Ace on Tech -- All things Tech and Me.

Easy Drag-to-Go is a Firefox plug-in that will decidedly make you more productive by implementing mouse gestures when handling hyperlinks and text on web pages.

• Find this add-on here [Free].

Web browsing, to me – and I gather this goes for many people nowadays – has become something of a second nature. Not a day goes by without me surfing the web for something or other. It has just become a part of my life [style].

Everyone has different habits when it comes to the use of a computer, but generally – as I see it – there are two types of people. Firstly, there are keyboard-people who try to accomplish as much as they can using solely the keyboard by taking advantage of the multitude of keyboard shortcuts most operating systems and applications carry with them.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are mouse-people, who evidently accomplish most of their work by virtue of the mouse. I assume this group of people is far greater in size since it was the one that ignited the whole GUI-movement in software interfaces.

Web browsers are applications that require a hybrid interaction style, though, combining extensive keyboard use with mouse movements and clicks. While surfing the web, I personally like to keep one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. This way I can easily open new tabs using the various keyboard shortcuts (CTRL+T, Cmd+T) and move between tabs quickly (CTRL-TAB).

A big part of my web routine involves open links, obviously, and I prefer opening links in new tabs. This usually requires me to hold down the CTRL or CMD button while clicking a link (Windows-based browsers often allow the middle-mouse-click to achieve the same effect). While this is behavior I can easily get used to, I found a great Firefox Addon that handles all of my link opening and text searching by use of mouse gestures, which have increased my productivity exponentially.

‘Gesturing’ your way through

Easy Drag-to-Go is not your usual mouse gesture-enabling add-on. While traditional
gestures usually employ the right mouse-button to open new tabs, to go to the next/previous
tab and to close the current tab, Easy Drag-to-Go has a different take on gestures. Here’s how it works by default:

Opening links

To open a new tab you can simply do the following:

• Drag a link up to open the link in a new foreground tab
• Drag a link down to open the link in a new background tab

This dismisses the need to hold down a keyboard button to insure that a link opens in a new tab, and, you have to the choice to open something in the background in case you decide you want to deal with something later on.

Searching

Saw a word on a page you’d like to Google Search (or Bing Search!)? No need to retype it or copy-paste it into that search box! Just go ahead and select it. Once it’s selected:

• Drag the selected text up to search in a new foreground tab
• Drag the selected text down to search in a new background tab

This functionality is especially handy when researching stuff for your blog (or anything else).

Images: You can also assign the add-on to save dragged images to a default location on your hard drive.

Recommended!

Keeping track of your paper administration can be a pain. Well, I know it is to me. Most countries’ laws force you to archive your paper administration pieces like invoices and tax-related papers for up to 10 years. Aside from the legal requirements, it’s important to archive in an orderly fashion, so you can retrieve a given piece easily and quickly.

There are obviously several ways to do this; you could get a shoebox and let everything pile up, or you could go with something more organized like a bunch of [real life] folders in which you divide sections with tabs. This is a fine methodology, but it tends to get rather voluminous after a couple of years. And along with added volume comes greater difficulty at finding what you need when the occasion proposes itself.

To accommodate this issue, I started scanning and digitally storing the most important pieces for a while now. While you could come up with a virtual folder system for local storage, it soon also becomes unpleasant to retrieve something – even with Windows’ Search or Mac OS X’ Spotlight. There are some proprietary database archiving systems out there that let you automate this, but I dislike my data being stuck in a closed box.

Google to the rescue

Recently, I noticed that Google added PDF-support to it’s online productivity suite Google Docs. While I don’t think Google Docs is very suitable for day-to-day word processing/spreadsheet-work, the PDF-support can be of particular use when dealing with administration and the like.

This is how I do things to keep track of my administration:

1. I keep paper copies of everything in physical folders as described above.
2. I scan the important stuff and export it to PDF.
3. I upload the PDFs to Google Docs, archived into a particular directory structure. Just rudimentary folders suffice, e.g. ‘Invoices’, ‘Taxes’, ‘Contracts’, etc.
4. That’s it.

While this system works for me, it may not for you. Also, consider your privacy when uploading PDFs to Google Docs. It’s not proven that any physical persons have access to the contents of your account, it’s generally known that Google has software scanning for keywords in order for them to offer contextual text-based advertisements. I acknowledge this is a genuine concern to be taken into account, this doesn’t particularly bother me.

Harnessing Google Search

I keep paper copies of everything because it’s compulsory where I live. The real handiness of putting everything online is the Google Search functionality embedded into Google Docs. This will only work if you enabled OCR when scanning of course (but most scanners do this by default). So whenever I need a given invoice or other document, I can just start typing any string I can remember into the search box and I’ll be sure to find the appropriate document reasonably fast.

