Setup Calendar in Thunderbird

Out of the many calendar add-ons in Thunderbird, Lightning is the best. It adds a full feature calendar system to Thunderbird and it integrates so well that you don’t even see the differences.

1. Open Thunderbird. Go to “Tool -> Add-ons”. Search for Lightning.

2. Install Lightning. Restart your Thunderbird.

3. You should see a new “Events and Tasks” option in the menu bar. Go to “Events and Tasks -> Calendar” and the calendar will show up in a new tab. You can start adding events and tasks to your Thunderbird.

Integrating Google Calendar to Thunderbird

Now that you have set up Calendar in Thunderbird, the next step is to integrate Google Calendar to Lightning. Provider for Google Calendar is one good add-on that can get the job done.

1. In Thunderbird, go to “Tool -> Add-ons” and search for “google calendar”. Scroll through the list to find “Provider for Google Calendar” and install it. Restart Thunderbird.

2. Next, open your browser and login to your Google Calendar account. Go to “Calendar Settings”.

3. Click on the Calendar tab, follow by the calendar that you want to integrate to Thunderbird.

4. Scroll down till you see the “Calendar Address” field. You should see three icons beside it, with the label XML, iCal, HTML respectively. Right-click at the XML icon and select “Copy Link Location”.

5. Go back to your Thunderbird. Go to “File -> New -> Calender”. On the popup window, select “On the network” and click Next.

6. In the next window, select “Google Calendar” and paste in the link that you have copied earlier.

7. Give your new calendar a name and set the color.

8. Enter your Google username and password. You might want to check the box “save password in Password manager” so it won’t prompt you for password in the future.

9. Lastly, once you see the “Your Calendar has been created” message. You are done integrating your Google calendar to Thunderbird.

Repeat the same steps for each and every Google Calendar that you want to add to Thunderbird. The “Provider for Google Calendar” supports a two-way sync, so you can add/edit events and tasks in Thunderbird and have them synced back to the Google server.

That’s it. What other ways do you use to integrate Google Calendar to Thunderbird?

1. Google+ Ultimate

Is the Google+ design too bland for your taste? You can now customize the color and style of Google+ with Googlt+ Ultimate. Things that you can customize include the background, scrollbars, left and top panel, navigation bar, image size in stream, side-by-side view (for large monitor).

2. GTools+

GTools+ is developed by the same developer as Google+ Ultimate. It acts as a complement to Google+ Ultimate and allows you to customize the Google bar as well as integrating the chat feature to the Google bar.

3. Google+ Tweaks

The Google+ Tweaks extension is a wrapper for a series of userscripts to customize the usability of Google+. Features include

• Preview images when you mouse-over them
• Favicon badge shows the number of new notices
• Make Google+ use your browser’s full width
• Force all images in posts to thumbnails
• Pin the Google bar and other navigational elements
• Yellow “Post muted” notices automatically fade out
• View post actions as buttons instead of as a drop-down menu
• Hide various elements of Google+ you don’t use

4. Google+Facebook

If you are not ready to give up your Facebook yet, this extension can show your Facebook news feed in Google+ stream so you can manage both in one place.

Note: While you can post to and view your Facebook feed, you won’t be able to comment on other’s update.

5. Surplus

Surplus integrates Google+ deep into your Chrome browser, allowing you to read notification and post to Streams right from the Google taskbar. It also supports desktop notification and notification sounds.

6. Extended Share for Google Plus

If you are using other social network platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Tumblr, this Extended Share add-on will add a “Share on” button below each post in Google+, allowing you to share to other social networks.

Similar extension: Share+ Social Buttons for Google Plus

7. Favorite G+ Stream

By default, when you log in to your Google+ account, it will show you the posts from all your circles. However, there will be times where you just want to follow the streams from a particular circle of friends. Favorite G+ Stream allows you to set a particular stream as the default. When you load your Google+ page, your favorite stream will appear.

8. Move Your Photos

Do you have a lot of photos in Facebook and wanted to migrate them to Picasa (so you can share in Google+)? Move Your Photos can do just that. All you have to do is to connect it with Facebook and it will immediately export your photos from Facebook to Picasa.

9. Goo Plus Manager

Goo Plus Manager adds a shortcut menu so you can quickly access the various part of Google+. In addition, Goo Plus Manager also comes with a series of keyboard shortcuts that you can use, for example:

• g + h : go home
• g + p : go to profile
• i + i : go to photos
• i + p : go to photos > phone
• i + m : go to photos of me
• i + a : go to my photo albums
• g + i : go to incoming
• g + n : go to notifications

For more keyboard shortcuts, check out the list here.

10. G+ Extended

G+ Extended adds a different set of keyboard shortcuts to your Google+. The shortcuts are:

• Press “+” for +1′ing a post.
• Press “-” for removing your +1 on a post.
• Press “p” to toggle your +1 on a post.
• Press “s” to share a post.
• Press “e” to expand older comments on a post.

11. Helper for Google+

As its name implies, Helper for Google+ is indeed a very good helper for Google+. Once installed, you will be able to share posts via Twitter, translate posts with Google Translate, bookmarks individual post (locally or to delicious.com), linked #hashtags, search Google+ posts and profiles directly from your omnibox.

12. +Comment Toggle

A simple extension to allow you to hide/show comments on Google+

13. G+ Count in Title

Another simple extension to show notification count at the document title in the page tab.

14. Usability Boost for Google Plus

The Usability Boost for Google Plus extension adds several CSS rule to make Google Plus more pleasant to use. Once installed, it sets the background to gray color, the post area white and the comments section light blue.

15. Native GMail for Google Plus – Beta

This extension allows you to check your Gmail inbox right inside your Google+ page.

