One thing I very much hate about Firefox is the download window. Whenever I download anything an annoying window pops up. I would be ok with it if it would materialize in the background, but instead, after each link click to download it springs up in my face.

Of course I don’t really hate Firefox for this, since there had been an addon around for ages to help with this problem. Download statusbar puts all your downloads in a bar at the bottom of the browser, saving you from that nagging download screen.

All finished items can be cleared with a mouse click, but if you don’t clear them the only problem it causes is a 15 pixel bar at the bottom of the screen. It increases my productivity a bit because it removes the pop up, and also because now I don’t have to click close every time I download something. This is one of my must-have addons, after each OS reinstall it’s one of the first ones I download.

Martin from gHacks just shared a really good tip on his site on mounting USB drives to folders, instead of assigning drive letters to them. This is great if you have a double or triple boot setup, since you are likely to have at least 4-5 partitions, all with separate drive letters.

Martin suggests creating a folder named USB for instance and then mounting all drives there. This also helps get rid of some confusion and navigation issues, since USB drives will now be more a part of your file system than before.

To read exactly how to do this, take a look at the original article on mounting USB drives to folders, I don’t want to take any of the limelight here.

A quick stumble led me to one of the best tag browser sites I’ve seen lately. Flickr related tag browser brings together design and usability in a great way.

Enter any tag into the slightly slanted box and you will be presented with pics applicable to that tag. You will also see a tag cloud around the pics with related tags. They work surprisingly well, GTD will give your productivity, moleskine, hipster and a lot more phrases which really do have much in common with GTD.

Navigation is simply awesome with the automatic zooming in and out, you really have to try it to appreciate it. If only this exact technology was implemented in a search engine, it would be search productivity heaven.

I always liked Windows explorer and although I acknowledge its shortcomings, I never really grew accustomed to replacements like WinCommander or Xyplorer. An application I just found while reading Lifehacker enhances explorer with one of the best features yet, the ability to jump from folder to folder really quickly.

Direct Folders gives you the ability to navigate through your folders much more productively by letting you navigate to any folder you specified before hand from anywhere inside an explorer window. Just double click on an empty space to bring up the menu, and select the folder you want to go to.

This is free so far, if you want some added functionality you can buy the pro version which supports jumping to the last used folder, setting default folders for apps and so on. All in all this is a great app for productivity which should ease folder navigation for you.

Today I took the freshly released Adobe Photoshop Express for a test drive, the online version of Photoshop (sort of). The reason that I say sort of is that there is no painting and drawing, this is strictly a photo editor application.

Photoshop Express looks much like Buzzword, the previous Adobe online product. I quite like the way things turned out if you can stop yourself from trying to find all the features of its desktop counterpart. After the considerable loading time (I have a fast connection) everything went smoothly, so it was well worth the wait.

When you have loaded a picture you can perform the tasks on it via the right sidebar which contains all the actions. You will find most of the basic tools you need for touching up your photos a bit like crop, rotate, red eye, white balance, sharpen and so on, and six effects to use for fun.

All these are executed very well, one of the best features I think, is the way it displays changes. If you click saturation for example you will see a series of thumbnails at the top, with your original in the center. To the left is the least saturated thumbnail and to the right is the most. This makes choosing quick and easy for those people who aren’t huge photography nuts, but like to improve their pics a bit.

You can also maintain a gallery on site, you get an impressive 2GB, which should be enough for a whole lot of pics. It was about time Adobe came up with something like this, it’s been more than a year since online editors came to be. I am a but disappointed that this is only a photo editing application, although for that use it’s quite good, perhaps some more features would be nice.

Ubuntu 7.10 comes with the awesome Compiz meaning desktop on a cube, window animations and so on, but you may be at a loss since it doesn’t work. I actually managed to get it to work quite simply, despite the fact that many forums propose long terminal sessions and so on.

From a fresh Ubuntu install it is very important to update. Simply going to the update manager in system - administration will not work, you will still see that your system is up to date since you need to expand the library of where the manager looks. Go System - Administration - Software sources. Once there on Ubuntu software mark all checkboxes, except source code. Switch to the third party software tab and mark both checkboxes, then switch to the updates tab and mark the first three checkboxes. If you go to update manager now you will see a lot of updates and install them.

The restricted driver for my video card was immediately usable. When I wanted to enable desktop effects I got the message “The Composite extension is not available”. This is apparently due to the fact that xgl is not installed. Head on over to the Synaptic Package Manager and search for xgl. You should see a small list and mark xserver-xgl for installation.

Once installed, you should be able to change your settings in System - Preferences - Appearance under the visual effects tab to Extra. To change the settings using a user friendly GUI, you will need to get the settings manager. The name of the application is “compizconfig-settings-manager”, just download it with the package manager.

When done, you should be able to access the settings via System - Advanced desktop effects. By the way, my keyboard layout reverted to default English after I installed xgl for some reason, so it might well do the same for you, just go to System - Preferences - Keyboard to fix the problem.