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Firefox Extensions revisited

Jul 13

Posted by admin in freeware, none | 2 Comments

Firefox (currently 3.5) is my favorite browser. I use it for hours every day, and I could barely manage without it. It has one big advantage over all the other browsers out there – extensions. No other browser has the same community, the same wealth of extensions that firefox has. If you need to do something that firefox doesn't do, chances are there's an extension out there for you.

I've listed my fave extensions before, but on re-reading it recently I realised that it does change a fair bit from year to year.

The Old Reliables:

  • Adblock Plus & Adblock Filterset.G Updater
  • Download Statusbar – puts progress indicators for downloads in the status bar.
  • Firebug – debug javascript
  • PDF Download – download PDF files instead of trying to open them.

I can't imagine ever not needing those four. Google basically included 2 & 3 in chrome, even tho the focus is on a stripped down browser. Absolutely essential.

The Fallen

  • faviconize Tab -  just don't find myself using it that often anymore. Prism has seen my most regular windows move to their own processes
  • All-in-One Gestures – mouse gestures are cool, but once I became more laptop centric I found them very hard to do on a touchpad
  • SmartBookmarks – I don't care about bookmarks anymore. I save some important work stuff at work, but I hardly ever use bookmarks at home, except for on the toolbar.
  • Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – see above.
  • Piclens – Now called CoolIris I think. Still very cool but I never used it enough.
  • All-in-One Sidebar – I used to do things in the sidebar but I can't for the life of me remember what they were anymore
  • Web Developer – viewing CSS can be handy, but its one toolbar too many

The Newbs

  • Downthemall – download manager which can't be beaten. Indispensible
  • FoxTab – A cool graphic tab manager like safari is always bragging about. rarely used, I doubt i'll still have it come this time next year
  • GoogleGears – More of a plugin really but it comes up as an extension
  • Fission – turns the Location bar into a progress bar
  • Growl/GNTP – extension to add growl (for windows) support to firefox
  • LocationBar2 – linkifies sections of URLs in your location bar
  • Personal Menu – hides the top menus (file view etc) and puts them in a button on the side of the location bar. with a custom menu
  • Prism – The best thing since sliced bread. Turn oft used websites (hint – GMAIL) into separate web apps!
  • Source Viewer Tab – view the source in a tab next to the window, chrome style
  • Ubiquity – command line web stuff – my most common uses are defining, googling or wiki-ing words, or mapping things.

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Rocketdock and Taskswitch

Jul 13

Posted by admin in freeware, none | No Comments

Two more productivity apps that I find very useful

RocketDock
http://www.rocketdock.com

A windows version of the dock application based on the Mac dock. Except its better because its on windows of course. =)

If you’ve ever seen the Mac dock you’ll know what to expect. You can add icons to the dock, and also folders of icons using the Stacks Docklet (a separate download, here). In fact there are all kinds of addons available on the site, although most are fairly simple stuff, usually just adding a shutdown button or some other trivial function.

Rocketdock also shows your minimized tasks, and I can happily report it works very well with previously blogged app miniMize.

Apple recently won a legal battle to patent the dock, so it may not be around forever, as they’ll no doubt try and keep it exclusive to macs. hopefully by that stage the geniuses behind XGL or Bumptop will have created some ingenious new way to interact with our PCs.

TaskSwitch XP
(http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp/download.html)

Even with miniMize and RocketDock, you’ll still need to alt-tab occasionally (sometimes its just more instinctive). TaskSwitchXP replaces the default alt-tab menu with a much better one, which allows sticky mode (the menu stays on the screen until you pick something with the mouse) and is super-customisable.

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Get Full Windows 7 Taskbar in XP in 3 Steps

May 28

Posted by admin in freeware, none | No Comments

I’ve blogged about some of the bits of this before, but just for convenience sake, here’s all the steps together.

1. Open up regedit and go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

Create a new String Value called MinWidth and set the value to -255.

2. Right click on the taskbar, and click properties, tick ‘Group Similar taskbar buttons’ and click OK

3. Install Visual Task Tips from http://www.visualtasktips.com/ and log off/on again.

Here’s a Screenshot of your resulting Windows XP Super Taskbar in action:

windows_7_bar_in_xp

The Windows 7 bar also allows programs to show up little submenus with actions. This feature has been much talked about as a brilliant new addition to the taskbar in Windows 7, but it is already possible in XP. Not many apps seem to support it, but it can be done, as demonstrated by the lovely J River Media Jukebox:

windows7_taskbar_2_jukebox

One Missing Feature

The first screenshot above is showing two instances of chrome, rather than two tabs in chrome. This is one advantage windows 7 has over this. Until someone writes an XP util that duplicates this functionality (which, lets face it, will likely never happen) then we’re stuck with only showing window instances.

