Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Tech Talk

Evidently Blogger and Picasa have gotten over their little spat of not communicating properly with each other as I had no trouble uploading today's selections for the eye candy section. I am a little later posting today because I was playing with a couple of new add ons to my Firefox2 browser. I am a registered member of CNET.com, a tech review site where you can download all sorts of software, music and media. I get several of their differently focused newsletters and the one I got yesterday had a link in it to Webupon.com. The newsletter referenced a column there about 10 Killer Firefox Extensions That You Probably Don't Know About. I had already installed some of the ones listed but there were a couple that I had not heard about that intrigued me. I installed them in my browser and have been happily playing around with them all morning. One in particular has been great fun. It is called Piclens from Cooliris (they also have an add on called Cooliris, more on that in a minute) that allows you to view the photographs on just about any website in a 3D slide show format. It works real well with all my web albums from Picasa and it lists sites like Flckr, Google Images, MySpace, and Facebook among others where you can use this feature within your browser window or even in full screen mode. The Cooliris add on allows you to open a preview window for any link on any site by simply rolling your mouse over the link the clicking the icon that appears. In the preview window you can open links in new tabs or windows and also preview additional links on that same page by clicking the down area in the top left corner. I used this feature this morning to read my email where progressing from one message to another seemed to load faster than when in the tab itself. I you want to use it at a site like Nichevo, it allows you to view the photos in preview window in a their original size and again you can either roll your scroll wheel or click the down arrow to progress from photo to photo.

I also installed Tab Effect and Tab Scope to go along with my Colorful Tabs.Tab Effect gives a 3D effect to your browser window when changing tabs and Tab Scope allows you to mouse over a tab to see a preview of the page there without actually change tabs from the one you are on. The newsletter from CNET also announced the release of the Beta version of FF3. I think I will wait for the new major revision to come out of Beta testing before installing it the same as I did FF2. I will let them work out the kinks then get the new improved version when it comes available. All of my present add ons are said to be compatible with the new version along with improvements in speed and memory usage among other improvements. For me who is adamantly averse to using any Microsoft software i do not have to I look forward to a newer faster version of FF so they will continue to outclass the clunky IE browser. I also use Open Office for my office type applications rather than MSOffice. It too is free for download at OpenOffice.org. One of these days I will have saved enough money to actually get what I really want and that is a iMac that is compatible with all the applications mentioned in this post.

That's it for now except of course for the eye candy just below. Until next time as always, Enjoy!
































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