot that the theme developer posted, but it is probably exactly what it looks like.

I’m not sure if Digg can really do anything about this theme being made available since they don’t have a copyright on the site’s style, but I’m sure the Digg crowd would give a lashing if they found out about this.

Download the Digg-like Theme for Pligg (Mirror)

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This article was written on February 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

I am all about freeware that gets the job done, and the free application that I am about to talk about definitely gets the job done! It’s a brilliant program that offers a wide range of features you wouldn’t normally find on your Windows computer. Let me introduce to you DM2 (Download Mirror)!

Before I get started I’ll let you know that the program doesn’t have to be installed! Yep, I always love freeware programs that you can just download and run without having to install…and this is one of those. So don’t be hesitant to try it out yourself, and I’m sure you won’t be once you see all of these features:

• Minimize to Tray – This is probably a feature that a lot of you will love. DM2 can minimize almost any application to the System Tray to clear up some room. TrayDevil did this as well, but I think I actually like the configurability and feature set that DM2 offers which you’ll see in the rest of this list.
  
• Minimize to Floating Window – This is a really unique feature that I haven’t seen before. Basically, you can make DM2 minimize a window to a small floating icon so that it can still be accessed rather quickly, but takes up virtually no room. You can then choose whether the little icon is always on top or gets hidden behind other windows. Check out what one of the icons looks like:
  
• Hide a Window – This will completely hide a window from both the System Tray and the Taskbar so that you won’t be cluttering up anything. Go on, I know you’re begging to know how you get the windows back then…from the DM2 System Tray right-click menu:
  
• Always on Top – This will help ensure that a particular window will always remain on top of other windows. Not the most advanced feature, but one that should undoubtedly be included with Windows.

• Transparent Windows – Making any window transparent is always a cool thing. Well, maybe not always, but with DM2 you can assign a hotkey so that adjusting the window transparency is always just a click away.
  
• Quick Access Menu – The DM2 menu is where all of the fun happens. You can access it by right-clicking on a window’s titlebar which will give you access to some of the features you might have been looking for, including transparency adjustments and minimizing the window to the Tray or floating icon.
  
• Align Window – Quickly position a window in one of several common places on the screen. This can come in handy when you’re trying to organize multiple windows that you have open at the same time.
  
• Resize Window – Resize a window to a preset size or to a certain percentage of what it is currently at.
  
• Open/Save Dialog Favorite Locations – This is a pretty cool feature. When you go to open or save a file I’m sure there is just a handful of different directories that you save your files to. With DM2 you’re able to customize a list of directories that will be accessible through a menu on the Open/Save dialog that pops up.
  

The program is  highly configurable as well, and instead of taking screenshots of all the options it offers, I thought I would just point you to the page they have already setup for the settings. It describes the different features that can be configured in a lot more detail than I was planning to do. A quick glance at that page and you’ll realize what I’m talking about.

Now I do have to give the developer of DM2 a lot of credit, because almost all of the features work flawlessly in Windows Vista. The only thing that didn’t function 100% correctly was assigning actions to the right-click option for the Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons. Yep, you can actually assign events to the buttons when you right click on them, such as minimizing to the tray, but in Windows Vista some of them didn’t work. For example, I couldn’t Alt+Right Click on the close button.

Besides that, the program was absolutely amazing. I was expecting this to have a lot of problems with Vista, but it somehow managed to work great. Not only that but the plugins that it also comes with worked great (for doing things like rolling up windows to just their titlebar).

I highly recommend that you give this application a shot if you haven’t already. The feature set that it offers is a lot better than other applications that I have come across, and I’m sure you’ll find at least one thing to be useful!

DM2 Homepage
DM2 Download via SourceForge
DM2 Download Mirror

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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

Web Browser Wednesday

Google Maps is hands down my favorite online mapping service because it has a simplistic design, which in the end makes it load extremely fast. Not only that but they offer features not found on other mapping services, including Street View, Wikipedia integration, and even walking directions.

Naturally when there is a great web service people will start making Firefox extensions that take full advantage of it, and that’s exactly what’s happened with Google Maps. Below we’ve got our top 5 Firefox extensions that push Google Maps (and some other mapping services) to the limits.

