Archive for June, 2009

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Firefox 3.5 Released!

Monday, June 29th, 2009

firefoxThe word on the street, and by street I mean various online news sources, is that Firefox 3.5 is set to be released tomorrow, June 30th.    Version 3.5, codename “Shiretoko”, does bring a lot of new neat features to the browsing platform.

My personal favorite feature I have seen thus far, that shows the most innovation is the support for embeddable video, without the use of any plugins or third party scripts.  This multimedia embedding functionality of HTML 5 may not be widely used yet, however this does give it a proverbial first kick in the pants to take off and become successful.

Of course, I wouldn’t be doing the Firefox 3.5 project justice if I didn’t mention the speed boost too.  However, I’m not really sure that is something real users will notice.  Maybe it is just me but Firefox 3 for me right now is still pretty darn fast.  You can check out a full list of features via Mozilla’s web site:

Seems like this time around Firefox’s newest release has either sneaked up on me, or perhaps isn’t getting as much coverage as the last.  What do you think? Are you excited yet?

Source: Firefox Facts

UPDATE – Firefox 3.5 released!!!

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Weave 0.4.0 Released

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Weave Sync is a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser.

Source: Mozilla Labs

Interestingly this looks like a competitor to my favoured Xmarks, which backups and syncs my bookmarks across various browsers such as Firefox, Safari and IE.  If you find yourself using various browsers, in various locations, this is invaluable.

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MSN through Jabber/iChat

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Finally, I can receive work related questions from MSN through iChat ;-)

Tutorial from All Forces

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Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 3

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Mozilla continues to (benevolently) toy with Firefox fans, making a third Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate available for direct download or updating through the Help->Check for Updates path, while shying away from an official announcement about a final 3.5 release date. The link for 3.5rc3 release notes isn’t working at the moment, but we’d presume this is a mostly bug-fixing release. Thanks Ryan!

Source: Lifehacker

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Twitterrific Best Twitter Client?

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

twitterific_logo_enlargedFor some time now, I’ve been searching for the best Twitter client across both the Mac and iPhone.  Initially I started off with Twitterrific, but strayed away as Twitter became ever popular, and more and more client were developed.

The latest client I just uninstalled was TweetDeck.  Although packed with functionality, what really grated me was it’s inability to remember what “tweets” I had already viewed.  Another bug bear was it’s advertisement that it could sync between the Mac and iPhone.  Now I may have misinterpreted this, but I thought it was relating to tweets, but it seems not.  I could never get this to work!

Anyway, it now seems that I should have never of doubted Twitterrific.  I’ve now installed again and wondered why I ever moved away trying to find a better client.

What are you using?  Do you have any better recommendations?  Loves/Hates?

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Enhance Quick Look

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

One frustrating aspect of Quick Look is that you cannot see the contents of a folder with it when browsing through files. The information produced when “Quick Looking” a folder is no where near as useful as when viewing most files. However, an amazingly useful plug-in that solves this problem exists.Simply download the plug-in and place it in a folder titled “QuickLook” placed in “~/Library”, relaunch Finder, and “Quick Looking” folders will now display the contents of the folder instead of a couple of less useful statistics.

Source: MacTips.org

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YouTube Tour of Firefox 3.5

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Mike Beltzner gives a quick tour of Firefox 3.5, the new web browser from Mozilla.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5Zbc-Rg6e8

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Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

firefoxMozilla released it’s RC2 of Firefox 3.5 on 19th June.  Please note, that this is still an RC and not a Public Release, so expect some of your add-ons to not be compatible yet.  But it’s another tantalising step to the full release.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice a slight change in logo too.

Can’t wait!!

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Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

And what are the facts Microsoft?  To help us out, they’ve very kindly provided us with their very own ‘Browser Comparison Chart‘.

You may be already aware, but Microsoft have recently released their latest version of their Internet Browser, IE8.  I am in full support of this browser, as it seems to have fixed a lot of W3C issues, since their ridiculous IE6.  However, when it comes to daily browsing, security, customisation and W3C standards, I still return to better browsers such as Firefox 3 and Safari 4.

This chart that MS have provided, compares IE8 against Firefox and Chrome (probably leaving out Safari 4 as they knew they couldn’t compete!), and then goes on to leave comments trying to justify why IE8 is better.  Frankly, I can hardly agree with any of them!

For example, Customisability (UK English spelling ;-) ).  They state:

Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you’d want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box.

That’s probably the biggest load of horse doo-doo I’ve ever heard!  What customisation MS???  Where’s your Adblock Plus, British English Dictionary, ColorZilla, Font Finder, Foxy URL, Tamper Data?

Shall we even start the Security debate?

Web Standards?  I wonder if they’ve even heard of the Acid3 test?

To me, this chart is absolute propaganda, and anyone who knows there are other browsers available, already know how daft this chart is.

Edit – This just gets better! – MS now has a MythBusting page

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JustLooking 3.3.1 (Mac Image Viewer)

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

This application is designed replace the default ‘Preview’ app that comes bundled with the Mac.  It’s basically an Image Previewer, but here’s the appealing difference.  When you double-click on an image, it cleverly grabs all other images in the same folder, and bundles them so they’re also ready to be previewed.

Give JustLooking a go, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

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