I talked about me not liking closed ecosystems, but isn’t Google just that? The short answer to that question is a clear ‘yes’. Google’s solutions are mostly proprietary and thus entirely closed. On the other hand, Google is pretty reliable and offers its services for the best price around – free. All things considered, it’s just as easy to get things into Google as it is to get stuff out of it. At any time, you can download the original PDF back to your computer. There’s no straightforward way to get all of your documents out at once, however (another thing to consider).

A nicety about Google Docs is that it allows for online sharing similar to how Google Docs handles sharing with text documents, presentations and spreadsheets. When you hit the share button associated with any given PDF you’re presented with a form on which you can enter your friends’/coworkers’ e-mail addresses. Once they accept the invite, they’ll get read-only access to the chosen document. The catch: your correspondent must have an active Google Account in order for this to work. You could just as well attach the PDF to an e-mail, while you’re at it, then.

Concluding note

Moving my administration to the cloud was one of the last steps in my digitized ‘getting things done’-effort. Incidentally or not, I ended up entrusting all of my data to Google. The future will point out whether it was a wise choice. For now, Google’s services are pretty darn reliable considering their price (free). As a testament to that, I also have my e-mail, calendars and todo-lists up in the cloud with Google.

Short note to Google: you’ve completely suckered me into your services.

One of the many features of Firefox 3 was native UI-integration on Windows XP, Vista, Mac and Linux. While Firefox’ Mac-version does look rather native, Mozilla completely dropped their efforts to take advantage of Windows Vista’s (or 7’s) Aero Glass effects.

Because Firefox has such a vibrant addon-community, you can achieve the effect below by using 1 custom theme and 2 add-ons:

The stuff you’ll need to achieve this look:

1. The Theme: Strata Reloaded which you can find here.
   Just hit the ‘Add to Firefox’-button, accept it and let it churn away. You may want to deny the restart, since we’re not done installing add-ons yet.
2. Add-on 1: Glasser, download here.
   While the theme above introduce prettier icons and the colored bar, Glasser makes Firefox’ chrome transparent like (Internet) Explorer windows. The latest version of Glasser is only compatible with the latest Firefox 3.1 beta. If you click the older version link, you can select the version that’s compatible with the latest stable version of Firefox.
3. Add-on 2: Menu Mod, here.
   You can hide the menu bar as Internet Explorer does by default by installing the Menu Mod add-on. Once installed, press F2 on the keyboard to toggle the menu bar’s visibility.

“Et voila, c’est tout” as the French say. It’s a pity Mozilla didn’t make this look the default one, it’s much nicer and certainly more native.

Many thanks to the respective theme/add-on developers.

The free ‘Function Icon Set’ from wefunction.com features 128 icons in pleasingly neutral color schemes. They aren’t awfully big – at generally 48 x 48 pixels – but certainly large enough for web design work.

When designing websites, it’s often necessary to gussy things up with icons. Though they have a big aesthetic appeal, they often also make the design more user-friendly by clarifying certain design elements. Icons aren’t to be underestimated in importance. Some good old icon eye-candy can work miracles in spicing up your websites’ designs.

Because I’m not much of a graphical artist I usually rely on the creative minds of the pros for most of my design stuff. Since the main colors I’m dealing with are matte blues and grays, my upcoming design requires a neutral set of graphics. After some googling, I quickly came across the free ‘Function Icon Set‘ which will fulfill my requirements rather marvelously. Thanks to the great icon artist(s) over at wefunction.

http://wefunction.com/2008/07/function-free-icon-set

Safari 4 Beta for Mac annoyingly doesn’t always open links in tabs, and there’s no real preference control to set this like there is in other browsers like Firefox or Opera. Apparently, this characteristic has been floating around in prior versions of the browser, too. While I like Safari’s speediness and mildly dislike the new tab placement in the beta, what bugs me the most is the issue I indicated with the title of this post.

While it is possible to make Safari [always] open links in new tabs, there is no user-friendly way to do this. To accomplish this behavior you will have to enter a line in Terminal.app:

• Quit Safari (CMD+Q)
• Open Terminal (\Applications\Utitlities\Terminal.app)
• Enter:
  defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
• Close Terminal and re-open Safari

Tada! That does it indeed. While this is easy enough, Apple should have included it here:

Note: A solution to this problem in the Windows-version of Safari 4 has not yet been found.

Being a Windows-only user for many years, I decided to go for a Mac when planning out which computer to buy to replace the living room PC. I chose the iMac for its aesthetics more than anything else, but I was also genuinely interested in Mac OS X and its BSD underpinnings. But don’t be fooled, the sheer elegance of Apple hardware is what cajoled me into the Mac-platform. And here I am, with a pretty iMac sitting happily on my desk.

I’ll be writing about this subject in a (continually updated) series:

• Part 1: A Bird’s Eye View of Mac OS X
• Part 2: Getting AirPort Extreme Working
• Part 3: Windows & Mac Interoperability
• Part 4: Windows File Sharing
• Various How To Articles

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple obviously used Chromium as a base for their Safari 4: