Firefox addons, and why they're great (Part 2)

The Firefox add-on saga continues! (If you missed part 1, you can read it here!)

FoxyTunes

Again, a really simple addon, it's only purpose is to save you time tabbing between programs. It adds a little music control bar to the bottom toolbar in firefox. This enables you to do the usual next/previous/pause/play/stop/volume changes to your currently playing music, without leaving firefox. It's compatable with all music players that are worth using, and it's very handy to be able to pause your music instantly if say, the phone rings.

Gspace

This is an addon I only came upon recently, and It's already proved to be a very handy tool. Basically it lets you use those 7 Gigs of storage space wasted on your gmail account to actually be used for storing files. This is very useful, because now you can upload a file, say a word document, movie, picture, whatever it is, to your 'gspace'. You can then access that file from any internet-enabled computer in the world. "Why couldn't I juse e-mail it to myself?" I hear you ask. Well, gspace also provides a friendly user-interface, and facilitates uploading a lot of files at once, wheras gmails upload system requires you to upload each file seperately. Therefore it's not ideal for say, uploading an entire album of photos.

ScrapBook

This should be renamed "The project addon". When you're in the initial phases of looking up stuff for a project, especially something like an essay, this addon is your best friend. It allows you to make what's sort-of like a bookmark album, dedicated to a perticular purpose, like an essay. However, it's usefullness comes from it's ability to bookmark parts of a web-page, and then view all of these parts together on the same page. Hence the name. If you see a reference, you can 'tear' it out of it's web-page, and save it with scrapbook, and then when you're done researching, you should have a nice long page full of references, and their sources, all in one place. Very handy indeed!

StumbleUpon

This is the best "I've got nothing else to do" addon. Boredom is it's mortal enemy. Basically what it does, is put a "stumble" button up the top of your firefox toolbar, and when you click it, it randomly brings you to a page related to your chosen subject (eg 'Humor'). It's a great way of discovering good web-pages you would otherwise have never heard of! It's also great for just killing time!

Tab Mix Plus

This is probably one of the more function-oriented addons, competing with FlashGot. It basically gives the user a huge array of options for customization in firefox, as well as a lot of handy brand new features. For example, it expands the "Open last closed tab" button into "View list of recently closed tabs". It also allows you to add loading bars to each tab, if you are the kind of person who likes to browse through multiple pages simultaneously, this is a great feature! It also allows for auto-refresh of your chosen tabs, which is great for monitoring things like results, or status updates which are posted to web pages. This is the first addon I download on a fresh installation of firefox.

Web Developer

This addon is a great compliment to the FireBug addon. Web developer is a great addon for simulating your website under different conditions, and it has a lot of handy features, for example you can see how your(or any) website would run without javascript. Another great feature of this addon, is that it creates a real-time error log when you are running a webpage. This is infinately usefull if you are creating a web-page, and need to know if there are any errors on it, or conversely, if you know that there's an error, it will tell you exactly where it is, right down to the line of code that the error is contained on. This saves hours of time trudging through faulty code looking for which part is 'broken'.

And that's my list of the best firefox Addons going! Each of the above come highly recommended by me, and I would strongly suggest downloading them you won't know what hit your firefox after the changes!

On a side-note, if you were wondering what theme I use for my firefox, I go for "Noia 2.0". I find it gives firefox a fresh new look.

That's all for now!

Firefox addons, and why they're great (Part 1)

This is a list of my favourite Add-ons for Mozilla Firefox, as promised in the last blog! These are pretty much alphabetical order, and obviously some are far, far more usefull than others.

Note, when I originally wrote this blog, it was too long for a single blog post, so I have decided to split it up into two, more manageable parts. Enjoy!

Adblock Plus

This is a great little tool that just removes adds from every website, and gives you the option to disable each add, on an add-by-add basis. You don't really know how many adds there are randomly scattered through web-pages you often visit, untill you've browsed them for a while with Adblock on, and then have to browse them again without it. All of those annoying noise-making adds on bebo? Gone. Google adds? Gone.

Cooliris

This is a great addon, which gives you an infinate, scrollable wall of either photos or videos. It's advantages become clear when you realise that it can be used on websites like bebo, to browse through entire albums in seconds, instead of loading each picture individually, and youtube, to browse hundreds of videos in moments, instead of waiting for the usual 10-per-page limit.

CoolPreviews

Made by the same people who brought us Cooliris, this handy addon gives us the option to hover over a link, and display it in a temporary window, so we can quickly decide if it's what we are looking for or not, without leaving the page we're currently on, or changing tabs.

Download Statusbar

This nice little addon which simply moves your download queue from a floating window, which can be hard to monitor, down into the bottom toolbar in firefox. It's mostly just a visual change, but it makes suprisingly big difference.

Firebug

Want to see exactly how a certain bit of javascript or html works? Just highlight it and right click "Inspect Element" and firebug brings up the exact part of the source code which refers to the element in question. Very handy.