What other extensions do you use to enhance your Google+ experience?

Installing and using the Chrome Extension

Firstly, head over to the Move Your Photos extension page and install it.

Once the extension is installed, you will notice a small Picasa icon to the right of the Chrome address bar, near the wrench. Click on this icon and you will be presented with a link to login to your Facebook account. This will grant the extension access to the photos on your Facebook account.

After you have logged in, the extension will start fetching all your Facebook photos. If you have any empty albums on Picasa, the extension will also notify you of this and allow you to delete them.

Once the pictures have been fetched, you can select which albums or individual photos to upload to your Picasa account.

Note the guide used to indicate which photos have been uploaded (green border), which photos are in the queue (yellow border), which photos are not to be uploaded (grey border) and which images are altogether unavailable (red border).

Unfortunately, the extension appears to be limited to fetching the photos you have uploaded within specific albums. So, all your albums, mobile uploads, profile pictures, and wall photos are included. However, tagged photos are not included.

Once you have decided which photos to upload, select “Upload” from the bottom of the page. You may have to scroll down if you have a lot of photos.

The upload process will take some time depending on the number of photos you have selected.

Once all the photos have been uploaded, they will appear in segregated albums on your Web Picasa account.

The album is set to private by default and only those with a link to the album will be able to view the photos.

You can now choose which of your circles to share the photos with.

Conclusion

This app is useful if all your photos are stored on Facebook but you feel like switching your allegiance to Google+. It would be a lot more useful, however, if it was possible to upload all your photos (including tagged images) from Facebook to Google+. It is likely, that there are privacy settings that is blocking this type of functionality.

Search Sidebar is a very useful add-on that allows you to search multiple sites with one query and search interface. The best thing is, all the search results appear in your Google search result page, so you don’t have to get used to any new interface.

Once you have installed the Search Sidebar extension, you won’t see any configuration option in your Firefox toolbar. Instead, you will see a search strip at the sidebar when you perform a search in Google (Note that this extension will not work for Google encrypted search).

When you hover your cursor over the icons in the search sidebar, the search result for that site will pop up.

If you are logged in to your Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook LinkedIn or Dropbox account, it can even search your personal account.

To see all the search results, simply click on the blue “WebMynd” button and the strip will expand to show all the search results from different sites.

You can add more sources for it to retrieve the search results or to remove the default source from the list.

Conclusion

Search Sidebar is useful if you search from multiple sources regularly. My personal favorite is the ability to search your personal accounts, like Gmail and Google Docs, without having to visit the sites.

My only gripe is there is no easy ways to organize the search sources. I prefer to have my Gmail account at the top of the list. To do that, I have to first remove Gmail from the list, then re-add it again to make it appear at the top. You have to do this for every other sources. It would be great if the developer can come out with a drag and drop solution to rearrange the search sources.

Search Sidebar is available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Introduction

iGlue is a free to use web service that adds an interesting feature to all webpages – annotation. While annotating webpages has been around for quite some time, iGlue tackles the issue in a unique way: it aims to use webpage annotation to add a useful layer of information to all webpages. The tool automatically detects important words such as names of people and places on a webpage and then highlights them. You can add links to these words and view the information other people have shared about these words. This simple feature helps subsequent site visitors quickly learn about these highlighted words.

Usage

iGlue comes in the form of a browser addon for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. In some rare cases, the addon might not work ideally for your browser. In such a case you will find iGlue’s bookmarklet to be very helpful. Before you can start using these tools, you will need to sign up for an account on iGlue by entering a username, email address, and setting a password. Your account will be activated once you click on the activation link emailed to you.

After creating your account and activating it, you can sign into iGlue and start using it. When you visit a webpage, certain words will be automatically highlighted.

You can click on a highlighted word to reveal more information about it. Usually a Wikipedia link of the term is already included in the window that pops up.

This link is one of many annotations that can be added to the word. Clicking on this link expands it and displays the information it contains.

By clicking on the appropriate tabs in this window, you can view images, videos, locations, reference links, and purchase links related to the annotation.

To add a new annotation, simply click on the annotation button when the pop up window first appears.

You will be asked to specify the type of annotation: entities, images, videos, locations, links, or notes.

For each type of annotation, you can easily add the information you want to share and save it. Visitors to the site can click on the word and check out these annotations to better learn about the topics. Information is delivered in a friendly interface. Images, for instance, can be filtered according to the site they belong to.

The same procedure applied to all words the website. If a word is not automatically highlighted, you can add an annotation to it by clicking on it and clicking on the “iGlue it!” icon that appears.

Conclusion

iGlue has the potential to completely change how we use websites to obtain information. By letting us view what others have annotated and by supporting various forms of annotations, iGlue has successfully added an additional and useful dimension to websites. Familiarize yourself with iGlue the soonest you can – this might be how websites will be used in the future.

Visit iGlue @ http://iglue.com/

InstanFox is a Firefox extension that allows you to perform instant search for several sites directly from the address bar.

The usage is simple. After installing the extension, all you have to do is to type the keyword for the respective sites follow by a space and your search term (for example, “g bookkeeping“). It will then perform an instant search as you type.

The default websites and keywords supported by InstantFox include:
g » for Google Search
i » for Google Images
m » for Google Maps
y » for Youtube
t » for Twitter
w » for Wikipedia
a » for Amazon
e » for eBay
b » for Bing
yh » for Yahoo
wa » for Wolframalpha
f » for Weather Forecast
c » for Calulator

As good as it gets, there is no room for configuration. If you are thinking of adding your own search engines and keyword, you are out of luck here. In addition, the search is default to Google (international). If you want to perform a localized search, you will be better off loading the Google site in your country domain.

