browser

Jul 29 2010

TotalFinder brings tabs to Snow Leopard

totalfinder screenshot tabs 370x252 TotalFinder brings tabs to Snow Leopard

I wanted to throw out a tip that has made my Mac-using experience much more productive: you are probably familiar with tabs in your web browser. They let you open a bunch of webpages without actually having a bunch of windows cluttering up your screen—they’re all nicely gathered in one window and are each accessible via their own tab. Get ready to have that same tabbed awesomeness in the Finder with TotalFinder from BinaryAge.

Just like in your web browser, you can switch between tabs, drag tabs to and from windows and reorder them within windows. There are tons of other customization options available under the Finder Preferences once the software is installed.

If you worry about installing Finder plugins, and well you should, TotalFinder does not overwrite your Finder.app files. It modifies the running Finder application image in-memory. If you install the software and still feel guilty about it later, BinaryAge supplies an uninstaller to set things right back the way they were—no one has to know. You can even disable TotalFinder without uninstalling it via the Terminal, just check out the FAQs

Version 0.9.6, which came out earlier this week, is available for free. Once version 1.0 arrives, TotalFinder will cost $15. So, I recommend you give Finder productivity a try and see if you’ll be on board when this freeware goes payware. I know I will.

What cool productivity gems are you using to make the most of you Mac experience? Let me know in the comments. If you teach me something new, I’ll link you up when I post about it!

By RickMacMerc • News, productivity, tips • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

Five Things You’ll see In IE 6… That Aren’t New

Microsoft is a company known for “monkey see, monkey do” behavoir.
First is was the GUI, then it was the little things like the recylcling bin.
Now it’s things like Windows XP’s GUI which is suprisingly similar to OS X.
I’m going to predict 5 things you’ll see in IE 6 for the Mac that are already
done in competing browsers. Further more, I’m predicting that these features
will be touted as original, and as major innovations straight from Redmond.
Let’s get started.

1) Tabbed browsing windows – This one is almost too obvious
to use in this article. If you’ve used Mozilla lately, you’ll notice that it’s
got tabs. What do I mean? Well, one browser window with multiple web pages.
Here’s a screen shot of my Chimera setup(click to enlarge):

tabs thumb Five Things Youll see In IE 6... That Arent New

It’s the main reason why I love to use browsers based on Mozilla.
Chimera has book marks that load tabs… I have one for Mac news that loads
all my favorite Mac sites all at once. It’s genius. Adam Iser has been using
this same tab concept with Adium,
a great AIM client. It was why I switched, and is currently why I don’t use
iChat. I’m just an all around sucker for tabs.

2) favicon.ico support – Windows users have long had icons
they see in the link bar when they go to webpages. Webmasters load a specially
named icon (favicon.ico) onto the root level of the server, and it gets shown
on almost every browser except IE on the Mac. Look for this to change with 6.0.
You can see our icon and some others in the above screen shots.

3) Pop-up Blocking - It’s too good to pass up. Mozilla ships
with it… and I see no pop-ups. It’s great. Look for it to be touted as a fresh
idea. Also look for MS pop-ups to still work (from MSN and such). This will
probably be stuck under the preferences somewhere.

4) MetaData – I bet IE 6 will act more like Mozilla with MetaData.
If you aren’t in the know, it’s info about the page that can be handy to the
visitor. Stuff like RSS feeds, publish dates, author name, simple navigation
and a ton more can be done in a special toolbar that pops up. It’s nifty stuff
that you have to scour the source for in IE.

5) Search in browser – I love searching Google right from Mozilla
(in the link bar)… This will show up in IE 6, except it will be defaulted
to MSN and be hell to switch to Google. There will be a way, and that’s all
that matters.

I’d love to see nerdy stuff like what images were loaded from where, which
forms go to what pages, and allow javascript to do only certain things, but
I have a feeling for that I’ll have to stick with Mozilla. The good news is
that the most popular Mac browser will be better. If you can’t wait, most of
the new functionality can already be harnessed. Mozilla for OS X isn’t bad,
but it feels bad because of its cross platform interface. For now, I’ll stick
with Chimera
and it’s Cocoa widgets icon smile Five Things Youll see In IE 6... That Arent New . If you have any comments or questions let
me know.

By admin • Articles, Editorials • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

Firefox Updates

Just when you thought all things Firefox had settled down, new extensions and updates get things fired up again. This week I’ll point you to the first public alphas of Firefox and Thunderbird 1.1as well as two cool new add-ons.

For those of you who like doing it all in Firefox, you have two less reasons to leave your browser with these free applications…

FoxiPod

This free Mac application works with the Greasemonkey extension (required) to allow you to send podcasts from a link in your browser directly to iTunes.

FoxiPod Firefox Updates

FoxiPod’s user script marks all mp3′s with a special button, and with one click FoxiPod downloads podcasts and sends them to a specified playlist or iPod.

AIMfire

There are a lot of great, full-featured chat applications out there. But, if all you need to do is jump on AIM to drop someone a note, you’ll be interested in AIMfire.

AIMfire Firefox Updates

With the AIMfire extension, a quick visit to Firefox’s Tools menu will fire up your buddy list and let you chat (with rich text support) from within Firefox.

Of course, progress is always being made in the quest to make Firefox the perfect browser. Since the 1.0 release, the Open Source team has been busy. If you’re the daring type, you can grab the bleeding-edge Alphas of the 1.1 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird.

I don’t need to remind you of the dangers of pre-release software, so beware.

Deer Park AKA Firefox 1.1 Alpha

New in this release we’ve got improved display options in OS X, image thumbnails on tabs and full keyboard access.

Thunderbird 1.1 Alpha

Naturally, the ‘Fox’s little brother is improved as well. the 1.1 Alpha includes default inline spell checking, Podcast support and improved feed reading and POP/IMAP access.

Have fun with the Alphas and extensions. And remember, there’s never a dull moment with Mozilla.

Brian

By admin • Articles, Freeloader Friday Download of the Week • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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