One Unfortunate Side Effect

Windows minimized in Photoshop CS3 (and probably other versions) seem to inherit the width from the MinWidth value, so you may come across this problem:

windows7_taskbar_3_photoshop 
I can’t find a way around it except to access these windows via the window menu, if anyone comes across a fix let me know.

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Windows 7 Taskbar Hack

May 6

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This is a picture of my current taskbar.

cluttered task bar

As you can see I’ve applied a hack which removes the text from each item on the taskbar, similar to the Windows 7 super bar (or whatever its called). It’s a registry hack. The thing I love about registry hacks is that they’re overhead free. I didn’t have to install any extra program to make this work. Here’s what you do:

1. Go into Regedit and find the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

2. Create a new String value, name it MinWidth and set it to -255

3. Restart (or log off and log on again)

Simple!

Although we’ve installed nothing, we could now install VisualTaskTips (http://www.visualtasktips.com), which would give us a windows 7 style preview of any item we hover over in the taskbar.

Coincidentally, I’ve been experimenting with using Taskbar Shuffle to colour code my taskbar icons during particularly long sessions.

I know it sounds daft, but I have this theory that when we look for an icon for a program, we identify by colour first. Thus, if we need firefox, our eye is drawn to the orange / red hues at the end of the taskbar, and we find it faster. It also looks way better:

ordered task bar

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Receiving a Bluetooth file in XP

May 5

Posted by admin in freeware, none | 2 Comments

Whenever I take a pic with my camera phone, transferring a file is as easy as right clicking on the bluetooth icon in the taskbar, sending the file and clicking 'next' on the Bluetooth dialog. Microsoft have made it wonderfully simple to transfer a file to your PC from a bluetooth device.

Transferring lots of files, however, is a different story. by the time your on the 5th or so file, you'll be getting fairly tired of right clicking on tray icons.

I put the following command in my autohotkey script, using WIN + SHIFT + B as the shortcut key.

%windir%\system32\fsquirt.exe -receive

Now if I want to transfer ten photos, I hit WIN+SHIFT+B ten times, ten dialogs spring up, and I can fire away all my photos from the phone end.

PS: fsquirt? Who thinks up the names for these things?

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Mp3Split 0.9.1

Apr 25

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http://www.merlinsoftware.com/free.htm

Sometimes you need to split a large mp3 file into parts. Sometimes. But you never remember the last program you used, and you end up downloading 5 things that don't do what you need them to.

This splits large mp3s into auto named files at a length of your choosing. That's it. No frills, its this easy.

step 1
drag mp3 to window

step 2
choose length of segments (I chose 10 minutes each)

step 2a. (optional)
have it stick all the files in the same folder, or pick a folder

step 3
click 'Split Files'

It'll even do multiple files in one go, to their respective folders. Go Mp3Split!

Rory

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ProcessTamer

Jan 7

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http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html

I used to use this app all the time a few years back, and I thought I no longer needed it until yesterday.

Picture the scene: You have a pile of windows open, working on lots of stuff, some saved, some not. Suddenly, your PC locks up. nothing will respond. The mouse barely moves. Windows will not redraw. CTRL + ALT + DEL seems to offer help, but once you click on 'Task Manager' the whole process just repeats, and we lock up again.  So what do you do? Sit there and hope for the best? Restart?

Well if you've already installed ProcessTamer, this might not happen at all in the first place. Process Tamer simply watches for system processes (programs) which are hogging too much of the CPU and reduces their priority.

In the early days of Firefox memory leaks, I found this hugely useful. Ever since firefox 3, I haven't had a need for it. But yesterday, I downloaded a piece of software to interface with my Sony Ericsson phone which completely crapped out and hung my system. Only through patient clicking and waiting did I manage to kill the process, and even then it took over 10 minutes to do.

Process Tamer is a tiny piece of software, with a tiny memory footprint, which you may never have to use in your entire computing life. However, if you ever do need it, you'll be very thankful for it.

PS: Just an additional tip here, on the same subject. I've seen a lot of people complain that their system is running slow because something called 'System Idle Process' is at 99%. People wrongly assume that these are background windows tasks hogging all the resources. In fact, System Idle Process is a process who's only job is to keep the CPU running when nothing else needs it. I don't know the exact technical reasons, but the CPU needs to be kept working constantly, if not intensely. If you ever see System Idle Process running at close to 99%,
it means that your system resources are almost 100% available, and nothing else is using them.

