Month: April 2007

Categories
Firefox Tips Mozilla

Firefox Tip: Full Screen

Doing a presentation and don’t want all those open windows in the background distracting eyes? You can just press F11 on your keyboard to go full screen. You’ll have some compact navigation on the top and nothing else on your display but your browser. And yes, you can still use tabs. This is perfect for situations where you want to be a little more professional.

If you want to go completely full screen, checkout the fuller screen extension. This extension will give you the ability to go full screen with more options including having no obvious signs of a browser interface. Think of it as being like PowerPoint, but with a website. Even more perfect if your the type of person who uses S5 for presentations.

Categories
Internet Open Source Programming Web Development

Wikipedia Infrastructure

Here’s a great read on Wikipedia’s Infrastructure. Two excellent sets of slides. A lot can be done with a LAMP stack. The common theme: caching and careful optimization. There are some really impressive stats in there.

Categories
Funny In The News

Not So Cool Whip

The cool guys over at Wired decided to dissect the ingredients of Cool Whip. The real fun facts are that it shares ingredients with hemorrhoid cream and sexual lubricants. Oh yea, the major ingredients are water and air.

The real stuff just contains something that came from a cows nipple. How is that for a natural alternative?

[Hat tip: Consumerist]

Categories
Mozilla

FoxTorrent

I said back in 2004 that Firefox needs built in support for BitTorrent. My idea was it would be integrated into the download manager so that it was “just another protocol” and would be transparent to a typical user. I still stand by that.

Fast forward to 2007: FoxTorrent is by RedSwoosh (now owned by Akamai).

I’d personally love to see something like this ship built in. It’s a great feature. BitTorrent is a great protocol for distributing large downloads without having to buy expensive infrastructure. Akamai’s interest is proof of that.

FoxTorrent has a blog if you want to keep an eye on it. FoxTorrent is MIT licensed as well. It seems like a very interesting product. I’ll have to dig into this and look at it a bit closer.

[Hat tip: TechCrunch]

Categories
Firefox Tips Mozilla

Firefox Tip: Where is…?

I know many average users don’t know this, but there is a search feature built into every page on the web. Just hit command “F”, or go to the Edit menu and select “Find”. Enter your term in the bar that appears on the bottom of the screen and press enter. If you select the “Highlight all” option it will even highlight the matching terms for you. Press enter repeatedly to see all the matches on the page. This technique can save you a lot of time by preventing you from needing to scan an entire page for a term. Searching can save you a lot of time by letting you jump to what you want to reach.

You can try it on this page by searching for “testing search”. As you type it in, notice how the browser searches while you enter it. You don’t even need type in the entire word or phrase most of the time.

Find As You Type

Categories
Programming Software Web Development

Coda Coolness

So I downloaded and tested out Coda a little bit today. My initial impression is that I’m very impressed. It could be the new standard. A few like Alex King point out that it uses Safari as the default engine. I don’t think that’s so bad. Nothing stops you from using 2 windows one being Firefox (obviously running Firebug). I think the editor itself is rather well polished and very refined. The use of Bonjour to allow for collaboration makes it perfect for multi-developer environments. And yes, you can have more than two developers collaborating in 1 document.

My typical workflow is very abrupt. I tend to have Firefox, IE, and an IDE open at all times when coding pages. Not to mention a KVM switch to go between platforms. This still consolidates several things, and with a much nicer UI.

I’ll need to try it (for actual development purposes) for a few days before I could tell if it really works as well I hope. Panic is one of my favorite Mac developers. Really well polished products are their specialty.

Categories
Around The Web

Fark Redesign

Fark is one of those websites that is was stuck in the past. It’s now been redesigned in a “Web 2.0” scheme. I’ve got mixed feelings on this redesign:

  • Not sure if it’s just extra load, but it’s a bit slow. They just added a banner that says “We’re working on the slow loading issue”.
  • When you visit a link, it’s link color doesn’t change, making it hard to tell if it’s one you visited or not (sometimes I forget where we left off hours earlier).
  • Rainbow navigation? Not really fond of the eye-bleeding nav, but I guess it could have some merit as color is easier to find than words. Chromatabs for Firefox tries to do the same thing, but for tabs
  • The right two columns (nav/ads) are just ugly and awkward.
Categories
Firefox Tips Mozilla

Firefox Tip: Import Later

Were you someone who just wanted to try Firefox, and ended up keeping it? I know some people decided not to import their IE settings and since regret that because they had bookmarks they wanted to keep. Well don’t worry, you can still import them. Just go to the “File” menu and select “Import…” the wizard will guide you to importing your bookmarks/settings from your old browser into Firefox. It will take under a minute.

Categories
Firefox Tips Mozilla

Firefox Tip: Send To A Friend

I’m pretty sure many ignore this handy feature. Find a page you want to share with a coworker, friend, family member? Simply right click on the page (or go to the “File” menu) and select “Send Link”. Firefox will create a new email with the title of the page you found and include the link in the body. Add your friend(s) email address and send it off. Sharing links is easy.

Send To A Friend

Categories
Firefox Tips Mozilla

Firefox Tip: Customize Your Browser UI

Did you know you can customize your browsers interface. Want a print button in the browser toolbar like you had in IE? “New Tab” button? Download Manager? No problem. Just right click on the toolbar and select customize. You’ll see a window with various icons appear.

From here you can just select what you want by dragging it to the desired position in the toolbar. You can remove an item from the toolbar by just dragging it off. Feel free to reposition items as well. It’s all customizable via drag & drop. You can set it up any way you like. It’s your browser.

Don’t worry about messing things up, if you don’t like what you did and want to go back to the defaults just press the “Restore Default Set” button in that window.