Another problem is that other than Google search, you can experience lag when searching other sites. For example, when you search “e iphone” (search “iphone” in eBay), it will take a whopping 5 seconds to load up the page. While it is still faster than loading the eBay site and type in the search term, it is still nowhere near “instant”.

According to the developer, the future release will see more features like dynamic autosuggest, ability to add custom sites/keyword and to speed up the instant process. We will see how it goes.

Thanks to Janis Leon for informing us about this addon.

InstantFox Addon.

Here to tidy up that situation and provide a neater way of using those Google service is a tool called “Integrated Gmail”.

Introduction

Integrated Gmail (IG) is a browser add-on for Mozilla Firefox. The add-on supports Firefox versions 3.0 onwards. The function of IG is to provide all the Google applications under one interface and make them accessible through Gmail. Thus all you have to do is sign into your Gmail account in Firefox; other services will be opened within Gmail without opening new browser tabs.

Usage

After installing the add-on and restarting Firefox, if you visit your Gmail account you will see something similar to the image below.

Instead of the Gmail interface automatically loading up on the right, you will links to your Inbox, Reader, and Calendar. The Inbox option will display your Gmail inbox in the regular manner. Clicking on the Reader or Calendar links however will open the respective application right there, instead of opening them up in new tabs. For example here is how the Calendar application will look like when its link is clicked.

You can use applications opened under Gmail in the same manner as you would otherwise use them. Minimization links to the right of each application lets you easily expand and collapse an app to reduce the clutter.

Modification and Customization

By default IG integrates only Reader and Calendar with Gmail. Other Google applications can also be added to this list of integration by accessing the add-on’s options. To add other applications click on the ‘Integrated Gmail’ option under the ‘Tools’ menu.

This action will open the add-on’s options.

The ‘Add’ and ‘Remove’ buttons on the right is where you can add /remove more applications. The add button presents the list of all Google apps that can be added to the Gmail integration list.

The bottom arrow buttons can be used to reposition the application shortcuts.

Other settings of the add-on such as collapsible headers and showing favicons can be controlled through the options present in the right pane.

To change application-specific settings, just click on an application to the left and change its respective settings on the right.

Conclusion

Integrated Gmail will prove to be valuable to all Gmail accountholders who use Mozilla Firefox. By proving easy shortcuts to other Google applicaitons within Gmail, this brilliant add-on saves you a ton of time. Give the tool a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Get Integrated Gmail from here and check out its official website here.

Google Shortcuts displays all Google services as buttons or as a space-saving dropdown menu next to your address bar (or anywhere you like it). You can then access your frequently used Google services with a single click from the toolbar. It currently supports over 110 Google services and it is highly configurable and customizable.

Install Google Shortcuts for Firefox or Chrome.

After the installation, immediately you will see a row of icons appears beside the address bar. The default list of Google services include Gmail, Reader, Google Encrypted Search, Maps, Calendar, Wave (is anyone still using this?), Dashboard and Settings.

Don’t like the way that it is messing up your toolbar or that you can’t find your favorite Google services in the list? Don’t worry. Just click the Settings button and you will be able to configure it to your liking.

In the Settings, you can add the Google services that you use frequently and remove those that you have totally no interest in. You can also arrange them in the order you like and even edit the URL of the shortcuts. What makes it even more powerful is the various function buttons such as “Gmail This” or “New Doc” to quickly email a selected text from the webpage to your friend or to quickly create a new Google document on the fly.

And if you think Google Shortcuts only handle Google services, then you are wrong. You can even create your own shortcuts with a custom name and URL.

The Advanced Options is where all the good things are. Here, you can define the layout of the Google shortcut, either as a horizontal or vertical toolbar, or as a dropdown menu. I personally prefer the dropdown menu as it does not clutter my toolbar with icons. You can also configure the tab behavior (to open a new tab or in background tab) and also use Google Apps for all your Google services.

The Import/Export Option allows you to backup your Settings and import to another Firefox browser.

The Import/Export feature is only available in the Firefox version. This also means that you won’t be able to export your Firefox Google Shortcuts settings and import it into Google Chrome.

There is no doubt over the usefulness of this Google Shortcuts extension. It is highly configurable and could save you ton of times typing the URL on your address bar. If you are not using it, go install it now.

Google Shortcuts (Firefox | Google Chrome)

By default, Grooveshark is only accessible via a browser. To use it, the usual way is to open your browser (or open a new tab), go to the Grooveshark site and start listening to your music. This isn’t really the most user-friendly way. What if, with the help of some tools, you can have a better Grooveshark experience? Let’s check them out.

1. Control Grooveshark from browser tool bar

Looking to control your Grooveshark without having to switch to the Grooveshark tab everytime? sharkZapper for Grooveshark is a great Google Chrome extension specially made for that. After installation, you can control your Grooveshark right from your Chrome icon bar. You can Play, Rewind, Next the song and even mute/volume control. It even shows the Album Art and a search box for you to search for songs.

In Firefox, you can use the Grooveshark Remote Control to control Grooveshark without breaking your workflow.

2. Block Grooveshark ad

Seriously, I would not want to block the ads in Grooveshark because firstly, I don’t find them intrusive, and secondly, it is a source of revenue for Grooveshark. However, I know that many of you dislike the ads and can’t wait to kill it even before it appears. The easiest way is to install an ad blocking extension. The most popular is Adblock extension (Google Chrome, Firefox). The ad will miraculously disappear after you have installed the extension.

