Jul 19

Spread Firefox 2 Preview – Way Better!

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on November 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

Spread Firefox 2 Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Quality Assurance leader, announced a preview of the Spread Firefox 2 site that will be the future home to all Firefox enthusiasts out there. The new site is still based on Drupal, which offers a powerful and secure platform for them to share and mange their content on.

If my memory serves me correctly the current Spread Firefox site hasn’t changed since it launched back in 2004. There’s no need to say that it is definitely starting to show its age, and the new site has numerous improvements that make it more pleasing on the eyes.

Mozilla decided to shift the focus a bit for the new Spread Firefox 2. Instead of making the site revolve around member blogs the new version puts more emphasis on the projects and contests that are currently going on. Naturally this makes more sense, and I’m glad they decided to make the adjustment.

And while you’re spreading Firefox don’t forget to tip people off on our very own Learn Firefox ( RSS Feed)! There have been hundreds of guides and extension reviews posted over there to help both new and experienced users alike.

Preview Spread Firefox 2

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Jul 19

Meebo Brings IM to Firefox Web Browser

Posted in: Firefox Extensions, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on October 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

meebo messages Meebo has just launched a new Firefox extension so that you can instant message right from the sidebar of your browser. While this makes it convenient to have access to your favorite IM clients like AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber, there are a few things that could be improved to make this extension even better. Seeing as this is their first extension though, I think you’ll be impressed with what it offers.

Once you install the extension (download here), you’ll be able to select which chat client you’d like to sign into.  Once you sign-in, a new Meebo tab will automatically open in your browser. This is where all of your chat windows will be. When I mentioned that Meebo could certainly improve on a few things, this is one of them.  It would be nice if you could keep the chat window open in the sidebar, or maybe even have your conversations tabbed right along with your other opened tabs in the browser instead of having all your conversations opened in the one Meebo tab. The current setup is almost like just going to their site to chat, but you have the convenience of being able to view all of your contacts in the sidebar which is always open.

meebo extension

While there are some improvements that need to be made, it does have some great features, so lets take a look. Using the Meebo extension, you can chat with a group of people, send a file, view chat logs, and view a user’s profile. There’s also an automatic sign-on feature that will sign you in when you open the browser.  Meebo alerts will let you know when you have a new message if you’re viewing another tab. If you’re on a different tab and you receive a message, the tab will flash, but you’ll also see a red bubble next to the persons name in the sidebar displaying how many new messages you have from them.

Overall it’s a really great extension, and a nice addition from Meebo to make chatting easy no matter where you are.

Thanks for the tip Radu!

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Jul 19

GroupBar Opens Grouped Applications With One Click

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 11, 2006 by CyberNet.

GroupBar
If you’re looking for an alternative for managing your windows, GroupBar, a free application designed for Windows XP is a good solution. This application makes it easy to group applications together.gHacks gives an example of grouping Firefox, an email client, and your instant messenger together. After they’ve been grouped together they can be started and minimized from the sidebar at once. This would be useful for those programs you use everyday like the ones mentioned, and the ones that you always use together. Groupbar doesn’t have to be installed, rather just download it and start GroupBar.exe.

News Source: LifeHacker

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Jul 19

Finding a Cheat Sheet for…Everything

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

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

PHP Cheat SheetI love cheat sheets because my memory, well, sucks. If I’m programming I often need to look up information, but most of the time all I need is something to get the juices flowing in my head. That’s where cheat sheets come in.

The first place that I always look for the cheat sheets is at ILoveJackDaniels.com who, despite the odd name, has some of the most comprehensive cheat sheets available. Unfortunately they only have about 15 available, but they are on the most important topics including HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and even World of Warcraft.

Thanks to TechTarget, it is now easy to find cheat sheets for nearly anything. Actually "anything" is an understatement because their list is extremely long. They’ve got cheat sheets for DOS, Linux, browsers, and almost all programming languages. Unfortunately the cheat sheets aren’t all in the nice printing format that you would expect, but that doesn’t mean they are not useful. You’ll also notice that any cheat sheet in PDF format is specified next to the title, and that is normally a good thing because it will retain the nice formatting when printing (as opposed to some of the sloppy HTML cheat sheets listed).

