Archive for the ‘Extensions’ Category

Opera has a much-promoted feature called speed dial, which basically showed a wall of your favorite/most visited websites. The same option is built right into Safari as well, but Firefox can also give you this functionality with a number of addons.

I tried a few, among them was the visually appealing  FoxTab which gives you 3D tab browsing and a nice looking speed dial, but it was buggy for me, and wasn’t customizable enough. In the end I arrived at the very simple looking, but extremely well customizable Fast Dial. The simpler looks were actually welcome, since the functionality of this should be for me to launch a site really quickly, not looking at it for ages.

Once installed the addon gave me exactly the options I wanted, and more. You can add sites by entering their URL directly, but you can also right click on any page to add it quickly. In the options you can choose how many sites you want to show, you can change the dimensions of the boxes to fit more, and of course you can completely customize the look. Apart from the 3D aspect, you can do anything with it, so you could make it much flashier than it is, but for me the simple elegance of the default look is fine.

More importantly, you can change the text of the windows (or leave them out altogether). This is a must for me, since I sometimes work with very similar sites, which are nevertheless totally different, like cPanels for different accounts, phpMyAdmin’s for different sites and so on. Here the text and the favicon would be almost the same. The addon gives you great options for customizing the favicon, which you can actually change to a different one from the web, or use your own, and you can also change the website preview to an image of your own.

This is one of the best speed dial addons since it seems no-frills, fulfilling the needs of those who just need launching power, but in reality it has the power to extensive customization easily.

My first time installing a Google Chrome extension was an extremely positive experience, no restarts, quick install, and an awesome plugin called Feedly. Feedly is essentially a feed reader, but it does its job in such an elegant way, that it rises out of all the other readers I’ve seen.

It’s available for Firefox and Chrome as an extension, and will pull your feeds from your Google account. Once installed you can go to the Feedly page to view your feeds, in a very user-friendly, magazine style view. You can view your feeds in a number of ways, my favorite is the cover view, which shows large thumbnails for most recent items on the left, and smaller thumbnails and excerpts for a list on the right. All the views offer great visuals, and good ways to browse, but where Feedly also excels is the reading/sharing/organization options.

Read the rest of this entry »