3. Add keyboard support for Grooveshark

For those who prefer keyboard shortcut to mouse click, KeySharky adds the necessary keyboard shortcut for you to control Grooveshark. Once installed, you can press “Ctrl + Shift + Alt + Z” to play/pause the current song or “Ctrl + Shift + Alt + D” to skip to the next song in the playlist. There are also other useful keyboard shortcut like mute, increase/decrease volume. You can even change the keyboard shortcut to other keys that are more convenient for you.

keySharky (Firefox | Chrome)

4. Display lyrics for now playing song

If you love to sing along while your favorite song is playing, Grooveshark Lyrics (Google chrome extension) can display the lyrics when the song is playing.

5. Import iTunes playlist to Grooveshark

If you already have a huge playlist in your iTunes, the last thing that you want to do is to reconfigure this playlist to your Grooveshark account. Groovylist is a web service that can convert your iTunes playlist to Grooveshark format. It supports Last.fm and Spotify as well, so you wouldn’t miss out any of your favorite track.

6. Using Grooveshark as a desktop app

While Grooveshark is great, it will be even better if we could run it as a native desktop app. GrooveWalrus is one such app that allows you to run Grooveshark as a native desktop app. In Groovewalrus, you can search for the songs and mass add them to the playlist. The interface is user-friendly, so it should be easy for anyone to use it.

7. Remote control Grooveshark

There are times where you are not directly in front of your computer, but still want your Grooveshark music to continue playing. This is where remote control for Grooveshark becomes useful. If you own an Android phone, you can install the Grooveshark Remote (market link) app in the market. This app, works in conjunction with a Firefox extension, allows you to control the playback/pause/previous/next of the songs in your play queue. It is rather minimal at the moment, but at least it works.

For iPhone and other mobile devices, there is no native app to remote control Grooveshark yet. What you can use is GrooveBud Google Chrome extension to control Grooveshark remotely from another web browser. In this case, you can open up your mobile safari, load the Groovebud Control Player and control your play song. I have tested it on a first gen iPod Touch and it worked, but the interface is overly simple and nothing to be desired.

8. Download music from Grooveshark

There are plenty of ways to download songs from Grooveshark. Orbit downloader is one of the most popular one. While installing Orbit Downloader, make sure to select Grab Pro in the installation option and check the box for your browser. Once installed, you can then playback the song in Grooveshark and get Orbit downloader to record the song in MP3 format.

GrooveDown is a desktop-based Windows software that can also be used to download music from Grooveshark. The usage is even simpler – search for the song(s) you want and click the Download button.

9. Using Grooveshark on your mobile device

If you can’t get enough of Grooveshark and want to access it even when on the move, Tinyshark for Android is your best choice. With it, you can search and play Grooveshark music while on the move. My experience with it is that it can be laggy at times, but this is the best you can get from the market.

What other ways/apps do you use to improve your Grooveshark experience?

TelePrompter is a simple extension that only do one thing – set any webpage to autoscroll mode. When set, the webpage will scroll up or down by itself at a regular speed. You can switch the scroll direction with the mouse or keyboard shortcut and change the scrolling speed on the fly.

Here how it works

Install TelePrompter in Google Chrome.

Once the extension is installed, reload the web page you are currently at. Double click at any where on the page. The web page will now automatically scroll by itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUcmDHv0mt0

As it auto-scrolls, you will see a slider just beneath the toolbar. You can drag the slider to increase/decrease the scrolling speed.

TelePrompter Options

In its options page, you can configure the initial speed of the autoscroll and also the range of speed (the lower and upper limit of the slider).

Wrapping up

This is a simple extension that allows you to sit back and enjoy your reading without having to bother about mouse scrolling. Is this a must-have extension? Nope. Will it save you time and make you more productive? Probably not. But if you enjoy giving your hand a momentarily break, yet not disrupting your workflow, this could be priceless.

One of the most common applications people look for is a desktop email application. Thunderbird from Mozilla is a fantastic replacement for Outlook. Much like Firefox, Thunderbird can be customized with any number of addons.

These are 12 of Thunderbird addons that I strongly recommend to make your Thunderbird a bit more powerful.

1. Lightning

A calendar is one of the most important tools for anyone in business. You need to be able to quickly look and access your day. Needing to have multiple windows open and toggle back and forth is very inconvenient. Lightning is Mozilla’s calendar application.

This extension lets you add a full calendar to Thunderbird, making it more efficient to schedule appointments from an email.

2. Reminderfox

When you get busy working or playing on Facebook, you might not notice it is time for the meeting. Reminderfox is a popular Firefox browser extension that is also available in Thunderbird. If you are trying to have an all-in-one mail application, reminders and to-do lists will help a lot.

3. Adblocker plus

Much like a browser, there are many things that can show up in your email inbox to slow down your what you or doing or even cause harm. Adblocker plus will help filter out the unsavory banner ads and other things that can be an annoyance.

4. WebMail Notifier

For those who use Yahoo or other web-based email accounts, in some cases, the email provider does not allow POP access. For this reason, you may not be able to access your email directly from your desktop mail program.

WebMail Notifier will check your web-based email account at regular intervals and let you know how many unread emails you have waiting for you.

5. Add-on compatibility reporter

Mozilla put out this extension to help you check the compatibility of your add-ons. It is nothing more than a time saver. When you install an add-on or upgrade to a newer version of Thunderbird, something may not be compatible. This handy little add-on will let you know.

6. Quick translator

Quick translator does just what the name implies. If you get an email in a language you are not familiar with, you can quickly translate the words into your native tongue. This is a very important extension for those of you who work via the web or have international clients.

7. Quick locale switcher

Do you need to work in multiple languages? Well, you know how much of an inconvenience it can be to change the input method each time you need to switch languages. Quick locale switcher allows you to quickly change your language, dictionaries and all the other stuff so you can concentrate on work.

