The new Opera 9.6 is out, so you might want to give it a whirl. I haven’t tried it yet, but as soon as I get a chance too I will. I’m hoping the speed enhancements are visible and I’m eager to give Opera Mail another go. Get the latest version from the Opera website.

As my friend Karl points out on Make Use Of, some of us are indeed not normal, and that’s the way (aha aha) we like it. His quick tutorial shows you a great productivity method of opening two separate versions of Outlook at the same time. If you need to quickly switch between two exchange servers, you’ve just struck golf. Find out how to do this on Make Use Of.

If you work on a lot of web projects on your site, you know you have to spell check, spell check and spell check. Nothing looks more unprofessional, and sadly, still very few take the time to go through their sites. Please don’t laugh, I know I probably have about a million, but I can just say that this is my own dialect! Take a look at Spellist, a website which takes your site and scans it for all mistakes it can find. It’s not the prettiest site, but it’s simple and fast, a great tool for webmasters out there. Thanks to Teknobnites for the find!

Gmail Labs has unrolled a new feature, called mail goggles. It’s a small feature that has you solve some math problems before it sends your email at times you specify. This is so that you don’t send emails late at night for example that you might regret later. Personally, I think this is a bit stupid, and for me it wouldn’t really work. However, some of you might find that it increases your productivity by NOT letting you do something!

I’ve just introduced some changes to the site, which you’ll most probably notice. Apart from the cool new social media buttons I made the biggest change is the related post and related products section which I invite you to browse at your own productive discretion.

The related products column shows some cool products I think have a lot in common with the post. I’m sorry to say that this is not the place for free stuff, so these will always be Amazon products, but they will be closely related to the post.

The related posts section will show some other posts like the one you just read, which works on a tag basis, in other words it shows random posts with the same tag. This also means that this won’t be properly working for a week or so, until I back-tag my posts.

These two productivity overhauls are accompanied by the back-tagging and categorizing of posts. This means that you will be able to navigate around Hack Your Day much more effectively and categories and tags will actually have meaning, not just being randomly assigned to posts. Categories will be very strictly defined, I plan to create a set category list.

There will be two types of categories, one for productivity methods, the other for apps. You can see this reflected below the titles, and there will be no other category types. Tags will be much more varied though, so if you’re looking for very specific posts, click through categories, if you’re just browsing around, look at the tags. I will be implementing tag clouds soon too, so navigational productivity will be awesome around here!

That’s about all there is to it, one or two things may be changed and added, but I’m done. I will also resume writing soon, but I’ve had a lot to do with Blogtastique, my new service for bloggers, which I have since got into managing so I will have time for some productivity.

I always have problems with news sites because many, especially local ones, tend to be more than a bit biased when telling their stories. With Skews, a new political news site, you can sort of moderate each news item by indicating on a slider how left or right biased you think it is.

I find that the main use for this site is for the people who really want to make an informed decision. Leftists and rightists who are “party people” (lol) will not change their mind no matter what, but for the centrists it is great to be able to read about Obama for example from both side’s.

I think that what you really should do is read both sides and sort of find their average. I don’t think a totally truthful word is ever spoken in politics, so you have to read between the lines to really find out who’d be best for you. I love the idea of this site since it enables you to at least determine which perspective you are reading.

Mozilla has just released Firefox 3 beta 1, the first step to (a probably quite close) finished Firefox 3 final.

There have been a whole host of changes, apart from the few visual tweaks in the default theme. One of the best under-the-hood tweaks could be the plugging in of apparently 300+ memory leaks. I have had some trouble with Firefox when I have it open for a long time. It eats away at my memory, savoring the taste until I need to restart Firefox. Not a huge problem, but maybe one inconvenience solved.

Among some of my favorite upgrades are the history and bookmark organizer, supporting web-based email apps natively (this could be done with extensions before), tab scrolling, save tabs natively (this could be done in Opera for years, I’m not sure why it took Firefox this long) and simplified add-on installation.

I have only installed it now, so if I find some major issues (positive or negative) I’ll share it with you guys, stay tuned!

Found on MozillaZine
Download the beta from Mozilla
Complete list of new features

Everyone’s favorite (I hope) online email client just got a face lift. Apart from some minor visual tweaks and a quicker interface, there have been a lot of subtle changes that should make our already easy Gmail life that but easier.

The official Gmail blog writers share some of their favorite ones, and I think they really did share the best ones. The star of the day seems to be the “archive and next” shortcut, a handy way to read a bunch of mail. Instead of reading your mail, going back to the inbox and reading the next, you can just press “archive and next” (or [ on the keyboard) and hey presto, the email is archived and you are moved on to the next.

My favorite feature, being the “all over the place” type of guy that I am is the browser history feature. How many times have I copy pasted a password, or phrase, closed the email, then realized 5 minutes later (after it’s no longer on the clipboard) that I need it again. Now you can navigate through Gmail using your browser history (click the small arrow beside your back and forward buttons), a great addition this one.

Take a look at the blog for a list of their top five features, but there are also many more, probably the most noticeable is the new contact manager interface and IMAP support, which is one of the best things since cotton candy and Ice Tea.

Found via The Official Gmail Blog