Frank, one of gHacks鈥?readers pointed me in the direction of a great little tool called Acer Vista Grid:
鈥 freeware program I recently came across that I quite enjoy is Acer GridVista. It allows you to split a monitor into multiple sections. For example, I have my 17" split into two. In one virtual pane I have the dissertation open on which I am working, and in the other I have the code or information that is relevant to the section I am writing. It makes it easy to keep all your open windows tidy. It is not as cool as actually having two monitors, but it would be especially useful if you had a 22" or larger. If only I could afford it….
I tried it out and it truly is extremely useful!
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Software
extension, Software, Windows
If you’re a fan of skinning your apps you probably already know all about user styles for web pages. There’s a great plugin for Firefox that enables you to change the look of webpages using css called Stylish. Once you have it, you can download (or create) user styles and change the look of any website with the push of a button.
If you want an awesome style for your Google Calendar take a look at the sleek design by Globes Designs innovatively called Google Calendar Redesigned. If you like a darker theme with a bit more contrast this is definitely for you. User styles are not always implemented well with choppy bits everywhere, but this design is totally beautiful.
You will be glad to know they have a Gmail design as well (in fact this spurred the calendar design) called Gmail Redesigned. This is essentially the same thing for your favorite email client, so you can have the same design throughout these two Google services. I you know any more cool user styles please let us know, I’d love to take a look at some!
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Windows
extension, firefox, gmail, google calendar, stylish, Tools, user styles
The concept of RSS or newsfeeds in general seemed quite appealing to me the moment I first heard (or read?) about it. But I never managed to find a possibility of utilizing them in a way I liked. I tried standalone-readers like FeedReader, and since I am a FF-enthusiast, I tried Firefox extensions like Sage and Wizz, as well as scroll-readers like infoRSS and took a look at the FeedDemon, but none truly seemed to satisfy my needs. I wanted a common view for all unread entries, sorted by date or anything, I wanted it to be lightweight, and I didn’t want it to be another program than my Firefox, so I eliminated all contestants pretty quick.
Luckily, I came across the small Brief Firefox extension which fulfilled all of my wishes. It’s lightweight, it’s a firefox extension, and it has the “unread”-folder as well as a nice and elaborate handling. It’s content-view is skinnable (though I have yet to come across a skin that suited me better than the original one), there are a handful of reasonable options, and it integrates with the Firefox-RSS-capabilities as well using it’s dynamic bookmarks system.
It’s just as the synopsis on the homepage says: “Brief is a light-weight feed reading extension for Firefox. Designed to be easy to use and streamlined, with exactly the right set of features.” - ’nuff said.
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Browsing
Browsing, extension, feeddeamon, feedreader, firefox, inforss, rss, sage, wizz
I’m always looking for new Firefox add-ons that speed up my browsing experience and Quick Drag is exactly one of those add-ons that are extremely useful. It basically makes it possible to drag and drop elements on a website to process them faster. Quick Drag has three main functions and I could not truly tell which of them is the most useful one because they are, at least for me, all useful.
If you drag an image on a website with your mouse you download that image automatically to your computer. This is great if you download images regularly and think that the right-click -> save image dialog is to laborious. The images are saved in the default download folder of Firefox automatically.
URLs, those that are clickable and those that are not, can be dragged to open them in a new tab in Firefox. This saves some time especially if the url is not clickable, for example if the webmaster did not use the http://www part of the url.
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Browsing
Browsing, extension, firefox, firefox-extensions, mozilla, quick drag
Did you ever have the problem that you needed information from two websites at once and had to switch between them all the time to access them ? I usually have the problem when I write a new article for Ghacks and have to take a look at another website to find the information that I need for my article. This gets extremely irritating if many tabs are open at once and I miss the tab that I want. To much clicks in my opinion, that is why I was searching for a way to display two websites next to each other in Firefox.
I did find the Split Browser extension for Mozilla Firefox which does exactly what I wanted. It allowed me to split the screen anyway I wanted it to split.
I could split the content area vertically or horizontally, and split those areas again if wanted. I’m happy with two websites that are next to each other vertically but you could theoretically split the content area in four windows or even more.
The author of the extension has a screenshot at the extensions website that shows a content area with about 20 websites. This is of course just for demonstration purposes, no one would truly split the content area in that many parts. I think the limit is four different areas, probably more if you run truly high resolutions.
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Browsing
Browsing, compare windows, content, extension, firefox, firefox-extensions, split, split-browser
I’m using the Tab Mix Plus Firefox Extension for one simple purpose mainly. I don’t like the way Firefox handles if you open more sites in tabs than the width of your screen can display. The default way is that Firefox makes the tab list scrollable which is not a perfect solution. I was looking for an extension that would create an additional row and place all the new tabs in that row. Tab Mix Plus supports this feature, you can select the maximum number of rows that should be added, the default value is three rows which means that two additional rows will be added if necessary.
The extension has so many options that it is hard to focus on some that could be worth mentioning. Playing around with it revealed several ones that I did activate and like. You may specify a minimum and maximum width for all tabs, changing the default Firefox values of 100 to 250 pixels to different values. I have great success with 80 to 150 pixels which should be enough to identify most websites.
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Browsing
add on, browse, Browsing, extension, firefox, firefox-extensions, internet, mozilla, tab mix plus, tabbed-browsing
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