8. Thunderbrowse

Everyday you get a link emailed to you. Instead of clicking on the link and wait for the browser to open, you can open the link inside Thunderbird. When you click on a link in an email, a new tab will open and you will be taken to the URL destination.

9. Quote collapse

This solved one of the irritations I have with long email threads. There is too much going on and the email can be distracting. This fancy little extension lets you minimize parts of the quoted email thread so you only see what you need to.

10. Send later 3

As the name implies, you will gain the ability to schedule emails. I know I use the schedule feature for a ton for things like birthdays, follow up etc. When you type up an email and it is ready to send, you can go to File -> Send Later or use the keyboard shortcut to bring up the Send later window. From this window you can choose a preset time or choose sometime more specific.

11. Nostalgy

If you process a large number of emails everyday, Nostalgy will save you a lot of time. This add-on will let you create keyboard shortcuts for actions like move a message to a folder or change folders.

12. Themes

Last but not least are themes. If you spend a lot of time using your email program, it may as well be visually appealing, right? You can choose from over 70 different themes to spruce up your inbox.

While many people will not use any add-ons for Thunderbird. It is a fantastic program right out of the box so to speak. However, using one or more of the add-ons will only extend its usefulness.

What add-on do you use to tame the email beast called your inbox?

image credit: wikimedia

Minimalist Gmail is a Google Chrome extension that gives you the power to strip your Gmail to the bare minimum (if you want to) and customize it to your liking. It is a powerful tool that allows you to change almost every single aspect (of the looks, not the functionality) of Gmail.

Let’s take a deeper look.

First, install Minimalist Gmail from the Chrome extension page.

Once installed, open its options page to view of series of customization options. There are mainly 8 areas where you can configure: General, Notification, Google Bar, Header, Main, Navigation, Chat and Footer.

General – disable the Gmail options icon and change the font and background color of all the buttons.

Notification – Enable favicon unread counter and desktop notification. it can support Google Apps domain as well.

Google Bar – Google bar is the top most bar of Gmail, the place that contains link to your various Google accounts. Here, you can configure whether to show the Google bar and set custom links to appear. For example, if you visit Youtube more often than Google Reader, you can replace the Reader link with your Youtube link. You are not restricted to Google-only sites. You can even change the link to point to an external site.

Header – Fancy your own logo in place of the Gmail logo? Here is where you can change the logo and enable/disable the search field.

Main – The Main section is related to the main message area. You can get it to highlight the starred email and change the background color when hovering over the messages. You can also disable the various icons (starred, attachment etc) and change the behavior of the toolbar. The best part is, you can turn off the ads at the sidebar and the bottom of the page.

Navigation – Control what appears on the sidebar.

Chat – show/hide the chat box

Footer – Toggle on/off the footer links. Most of the stuff are things you won’t take a second look, so you might want to turn them all off.

Here is the screenshot of the before and after Minimalist Gmail customization.

Before:

After

The best part about Minimalist Gmail is that it shows a preview window when you hover over the option. This allows you to see the portion of the site that you are changing before you make any changes. It also saves you the trouble to keep refreshing the browser to see the changes.

Wrapping up

While there are several extensions and userscripts for Gmail, minimalist Gmail seems to be the best out there with plenty of customization options. Even if you are not into minimalism, you still can use it to improve your user experience in Gmail. One caveat though, it is currently only available for Google Chrome. Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera users, sorry, you have no luck here.

Thanks to Jeff Studenski for the tips.

Minimalist Gmail

There are many factors that can influence the loading speed of a website. Analyzing and fixing the problems one by one could be a nightmare for non-geeks who happens to have one or two websites. But luckily, there’s YSlow – a Firefox add-on which will help even the most common users of technology to easily track down the hogs on their websites.

Get, Install, And Set Up The Add Ons

You can install YSlow by using the search function in Firefox’s Add-ons Manager, or you could also get it straight from YSlow page.

And after installation, you can see the logo on Firefox’ lower bar. Clicking on it will activate the Add-on.

However, please note that you have to install and activate Firebug prior to using YSlow. And if you are Firefox 4 beta users, you currently can’t use YSlow because the latest version of Firebug (at the time of writing) is only compatible with Firefox 3.x.

If everything is set, click YSlow button while the website that you want to analyze is in focused. YSlow will open as one of the tabs of Firebug. You can choose the option to always run YSlow each time a web page is loaded, but ordinary users who only want to analyze one or two sites should use manual process by clicking the “Run Test” button.

There are several ruleset of test that you can use depending on what kind of website that you have. Most of us amateur blogger might want to use the “Small Site or Blog” ruleset.

You can also edit the sets by clicking the “Edit” button next to the ruleset drop down menu. Then you can include/exclude elements of the set. You can get more information about an item by hovering your mouse over it.

The Test Result

After clicking the “Run Test” button, YSlow will start analyzing your site. A short moment later, it will present you the complete result with overall grades, individual grades and short notes about each items.

You can learn more about a particular item by clicking on the “Read More” link.

You can also filter the result based on the categories.

Next to the “Grade” tab is the “Components” tab. This is the place to see the breakdown list of components that weighing down the page that you analyze.

The “Statistics” tab will show you the result in a more graphical manner. You can quickly compare the size of each components just by looking at the graph.

Tools Of The Trade

After the analyzing comes the fixing phase. YSlow provides its users with a set of tools to improve your websites’ performance. But please remember that YSlow goes only as far as giving you suggestions of the optimized elements of your websites. You still have to manually edit those components yourself – replacing the old ones with the optimized versions suggested by YSlow.

For example. you could click on the “All JS Minified” link to get more compact and smaller script. Then login to your web host and use those minified scripts to replace the ones that you use on your site.