Update:

Looks like I already posted about ProcessTamer back when I started this blog! Whoops…

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Remove Windows Media Player Shell Integration

Sep 9

Posted by admin in freeware, none | No Comments

Even though you probably don't use Windows Media Player (especially now that you've found J River Media Jukebox and Songbird ) you'll no doubt have those shell extensions every time you right click on a media file. You know the ones. Play this with media player. Add this to media player playlist. 
Want to get rid of them? Its this easy

Start > Run > regsvr32 /u wmpshell.dll 


Yes. Really. 

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Songbird 0.7

Aug 22

Posted by admin in freeware, none | No Comments

http://www.songbirdnest.com
Windows/Linux/OSX

SongBird is the mediaplayer that I would be using if I hadn't found J River Media Jukebox. In fact, if I had been just a few months late finding it, I might have stopped looking for media players altogether.

SongBird is a unique media player based on the firefox codebase. It's biggest claim to fame is the inbuilt web-browser and related functions it includes. It utilises the mozilla model of add-ons and skins which can be downloaded from within the player itself. These include everything from ad-blockers to lyrics downloaders. It can also connect to a variety of free (legal) music sites and allows you to download files.

This is the key feature that sets SongBird apart from other media players, and an advantage it holds even over Media Jukebox. If you visit a music blog in SongBird, a bar popups along the bottom listing all the media files that this site directly links to. Think of it as a pre-emptive version of firefox download manager. It prompts you to show you what you can download, letting you visit your fave music sites and pull down the new content with the greatest of ease. This could be a very useful feature, and it's something I'd love to be using regularly, but alas I'm fairly static in my music tastes these days. The more adventurous amongst you will like it.

SongBird is in beta (version 0.7) and the design has been overhauled from the last iteration. It's now much cleaner and clearer than before, and models itself on a sort of industrial version of iTunes. It's also a boatload faster, which is very important as one of the big drawbacks of the early versions was the sluggish feel to things and the tendency to crash.

It's not perfect, in that it lacks the custom views of JukeBox, it doesn't (to my knowledge) sync to any devices, and it's got no equaliser of any kind, although one is apparently in the pipeline. Having said that, it's a lot better than most of the media players out there, and it's still only in beta. Its also available to linux and OSX users, which Jukebox is not. This fact pushes it in to that growing mass of essential apps which are available cross platform.

If you're on linux or OSx, if for some reason you didn't like Media Jukebox, or if you're just curious, check out SongBird 0.7

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J River Media Jukebox

Aug 19

Posted by admin in freeware, none | 2 Comments

http://www.mediajukebox.com//

Let me tell you a story.

One day, about a year and a half ago, I decided that winamp was no longer the media player for me. I needed something more – something better. I needed something that could catalog my vast collection of MP3s and let me visualise it in a better way. And other stuff.

It's probably that 'And other stuff' which almost killed me. I tried a whole boatload of media players – Winamp 3, Winamp 5, VLC, Media-Monkey, iTunes, Windows Media Player 9, 10 and 11, 1by1, Foobar2000, aTunes, MusicCube, Mp3toys, MusicMatch Jukebox – and none came close to satisfying my thirst for control of my media collection. Well that's not technically true. I was happy with foobar for about 2 months – but each one I tried I eventually tired of.  I even considered writing my own media player at one point, but before I could, I found J River Media Jukebox.

Initially, Jukebox had come up several times in searches, but I dismissed it based on the name. I figured J River sounded like a cheap knock-off of iRiver, and it was probably a spyware loaded piece of shit. I was so far wrong.

J River is, in a word, PERFECT. Everytime you think of some other feature it could have, you find that feature. It catalogs your entire music database, watches folders, manages portable devices, makes smart playlists (like 'most played', 'last listened','random 100 songs'), allows you to add shortcuts to things all over the place, includes a web-browser, does all kinds of DSP effects, Burns CDs, rips CDs, Converts audio formats, connects to last.fm, imports album art…

I could keep going, but you get the idea. It does everything you need, it does it cleanly, it does it well, and it does it fast.

But my favorite function of J River Media Jukebox is the 'View Schemes' it uses instead of folders. Basically, it allows you to add custom views to the side bar which auto sort/group your music by tag. So for instance, I have a view for disk location, one for keywords (so I can find all my soundtracks at once),  one for file-type, one for genre, and most importantly a combo one for album artist / album – this means it sorts by artist EXCEPT where the track is on an album with multiple artists – then it sorts it under (various). It might sound trivial, but its the exact kind of attention to detail which makes great software.

If you've ever been frustrated with the Winamps and iTunes of this world, I urge you to give Media Jukebox a try.



EDIT:

I had the wrong URL at the top there, it was linking to J River Media CENTER, which is a different product. There is a 30 day trial, but it’s not available for free like jukebox is (they have to make money somehow). The correct URL for jukebox (now fixed at the top of the post) is http://www.mediajukebox.com/

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