I wrote up my review of Firefox 3 about two weeks ago, but I didn’t go into detail about what has been one of Firefox’s best abilities: it’s ability to be extended with extensions and other plugins. Some people like to extend Firefox to the point where it’s more of a swiss army knife than a browser, and others like to go kind of lite on the extensions. I find myself towards the latter side, but it’s nice that Firefox is so easily extensible because it allows me to fix up a few of Firefox’s shortfalls and even throw in a few bonus features that I can find useful. Firefox has a very nice add-ons database that is very cleanly integrated into Firefox that makes it very easy to install reliable add-ons to the browser. I’ve played with a few of these extensions, and here are the ones that I’ve kept for regular use in my Firefox.
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Tags: Adblock Plus, addons, bookmarks, Delicious, developer, extensions, Firefox, Gears, Google, history, Notebook, PDF, submenus, TinyURL, URL, web design

I’ve recently been converted.

No, I’m not talking about religion here. (Who knows why I would ever want to blog about religion, anyway!) I’m actually talking about something much more relevant to most of us in this day and age: e-mail.

I’m sure that many and relate themselves to me when I talk about how, during the past school year, I really didn’t do much to keep my e-mail under control, and I found myself having an inbox full of stuff dating all the way back to last September. By the end of June, I had over 1500 messages in my inbox, and I didn’t even remember what most of it was.

Well, one of my goals this summer was to get my life better organized (both in the real world and the computer world), and e-mail was certainly a major target for getting my life back in order. And lo and behold, I found my inspiration in the July 2008 issue of Macworld, which featured a three-part article by Joe Kissell called Empty Your Inbox (part 1, part 2, part 3), which was heavily based on the Inbox Zero philosophy by Merlin Mann. I delved into the Macworld article, Merlin’s video presentation and Merlin’s own set of blog articles surrounding this novel idea of getting your inbox down to nothing.

And after reading and watching, surprising as though it may seem, I’ve successfully implemented Inbox Zero into my life this past month, and now could hardly imagine going back to letting my inbox fill up. (I’m still going through the last few transitional growing pains of adjusting to a new paradigm for my e-mail, but a lot of this stuff is finally starting to become instinctive.)

While you can go check out this info for yourself, here’s my summary of what Inbox Zero is all about, and how it works.
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Tags: data detectors, e-mail, inbox, Inbox Zero, Macworld, Mail, Merlin Mann, OmniFocus, organization

Today I had another opportunity to take advantage of one of my favorite Leopard tips, but interestingly enough, it’s one that isn’t very well known out there. You may have heard of this tip, you may have not, but I thought that it might be interesting on this Fourth of July to take a break from my usual string of blog posts to share this tip from Mac OS X Leopard.

Have you ever used an application that had a menu item that you said, “Boy, why didn’t the developer think to give that menu item a keyboard shortcut?” I sure have. For example, in the new Safari 3, I use that “Merge All Windows” feature from the Window menu quite frequently, but it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut at all. Well, Leopard gives you a way to assign keyboard shortcuts easily.

Open System Preferences and go to Keyboard & Mouse, then choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Not only does this tab let you see the various system-wide keyboard shortcuts available to you, including some you may not have known about (did you know that you could show the Help menu with Shift-Command-/ by default or look things up with Control-Command-D by default?). To add a new shortcut, however, just click on the + button underneath the list, which will bring down a new sheet. If you’re adding a shortcut for a menu item in a specific application, choose it in the pop-up menu. If you’re adding a shortcut for a system-wide menu item, like a service or an Apple menu item or something like that, leave it to All Applications. In the box that says “Menu Title,” enter the exact name of the menu item you’re editing. Capitalization counts here, and if the menu item includes an ellipsis (…) at the end, include that as well. Don’t worry about what menu or submenu the item is in. Finally, in the last box, enter the keyboard shortcut you want, being sure that it doesn’t duplicate an existing one in the application or in the system. Then, click Add, and restart the affected application.

If you entered it correctly, you’ll find that the menu item should now display its keyboard shortcut, and for most applications (definitely Cocoa applications), the shortcut will be functional. Incidentally, this trick also works in Mac OS X Tiger, except that the shortcut won’t display itself in the menu item. This doesn’t work everywhere (Firefox wouldn’t go with it), but in Safari, it’s sure a lot easier to merge all windows into tabs with a Shift-Command-M than it is to have to go into the Window menu manually.

Tags: keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, Leopard, Mac, Mac OS X, menu items, menus, tip

More than a couple of times, I’ve been asked to share some WordPress plugins that I would recommend. I do have a number of plugins that I use on all of my WordPress-powered sites, and I consider them essential for any WordPress-based blog, and so I thought that I’d take the opportunity to share these plugins with you, including talking about what they do and why I use them.
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Tags: favorites, features, plugins, recommendations, review, WordPress

Macworld has put together a very interesting video of ten Leopard tips that you may not have known about, special for Thanksgiving, and indeed, most of these tips are ones that I didn’t know about before and look really useful. I’m particularly excited about the keyboard shortcuts tip, which addresses one of my qualms from my Safari review.

Anyway, if you want to learn some new power tips for Leopard, I highly recommend checking out the video.