But the tool that I think would be most useful to most of us is the Smush.it. This tool will optimized the images found on the page that you analyze so that those images will be smaller and more fit for the web.

Click the “All Smush.it” link and let Smush.it do the rest. After the process is done, you can download the smushed images and use them to replace the ones that you use on the web page.

The tool also allows you to upload images from your hard drive and optimize them. This will be very useful to compress the size of images before using them for the web.

Be warned though that Smush.it will rename the files and use plus (+) sign to replace spaces. Some sites doesn’t allow you to use non-standard characters for file name and your optimized images might not show up properly. So you might want to rename the optimized images before uploading them to the web.

There are many more aspects of YSlow that can’t be fit described here. For more information, you could visit YSlow User Guide.

WordPress blogs owners could also try 3 more methods to lighten the load and speed up their blogs.

Have you tried YSlow? Do you know other tools to analyze and fix the hogs on your websites? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comment below.

Chrome Toolbox is a Google Chrome extension created by Google. It is an enhancement and quick access tool combined into one.

After the installation, you will see a new icon on the toolbar where you can click to reveal a dropdown menu containing various useful tools, including the mute tabs option.

The dropdown menu also allows you to save form data for the existing site and quickly fill it up next time you visit the same site. You also can get it to open closed tab and toggle Show Bookmarks Bar. (Note: Some of these features have long been available in the form of shortcut keys, but are now grouped together to provide a faster access)

Toolbar/Tab option

The option page is where you can find more interesting things.

You can activate the floating toolbar option for images and videos so that every time you hover your mouse over an image or video, you can magnify it, set it as wallpaper or open the video in a new standalone window. For the video, you even have the ability to pin it “always on top” of all other windows.

By default, when you close the last tab, the browser window will close too. With this extension, you can now configure it to open a new tab when the last tab is closed.

Quick Launch Bookmarks shortcut keys

If you have organized your bookmarks into various folders, here is where you can assign shortcut (Alt + #) to open the links in a specified folder all at once.

Shortcuts and menu

Google Chrome comes with plenty of keyboard shortcuts that you probably don’t even know their existence. This is where the Shortcuts and Menu option is useful. You can find all the keyboard shortcuts of the browser here. You can even compare the shortcuts with other browser and which one is the same and which is different.

For those keyboard shortcuts that you don’t use, you can also deactivate them.

Google Chrome is already well known for its speed and simplicity. With this extension, it is now even more user-friendly than before. What other features do you hope to see in the extension?

Note: The above extension was tested on a Windows machine. Some of the features are not available in the Linux version of Google Chrome.

Download Chrome Toolbox

Setting Google Instant as the homepage

While the default homepage in Firefox is set to the Google search, you will find that you can’t perform any instant search on it. The reason being, the Firefox Google home page is a custom page created by Mozilla that doesn’t come with the instant feature. To set Google Instant as your homepage, go to the “Preferences -> General” and set Google.com as your homepage.

For those who are not residing in the United States, you will also find that Google will auto-redirect the Google.com site to a country-specific site. For example, I am living in Singapore, so whenever I access Google.com, it will redirect me to Google.com.sg which does not come with the instant search feature. To fix this, you have to set the homepage URL to google.com/ncr or http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy. This will ensure that the actual Google instant Search page is shown.

Accessing Google Instant from the Awesome bar

To enable Google instant search from the awesome bar, install the InstantFirefox extension.

Once installed, you will be able to perform a Google instant search from the awesome bar.

There are two things that you need to take note:

1. While performing the search, the dropdown search result will overlap with the instant search. This can be very irritating at times.

2. This extension will only work on new tab. If you are using extensions, like Speed dial, that also take control of the new tab, this InstantFirefox extension won’t work.

Accessing Google Instant search from the search bar

You can easily add custom search engine to the search bar with the Add To Search Bar extension.

Install Add To Search Bar extension

Go to http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy.

Right click on the Search field and select “Add to Search Bar”. When prompted, enter “Google instant” as the new search engine name.

Note: You won’t get instant search result when you type on the search bar. However, you can just type the first few characters of your search term, press Enter and it will bring you to a Google instant search result page. You can then continue your search from there.

That’s it. What other ways do you make use of Google Instant in Firefox?

If you are like me, and are also using Google Chrome, you are in luck, here are several PDF extensions that you can use to make the whole conversion process much easier and faster.

1. Save As PDF

This is my favorite extension for pdf conversion. In my experience with several other extensions, this is the best, in terms of the speed and quality of conversion.

After installing the extension, you will see an icon at the toolbar. When you come across any webpage that you want to convert to pdf, simply click on the button and it will start the conversion immediately. The conversion is fast (typically less than 5 seconds) and it runs in the background without disrupting you from your work.

Save As PDF also comes with plenty of configuration options (in fact, it is the only pdf extension that comes with configuration option). Things you can configure including the page size, page format, page margin and whether it should convert javascript, images and background. The best of all, it allows you to set a password for your converted pdf file.

2. PDFmyURL

Instead of an icon in the toolbar, the PDFmyURL icon appears in the URL bar. Similarly, on a page that you want to be converted to pdf, just click on the icon and it will do all the work in the background.

The speed of conversion is rather fast, but it is not able to convert images properly for sites that are using lazy loading. In addition, it seems to add an extra margin to the four sides of the page, which make the file size bigger.

3. Web2PDFConverter

Web2PDFConverter is yet another pdf converter extension for Google Chrome. One of its unique feature is the ability to view your converted PDF files in Google Docs. You can then choose to save the pdf file in your Google Docs and free up storage space on your computer.

One annoyance with Web2PDF is that during conversion, it takes control of the browser and prevents you from doing any other things. You won’t be able to switch to other tabs, or even other applications. Doing so will terminate the conversion process. In term of user-friendliness, this is definitely the worst in my opinion.

