Appassionato

Giving in to GreaseMonkey

Categorised as Web-Related & tagged with firefox, tips.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard of the Grease­Mon­key Firefox extension, but never thought it would be of any practical use to me; perhaps because the descrip­tion sounded dull and unap­peal­ing: Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaS­cript. … But I just installed it for a couple of days and came across three scripts enough for me to swear my loyalty to GreaseMonkey.

Hel­ve­tire­ader

This one is “A minimal interface theme for Google Reader”, changing the dull Google default to sheer sleekness: Hel­ve­tire­ader.

Hel­ve­tire­ader for Google Reader

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Awesome Firefox extensions without enough recognition

Categorised as Web-Related & tagged with firefox, lists.

Most of you would’ve seen blog recom­mend­a­tions of Firefox exten­sions anywhere and every­where. And from anywhere and every­where you would’ve heard of the all-time-famous Adblock Plus, Web Developer, FireFTP and so on; so there’s no need for me to redund­antly talk about them again. In fact, most of the “famous” ones which I use can be found on my list from last year. And funnily enough, what I said from last year is true now:

If I haven’t had what I would call a decent level of self-control, this list would be doubled the length.

From last year’s 21 exten­sions, I now have exactly 41 dammit.

So this year I’m present­ing a handful of exten­sions I love which (1) aren’t on my list from last year and (2) I don’t see in blog recom­mend­a­tions anywhere and every­where. In alpha­bet­ical order:

• Codetch: I only installed this morning so I haven’t had the chance to test it out. But it’s a code editor with functions including val­id­a­tion, FTP, JavaS­cript debugging and what-not. It looks promising.
• FireGes­tures: having had Opera as my default browser for over a year before, mouse gestures has become second nature to me while browsing.
• FireShot: the most advanced screenshot-taking extension I’ve come across. Allows screen­shots of selected areas, annota­tions and drawings. No less than “godly”.
• Full Full­screen: clicking F11 used to keep the toolbar and tabs bar (I think). But now you get to use the entire screen. Used espe­cially when taking full screenshots.
• Google Notebook: Firefox extension for Google Notebook. I use it to save code snippets or random notes.
• Google­Pre­view: adds thumb­nails to Google and Yahoo search results. Useful to see if the websites look legit­im­ate enough. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but hey, whatever.
• Picnik: easy for importing images into Picnik for quick editing. I really don’t like opening Photoshop just to resize or crop an image.
• Smart Bookmarks Bar: I have so many bookmarks in my bookmarks toolbar they just don’t fit in the “default way”. So I display them as favicons with title appearing on-hover. I find it easier to recognise sites by their favicons and it looks prettier that way too!
• Undo Closed Tabs Button: I just can’t stop clicking this button.

All the above are com­pat­ible with Firefox 3. Just shoot me if you have heard of all of them before from other people’s blogs because it would mean I have failed my purpose of intro­du­cing not-so-recommended extensions.

And if you haven’t already, check out Appassionato’s Winter Com­pet­i­tion 2008!

Lovable Firefox junk

Categorised as Web-Related & tagged with firefox, lists.

I dislike messy envir­on­ments, and yet my personal “envir­on­ment” is almost always messy. It’s just a matter of hypocrisy. I complain about messy and dirty things, but I admit I’m fully sur­roun­ded by mess and dirt too. I know I have heaps of junk I can chuck away easily, but I just can’t. It’s fine if I didn’t have them to start off with, but since they’re already there it’s hard to let go of them.

To be more specific in this sense, I’ve been clut­ter­ing up my Firefox browser with loads and loads of exten­sions. I actually do regular pruning! Except while I prune I also visit Firefox Add-Ons at the same time, which com­pletely defeats the purpose of regularly pruning such things.

These things cheer me up. But they crash my computer down. It’s a trade-off between my happiness or my computer’s running. And I’ve decided that I’m more important.

Essential tools

• Answers: one-click defin­i­tions for people whose vocab­u­lary suck as much as I do.
• Col­orZ­illa: a color-picker, my essential tool for designing.
• Firebug: edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML, JavaS­cript of any web page.
• FireFTP: my FTP client because well, opening extra FTP program means extra crashing.
• StumbleUpon: actually need it to Stumble! websites.
• Tab Mix Plus: enhance tab-browsing utilities and session saver/manager.
• United States English Dic­tion­ary: I use British English and I can spell well, but typos are a part of my daily life.
• Web Developer: godly functions in a godly toolbar that everyone inter­ested in web devel­op­ing should have.

Useful for the lazy bum-bums

• Dummy Lipsum: generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text.
• FoxyTunes: control a media player from Firefox, saves the time to slowly load up my WMP.
• HTML Validator: instantly know if a page is valid or not.
• IE Tab: switch a page to IE in a click, easy and instantaneous.
• LiveClick: monitor my RSS subscriptions.
• Restarter: to restart Firefox in certain situations?
• Screen grab!: save a web page as an image, screen­shots without Photoshop, yes!

For the sake of it

• All-in-One Sidebar: load dialog windows in a sidebar, but I can live without.
• Feed Sidebar: display unread feed items in sidebar.
• FoxyTunes Skin – WMP 11: to match my beautiful Firefox Vista Theme.
• Hide Menubar: because it looks ugly in my theme.
• Mouse Gestures: for lazy people that got used to them from setting Opera as their default browser for over a year.
• Stylish: customise Firefox with user styles to make it look how I like it.

If I haven’t had what I would call a decent level of self-control, this list would be doubled the length. And this problem occurs over my computer as whole, with loads and loads of programs that are redundant but I can’t let go. I can’t resist having pretty themes and icons and five spyware and adware removers because I feel like it. It’s bad for my crap laptop, but too lovable to drop once they’ve already been there. Yeah, it’s a part of who I am. I really need to throw out my junk.

But at the end of the day, I know I can’t.