FlashGot

This is a download manager, which has a huge array of usefull functions. Among them is a "download all" feature, handy for downloading entire directories of files. It's also able to download entire youtube videos, which can then be converted into Mp3s for your ipod! It also has the ability to 'divide' up a file, into multiple parts, and download each part simultaneously, which is a way to get around certain servers bandwith limitations on downloads per person, and also it's just much, much faster. Especially for big files such as videos or music.


Well, that's all for this post! I will be posting the second half some time next week!

Internet Explorer to be 'optional' in Windows 7

According to blogs posted by several windows 7 beta testers recently, Windows 7 will have a large list of programs which may be disabled entirely from windows, and hence will not be compulsory. An example of this in previous Windows OS's is of course Internet Explorer. Any time you try to click on a link from MS word for example, IE launches, and not your default browser. This wouldn't bother me so much, if IE wasn't vastly inferior to the alternatives.





Personally, I prefer to use Mozilla's Firefox. Its vast array of addons alone really sell it for me. Since firefox is an open-source technology, anybody, literally anybody, can create addons and plugins for it. This means that if you have ever thought of a usefull feature you wish your web browser should have, then somebody has probably already made it. I will post another blog soon enough with a list of my favourite addons and plugins, and why they are great!





Long live Firefox!

Projects update

Ok, so we have had a load of projects given to us simultaneously, hence the lack of blog for the last while. Right now I have to work on:

IS1101:
Microsoft Access Project for gaye kiely

IS1102:
Group project in visual basic programming for Jeremy. We have to make a working program to calculate and audit tax records.

IS1103:
Web development project for Ivan, we have to create a fully functional website, to include an online CV, this blog, an imaginary e-business, a home-page and a page about my interests.

MG1114:
This is an essay for management accounting about the ABC system and it's associated benefits and limitations for companies.

Economics:
MCQ coming up in the 4th week of February.

So, as you can see, I'm a little busy right now!

Updates coming soon

Google Aims To Expose Network Meddling

Former Vice President Al Gore talked at Web 2.0 Summit, covering topics like his company Current TV, the democratization of the Web, the recently-concluded election and his favorite topic, renewable energy. Web 2.0 Panel: The Web has changed the way politicians raise money, it has transformed the level of engagement people have with the political process, and it will help shape policy and presidential agenda. Baynote's retail and social networking search software can help Web sites keep their customers and subscribers satisfied with an Amazon-like experience, CEO Jack Jai explains.
Baynote's retail and social networking search software can help Web sites keep their customers and subscribers satisfied with an Amazon like experience, CEO Jack Jai explains.
Measurement Lab is backed by Google, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and other academic researchers. It aims to provide Internet users with network-diagnostic information that can be used to identify network performance degradation. It also aspires to make such information easier to share.




"At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation," said Cerf and Google engineer Stephen Stuart in a co-authored blog post. "No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they're getting when they sign up for broadband, and good data is the bedrock of sound policy. Transparency has always been crucial to the success of the Internet, and, by advancing network research in this area, M-Lab aims to help sustain a healthy, innovative Internet."




Google's support for net neutrality is well known, and it's clear that by making network performance data more accessible, the company hopes to make it more difficult for telecommunications providers to degrade or block certain protocols or applications, such as BitTorrent or Skype, that undermine certain business models.

MS Access Project

We got a project in ISS1101 from Gay Kiely. It involves using a combination of both Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel to combine records for both clients and employees and have both of these joined together with their related projects! The project outline can be found here. I've got to get back to this project anyways, so I'll post another one soon!

The After-Christmas Game Summary

Ok, over Christmas I've been able to get my hands on a few of the newer games I've mentioned in earlier blogs, and had time to play them and form an opinion on them! Here's how they stand:

Guitar Hero: World Tour:



Ok, This game was a little bit of a disappointment, after the great quality of it's predecessor, Guitar Hero 3. The new guitar controller features a touch pad which can be used to add a 'wah' effect to held notes, or for tapping fast solo's, but I think that it ends up feeling more gimicky than useful. The drums have better to be said about them however, although the 'symbols' pads feel a bit weird to play on, but the 3 regular drums feel really high quality, and the entire drum controller is velocity sensitive, so the harder you hit it, the louder the notes are! The kick pedal feels a bit too springy and sometimes if you try to use it it will give off a double note, but other than that I've no complaints. It's wireless, which makes it much easier to move around than the rockband 2 drumset, but I don't know how long batteries in it will last, only time will tell! It's still going strong since christmas though, so it seems solid enough!

Moving On:

Gears of War 2:



Eh yeah.... This game is just gears 1 again with some nice bells and whistles. They have some very creative campaign levels, and the AI in them seems to be smart enough. They've added some things like chainsaw duels, and the option to choose your starting weapon in multiplayer, which does help combat lag a little bit, but there's still server-side hit detection, which makes the game very biased towards the host player when playing online. They havn't added too many new weapons, but there are a few, still though, at the end of the day it really just feels like Gears 1.5 instead of 2.

Left 4 Dead:







-Full-length review coming soon, I've only played it so far for about an hour on a friends laptop, but it seems like it's an unreal game!