Wrapping up

If you are looking for a pdf conversion tool for your Google Chrome, I would strongly recommend SaveAsPdf. What other tools do you use to convert your stuff to PDF?

When browsing the Web, there will be times (plenty of times) that you come across sentences/words/phrases that you want to check it out in other sites such as Google, Wikipedia, Amazon etc. Instead of launching a new tab, load the URL and copy/paste the term into the new site, you can now get rid of all these steps with Hyperwords. All you have to do is to highlight the term and select from the popup menu the action that you want to carry out, and it will automate the process for you.

Let’s take a look at what Hyperwords is capable of doing.

Search

After you have highlighted the term, a small orb will appear and you just have to hover over the orb to display the menu. The first option is the Search function. From here, you can perform a search in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Images and Videos, and even search on the current page.

Reference

If search is not your cup of tea, you can also quickly find a reference in Wikipedia, Britannica, Wolfram Alpha or Google Definition.

The best thing is, when you hover on the link, a popup window will appear with the results you want. You can then obtain the info you want, close the popup when you are done and continue reading the page that you are at previously.

Conversion

There are times when you just need to get information quick, just like “How many meters is 10 miles?” and you can get instant result from Hyperwords as well.

Quick Sharing

Hyperwords also allows you to quickly share content in Twitter, Facebook and several other social networks. On the first run, you will have to grant permission for it to publish to your Twitter/Facebook account.

Configuration options

In the backend, there are several options that you can configure. The General tab is where you configure the action when a term is highlighted. You can set the menu to appear immediately after you have highlighted the term, or when you hover over the orb.

In the Layout tab, you can decide what options appear on the menu and arrange the order that they appear. You can also add new items to the list.

The Other tab consists of all the miscellaneous options like “open click in new window” etc.

Conclusion

If you are looking for ways to improve your productivity and have quick access to various information in Google Chrome or Firefox, Hyperwords is definitely one great choice you should check out.

Download Hyperwords for Google Chrome | Firefox

While some of the above functions can be achieved using a dedicated HTML editor like Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, but why use another program when the same purpose can be achieved without spending time on learning to use a heavyweight designing tool ?

Here is a recommended list of Firefox add-ons for anyone interested in web design or development:

Firebug

Firebug is by far the best add-on for debugging the HTML source of websites, changing CSS parameters and previewing the changes in real time. The extension also allows you to delete specific HTML parts from the webpage under inspection and you can preview the changes right away.

To get started, all you have to do is hit the little “Inspect” button at the far left and choose a web element from the page . The CSS property of that element will be shown on the right panel, now just modify the attributes and you can preview the output in real time.

Firebug is also available as a Google Chrome extension which can be found here.

Web Developer Toolbar

This is again a useful add-on which adds a huge number of useful features in a sleek toolbar, as shown below

Using the toolbar, you can tweak the following aspects of any webpage:

• Disabling Specific items: With one click, you can disable all colors, meta redirects or javascript coding on any webpage. Just check off the required options from the “Disable” dropdown and the webpage will refresh with your defined changes in action.
• Cookies: From the “Cookies” dropdown you can disable external cookies or site specific sessions and test the behavior of the website.
• CSS: This is the most useful thing – handling external as well as internal CSS files with the touch of a button. Just hit the “CSS” dropdown and you can manage all external CSS files called, inline CSS elements, view Style information or add a custom stylesheet. Saves a lot of time, when you want to disable an entire stylesheet and recreate a theme from scratch.
• Images: Another very useful button on the toolbar is “Images” which allows you to disable all images on the webpage, copy all the image source paths, check for broken image links or hide specific images.
• Information: The “Information” button allows you to view the page information, display tab index, table depth, anchor information, color information and much more data about the webpage you are analyzing.

There are other useful buttons as well which includes verifying the CSS validation, checking the outline, browser compatibility – it’s all packed up in the toolbar you can’t afford to miss.

Fireshot

Fireshot is the best add-on for handling or manipulating images on any webpage. Apart from capturing screenshots, the add-on can perform a whole bunch of operations related with embedded images:

• Capture active region or the full page and save it in your computer.
• Capture a region or the full page and open it with your default image editing program.
• Upload a screenshot of the active region to an FTP server or send it as an email attachment.

So when you are done tweaking a webpage with Firebug or any other debugging tool, you may want to save the output as an image file or send it to someone else. In such situations, Fireshot is a really handy tool to save a screenshot or download the processed design on your computer.

To use Fireshot, simply right click on any webpage and choose Fireshot -> Action, as shown below:

ColorZilla

If you need help in finding the hex code of specific colors on any design, use ColorZilla. Once the add-on is installed, just click the small “Eyedropper icon” at the left bottom of the Firefox status bar, as shown below:

This will open a simple crosshair which you can use to know the hex code of any color on a webpage. There are other tools as well e.g Eyedropper, Palette browser ; you can copy the hex link directly to your Windows clipboard and use it on your CSS stylesheet.

Apart from selecting colors, you can also use ColorZilla to zoom in to a portion of a webpage. This is very useful when you want to accurately determine the hex code of borders, navigationsl units and so on. Here is an example:

ColorSuckr

ColorSuckr lets you extract all the colors from any image and build a color pallet using those colors. After the add-on is installed, right click on any image to extract the hex codes of the major colors used on the image and generate a unique color pallette using the ColorSuckr website.

This is very useful when you want to design a new element in your website’s theme and looking for a matching color pallette which dwells with the current design of your website.