If you find any cheat sheets that are really useful let me know in the comments, because I like having them around for when I need them.

Source: Lifehacker

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Jul 18

Jedi Concentrate + WPM = Something Interesting?

Posted in: Newly Released, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on October 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

Jedi Concentrate WPM

We mentioned the Jedi Concentrate application a few days ago from the App-A-Day blog and it is a really clever concept. It lets you dim everything except for the current application that you have open so that you can focus on it a little better. Someone decided to take it a step further by combining it with the Words Per Minute (WPM) program that App-A-Day also created.

By bringing those two together the new program will automatically dim the background as soon as you are typing more than 40 words per minute. It is pretty cool but I think a lot of people probably don’t type that fast and if you constantly pause while you type then it could get annoying. I think that once you hit the 40 words per minute it should lock-in the setting until the user disables it. Otherwise it starts to feel like you are on a website with one of those annoying flashing ad banners.

Don’t hesitate to download and try the program because there is no installation required. You simply extract the ZIP file and run the program…and if you don’t like it you can delete it with no harm done.

Download Jedi Concentrate WPM
News Source: App-A-Day Blog

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Jul 18

Solipskier, Osmos, and Others Collectively Raise Over $35k for Charity

Posted in: Games, iPhone, open source, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on January 04, 2011 by CyberNet.

iphone game sale.png

Remember a few weeks ago when we told you about the six independent iPhone game developers that were teaming up to raise money for charity ? They each put their games on sale, dropped the price down to the sweet $0.99 price tag, and pledged to give 1/3rd of their of their sales (after Apple’s cut) to Child’s Play Charity. The sale was only supposed to go until December 31st, but they decided to extend it to January 2nd because it was so successful.

The deadline has come, and they managed to scoop up some publicity along the way. Sites like Boing Boing, Kotaku, Joystiq, TUAW, and CNET all helped spread the word about the game sale. Engadget even included the Solipskier game in their list of just 6 games that new iPad owners should buy. Oh, and I’m sure it didn’t hurt that actress Felicia Day tweeted out to her 1.7 million Twitter followers that she “CAN’T STOP PLAYING THIS: Solipskier.“

The six games, Canabalt, Solipskier, Spider, Osmos, Eliss, and Drop7 raised $35,134 for Child’s Play Charity, and here’s a snippet about what the charity looks to accomplish with the donations they receive:

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over 7 million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

Amazing, huh? In some related news, Canabalt also released the source code of their game and made it all available for download. That’s kind of like the cherry on top of all this.

Congrats to all the developers involved… you’ll be making a lot of kids happy with your donation!

IndieSale Homepage

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Jul 18

Pligg Starts Looking Even More Like Digg V3

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 10, 2006 by CyberNet.

Pligg Starts Looking Even More Like Digg V3

All kinds of excitement was stirred up when Digg launched there newest update, v3, less then 2-months ago. It really made a lot of the Digg-clone sites look like old news but now they are turning up the heat again! Pligg is free and will make it easy to make your own Digg-like site…and soon you can make it look just like Digg v3.

There are a bunch of screenshots of the upcoming release of Pligg which is scheduled for September 1. Look at the navigation bar on the right-side of the image, it almost looks like it was copied straight from Digg. Of course they won’t be able to match a lot of the great features that Digg already has such as the Digg Stack and Swarm, but who knows what these people will be able to develop over time.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Jul 18

The Visual Identity of Firefox…What’s Right & What’s Wrong

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on January 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Firefox logos are abundant on the Internet but how many of them are actually correct? Some of them are obvious that they are not trying to go along with the standard Firefox icon, but I think you might be surprised at the strict details that Mozilla has in place for distributing their logo. First lets look at what the correct logos look like:

Just the logo with both a white or black background:

Firefox logo

 

The logo with side text:

Firefox Logo with Side Text

 

Now lets look at some of the ones that are not correct and what’s wrong with them, actually, we should make a game out of it. I’ll list the different logos (numbered 1 to 9) and you make a list of what’s wrong with each. Come on, you have done things like this as a kid. ;)

To reveal what is wrong either hover your mouse over the image or scroll down to the bottom where I have listed the answers with the corresponding numbers.