–CyberSearch (Homepage)–

CyberSearch is the advanced Google Search extension that we’ve created, and one of the services it supports is Google Maps. What this gives you is full access to the Google Maps database right from the Firefox 3 address bar. When searching for a location it will also provide the address and phone number right there in the title, and clicking on a result will take you to the Google Maps page.

–GDirections (Homepage)–

This extension is pretty simple because all it does is provide a context menu entry to pull up a highlighted address on Google Maps. Just select an address on the screen, right-click on it, go to GDirections and choose the map option. You can also go into the preferences and customize up to three default home/from addresses so that you can get quick directions.

Note: This extension also works with Yahoo! Maps.

–All Your Maps Are Belong To Us (Homepage)–

Not much to see here. This extension pretty much does everything in the background without you ever noticing. Anytime it recognizes a URL pointing to another mapping service (like Yahoo!) it will automatically reroute the links to point to Google Maps. There’s no list of what services it supports, but Yahoo is definitely one of them.

–Mini Map Sidebar (Homepage)–

Do all of your mapping right from the Firefox sidebar with the Mini Map extension. This has an incredible interface setup to navigate, search, and obtain directions all from the comfort of your Firefox sidebar. Plus mapping an address is as simple as dragging and dropping it into the dropzone located below the maps.

Note: This extension also works with Yahoo! Maps.

–Locator (Homepage)–

This is actually very similar to the Mini Map extension mentioned above, but instead of opening in the sidebar it opens in either a new tab or new window. I actually prefer to have the map open in a new tab so that I have a much larger viewing area available to me, and that’s the primary reason I’ve chosen to use this extension over Mini Map.

To get a map of an address all you have to do is highlight the address on the page, right-click, and then use the “Locate on Google Map” option to have it open a map for you.

–Overview–

As you can see there are a variety of different extensions available that put the full power of Google Maps right at your fingertips. Plus the fact that they make getting a map just a click away can save you a ton of time.

If you’ve got a favorite Google Maps extension be sure to let us know in the comments!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on September 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Back in February Firefox hit 300 million downloads, and now 7-months later it is rolling the counter over again as they hit 400 million downloads! Of course that is the number of downloads the browser has, and doesn’t actually represent the number of users. Actually Mozilla recently posted information regarding things they’re trying to do to improve their user retention rate, and the graph they provided implies that they have around 40 million daily users…just 10% of the number of downloads.

Now it is time to go onward and upward! April 15th, 2008 is my estimated date that Firefox will hit 1/2 billion downloads. And we should see 1 trillion downloads sometime in the year 8049 if their current growth rate continues.

Congrats to Mozilla and the Firefox team! Keep up the great work, and I’m looking forward to Firefox 3 which is expected later this year.

Get Firefox
Source: CNet

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on July 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

One feature that Firefox users typically miss when transitioning over to Opera is the "View Selection Source" option. In Firefox this is used to view the HTML source code of a specific area on the page. For example, let’s say that you are visiting our site and see a Google Video that you want to embed on your own site. In Firefox you could highlight that video (and maybe some of the surrounding text), right click on the area, and choose the View Selection Source option. Firefox would then display the source code of the page and highlight the code corresponding to the text/video you highlighted.

This is extremely useful to both developers and casual users because it can save you from sifting through thousands of lines of HTML code looking for one specific part. At times it can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

If you’re using Opera you’ve probably noticed that this feature doesn’t exist in the right-click menu. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done though! Web Kitchen put together a bookmarklet that you can use to display the source code of a selected area. All you have to do is open this page, copy the text, and paste it into the address field of a new bookmark. It should look like this:

Then anytime you want to use it just highlight some text on the page and click the bookmark. Alternatively you can place this in the right-click menu, but it will take a few additional steps. Information on doing that can be found here.

I was rather surprised at how well this worked, and it filled one of the few empty voids that Opera has. There are also some things that you can configure, such as the window height or width, since the source code opens in a popup window. Heck, you can even choose the color schemes that are used for the syntax highlighting!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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