GridFox

This is not a must have add-on but can be useful when you want to draw gridlines over a design and want to measure the position of certain elements by pixel width. Grids can be saved for future use and you can measure the width of any row or column, as seen in the following illustration:

Note: a similar add-on - Measure it solves the same purpose, but comes with an additional pixel ruler which can be used to measure the width or height of a web element.

FireFtp

Another useful add-on down the list is FireFTP which allows you to manage FTP accounts and transfer files to your website directly from the browser. You can add multiple websites in FireFTP and upload files from your computer to any of your website’s directory.

This is highly recommended because when you are designing something, you need less number of open applications to work with. Works much the same way as other FTP programs like Filezilla and you can also import/export FTP settings on other computers.

There are some other useful add-ons e.g IEtab, CSSMate, Loadtimeanalyzer but unfortunately they are not compatible with Firefox 3.6.10. You can use them on older versions of Firefox, if you want.

Which Firefox extensions do you use or recommend? Please share your views in the comments.

Here’s what you can find in the new Firefox beta for Android.

Sync

Firefox users who have been using the Firefox Sync feature to synchronize your bookmarks, settings and profile across multiple computers, you can now sync it to your Android phone too. Simply go to the Preferences, fill in your sync credential and tap on the Connect button.

Add-ons

Just like what makes the desktop browser great, the mobile version also comes with addons. You can either browse the addon gallery or just do a search to locate your addons.

Yes, you still need to restart your mobile browser every time you install an addon.

Personalized Start Page

The start page is a good place for you to… well, get started. It shows your previous browsing session, the tabs that you opened and also tabs from other computers. Cool!

Left and Right sidebar

Firefox for Android makes clever use of the sidebar which have been largely ignored by most applications. By flicking the page to the right, the left sidebar will appear to reveal the tabs. Similarly, on the right side (flicking the screen to the left) shows the quick bookmark icon and the forward/back button.

Awesome Bar and Awesome Screen

The Awesome bar in desktop Firefox (the same as the URL bar) continue to be awesome in the mobile version. A tap on the URL bar will bring you to a awesome screen where you can access to your bookmarks, history and other desktop tabs all in one place. Similarly, you can type the URL to load the site you want.

Pinch to zoom

The pinch to zoom is becoming the norm in multi-touch device, so it is not surprising to know that Firefox beta supports pinch to zoom as well. In a quick experiment, the pinch to zoom feature is not as sensitive as the native Google browser, but still, it is a good inclusion.

Increased Responsiveness

Yes, this is the one that we all been waiting for. Firefox beta for Android is definitely more responsive than the alpha build. It is even on par with the native browser.

Can’t wait to try it? Hit the link below to download and give it a test drive. Don’t forget to let us know what you think in the comments.

Download Firefox beta for Android

1. Twitter

If you’re in to Twitter at all, you are probably already imagining all the ways this could be useful. Frankly though, it even surprised me a little. While I expected the ability to be able to Tweet right from the toolbar, it goes a couple steps further. You can click the Tweet button to automatically Tweet the page you’re currently on, with the link already shortened for you, and then go ahead and continue writing your tweet. You can also quickly and easily see trending topics in real time, right in your toolbar, which was a nice piece of extra functionality I hadn’t expected.

2. MLB.com Toolbar

Anyone who knows me at all knows how much I love my Philadelphia Phillies. I’m constantly watching their games, reading about the team, checking scores and standings, and going back and forth with my friends about the Playoffs and World Series, and there are a ton of people out there with a love of the game like me. I even used the Phillies own National League East standings in an article on creating your own widgets back in July.  You can imagine how excited I was to find out there was an official MLB.com extension. The extension adds a toolbar to your browser that basically acts as the ticker does along the bottom of ESPN on your TV, but only for the MLB. It shows current scores, along with stats, and links to game coverage.

3. 1-Click Weather by Weather.com

The usefulness of 1-Click Weather might seem obvious, but what may not be as obvious is its perfect subtlety. 1-Click Weather does just what it says, it gives you one click access to Weather.com’s weather information. The way it does so though is great, and most of all unobtrusive. Rather than installing a full toolbar that could show you weather info that you may or may not need, and reduce the viewing area of your browser, 1-Click Weather adds a little button to the left of your address bar that has a little current temperature reading, and with one click takes you to the full site in a new tab for a more in-depth look at conditions in your set area.

4. Gmail Counter

Gmail Counter too, seems obvious. But again, its the perfect implementation that makes this extension great. Like 1-Click Weather, it simply adds a small email button to the left of your taskbar that will have a count show up if you have unread email messages.  While the implementation is great, and the app works wonders, what may be the best part is the fact that myself, as well as many Gmail users I know, are basically addicted to the service. This means we have Gmail open literally anytime our browser is. Now though, we don’t need to waste the system resources on it. Just add the extension and check your email if it pops up and tells you you’ve got new messages!

5. Click to Flash

Click to Flash might be my favorite extension out of all of these. Look, there is no debating Flash’s usefulness on the web. It absolutely exists and is used in innumerable web applications. The problem is that there is also no denying that Flash can be buggy, and is at the very least a huge battery drain. This is where Click to Flash comes in, and it solves these problems cleanly, easily, consistently, and perfectly. Once you install the Click to Flash extension, anytime Flash appears in your browser, rather than showing the ad, it will block it before it even loads (speeding up website loading times across the web) and will display the block with the word “Flash” in it. Then, if you click the box, that Flash portion of the page will load. If you don’t, it won’t and it won’t waste your time or resources loading it up. Its an elegant solution to a complex problem that one day may not exist, but for now is a huge one.

So what did I miss? Do you guys have certain extensions you love that we should know about?  Is there an extension you’d like to see that doesn’t exist? Tell us in the comments!

Get all these extensions and more from Apple’s extensions site