  1.  

  2.  

  3.  

  4.  

  5.  

  6.  

  7.  

  8.  

 

Here are the answers for what’s wrong with each of the above images:

  1. Strong colored background (duh!)
  2. Incomplete logo (it’s gotta have a globe!)
  3. Non-standard orientation and sizing of logo/text
  4. Incorrect logo/text size ratio and position
  5. Missing the shadow (this one was a bit tricky)
  6. Incorrect font color
  7. Incorrect font face
  8. Strong pattered background (you should have learned your lessen from the first image)
  9. Incorrect colors

 

I hope you had some fun with that and even I’ll admit that I couldn’t figure out number 5 without looking at the answer. Be honest…did you figure them all out without cheating?

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Jul 17

Mozilla Sunbird and Lightning 0.5 Available

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

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

Mozilla Sunbird
Click to Enlarge

Mozilla just launched Lightning and Sunbird 0.5 for the calendar users out there. This new version comes a long time after 0.3 was released, and I was almost questioning whether the project was still alive. The full list of changes is actually quite long, so here is an abbreviated version:

  • A polished user interface in the calendar view. Actually that is an understatement…the interface looks a lot better than it did before. They do things like adjust the font color based upon the background color of the calendar. This can be seen in the screenshot above, wehre I have a dark green background so a white font is used, but when the light orange background is applied the font is black. This increases the readability quite a bit.
  • Event invitations can be sent and received via iMIP/iTIP (Lightning only)
  • Working hours are back
  • Automatic migration of data in Sunbird 0.2, iCal.app, and Evolution
  • Much improved printing functionality
  • Better integration of Lightning into Mozilla Thunderbird (Printing, Undo/redo, Copy/paste)
  • Support for Google Calendar (we have some instructions on how to do this). This doesn’t support every feature in Google Calendar, but it will be good enough for most people. One of the biggest drawbacks is that you can’t sync recurring events.

So how do you know whether it is Sunbird or Lightning that you need? Sunbird is a standalone program while Lightning is an extension to Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client. Here’s some advice that should point you in the right direction:

You may prefer Mozilla Sunbird if…

  • you prefer your calendar to be separate from your email client
  • you don’t currently use Mozilla Thunderbird for your email
  • you don’t like adding add-ons (such as extensions or themes) to your applications

You may prefer Lightning if…

  • you send or receive meeting invitations via email
  • you already use Mozilla Thunderbird for email
  • you customize your applications with add-ons (such as extensions or themes)

In my testing of Sunbird, I have noticed that it can be quite a memory hog, although most of the calendar programs that I use are. It consumes anywhere from 60MB to 140MB of memory, which is what I expect from a Web browser…not a calendar.

Other than that it is a really nice application with a ton of settings that you can configure. One tip that might help you out while using the calendar is that you can collapse the sidebar or top bar by dragging it all the way to the edge of the screen. It will eventually reach the point where it snaps closed, and then it can be opened by dragging it back out from the edge.

Download Lightning or Sunbird
Source: Mozilla Calendar Weblog

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Jul 17

Firefox 2 Beta 2 Slips For A Second Time

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 10, 2006 by CyberNet.

Firefox 2 Beta 2 Slips For A Second TimeFirefox 2 Beta 2 has been pushed back another week because there are a lot of bugs that need to be fixed before they can release Beta 2. Some of the bugs have to do with the new visual refresh theme that was implemented last week and also with the new Preferences Window. So the new schedule means the code freeze for Beta 2 will be on August 16th and it will officially be released midday on August 23rd.

If you haven’t heard there is one really serious bug that will continue to push back the release if it cannot be fixed. Here is the description of the problem:

Firefox cannot handle eating 10 Taco Bell Burrito Supremes without vomiting.

Everything starts out rendering correctly, but as time progresses, the
rendering slows down… and then about 90 minutes in, Firefox just barfs.

This is the pre-crash image but it looks like they may have gotten the bug worked out in this image. If you want some really good laughs make sure you read the comments in the bug report. Don’t worry though, there really are legitimate bugs that are blocking Beta 2 from being released :D .

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