UPDATE: Fixed link to video. Had a copy and paste error.

Tags: Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld, Thanksgiving, tips, Video

In my inaugural Leopard Feature Presentation on the New User Interface & Dock, I may have been a bit harsh on much of the new interface, but the wonderful Mac community have continued to come out with ways to rectify many of Leopard’s shortcomings. This morning, TUAW blogged about an incredible new way to dress up your stacks. Now, I didn’t come down too harshly on Stacks, which does seem like kind of a neat idea, although its implementation seems limited and I miss the ability to right-click on a folder in the Dock and get a browse-through menu. But one of the quirks of Stacks is that the icon for a stack is the icon of the item in the top of the stack, which often can misrepresent the stack or make it appear odd. For example, if you put a stack of your Home folder in the Dock, the top icon would be the folder icon for your Desktop! Seem a little strange?

This morning, TUAW blogged about some designers who have come up with some really cool designs for “Stacks drawers”, which are little folder overlays which you can set to automatically appear at the top of your stack, include the general icon of the stack you want, and appear as a little translucent drawer that still let you see the icons behind it. (You can see a screenshot, along with downloads and further instructions in the linked TUAW post.) The download includes drawers with icons suited for your Home, Library, Downloads, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Public, Utilities, Photos, Movies, and Music folders. You also get some additional “novelty” drawers with the shadow person used for Accounts, the @ for bookmarks, the action button gear, the Command key icon, an envelope for Mail, a check mark for to-dos, the “i” for Information, and even Apple’s sideways version of the Windows logo as seen in Boot Camp. (And, of course, there’s a generic drawer with no icon on it.) And of course, what’s to stop other graphic designers from making their own?

The icons are actually folders that you place inside the folder that you want a stack of. The names, by default, have spaces on either end of them so that they appear at the top of stacks that are sorted by name. For Stacks that are sorted by date, however (like the Downloads stack, for example), the TUAW post links to some Terminal-fu that you can use to set the date modified of a folder to the year 2020 so it always appears at the top of the stack.

One minor quirk that I had with this technique is that the name of the icon can’t be identical to the name of the stack it’s housing–once you change it, it works fine. You’ll also have to get used to the fact that when you open the drawer/stack, the drawer icon also comes along for the ride, but I think that the presence of those icons now to remind me of exactly what stack I’m looking at just looks so cool, and makes Stacks more useful. Now let’s hope that Apple offers something like this built-in, without the need to add folder icons to make it work…

Tags: customization, Dock, hack, icons, Mac OS X Leopard, Stacks, Terminal

Here’s a little easter egg that’s brand new in Leopard that I just discovered:

In any open file (in any application), right click on the icon that you see in the title bar for that window, and a pop-up menu will show up listing all the folders in the path to that particular file. Clicking a folder will open it in Finder. This is great if you’ve got a file open and want a quick way to get to its enclosing folder in Finder, say, to rename the file or open another file in the same folder.

Just thought I’d share that little discovery with you.

Tags: easter egg, file, Mac OS X Leopard, path

Apple is now offering a 30-day trial of iWork which you can download. The trial provides full iWork functionality for 30 days, after which you’re restricted to only opening documents until you purchase. If you download the iWork trial, then you can actually order just the serial number online from Apple instead of having them mail the boxed version to you, if you’d like. Both the serial number and the boxed version are $79, however if you qualify for one of Apple’s educational discounts (my parents are teachers, so I do), then you can get a serial number for $49, whereas the boxed version is $71. Therefore, if you’re an educator, you can save some serious money by downloading the iWork trial yourself and unlocking it with the serial number that Apple e-mails you. All that you sacrifice is a physical CD and physical documentation, but the docs are still available to you electronically. Just don’t lose the serial number and you’re all set, or you can easily burn the disk image download direct to CD!

UPDATE: Apparently the $49 was a misprint. The online Apple Store now lists that for educators, both the instant serial number and the boxed version are $71. Oh well, easy come easy go.

Tags: Apple, Discounts, Educational, iWork, Mac, Software

I’ve been working on Webmacster87.info 5 the past few days, and it’s really starting to look good. (It’s housed in a super-secret hard-to-find location somewhere on the Webmacster87.info servers.) However, I thought that I’d blog about one really useful plugin that I found.

One of the things that’s kind of annoying about WordPress is the Dashboard, in that it covers itself with a bunch of stuff taken from a whole bunch of WordPress sites, and most people don’t really care about much of the stuff, particularly the WordPress Planet stuff at the bottom of the Dashboard.

Meet Dashboard Editor. This sweet plugin adds a new tab to the Dashboard which lets you control what shows up. You can individually remove different sections of the Dashboard to only show what works for you (I found that just getting rid of the WordPress Planet section sufficed for me). But it gets even better, in that you can choose to remove everything on the Dashboard except the header and footer, and it provides a text field where you can literally design your own Dashboard. Also, if you have WordPress 2.2, or else 2.0/2.1 with the Sidebar Widgets plugin, Dashboard Editor allows you to add Sidebar Widgets to be displayed on the Dashboard (you configure which widgets to display in the normal place, just as if the Dashboard is another sidebar).

Check it out at the WordPress Plugins Directory.

My Chemistry teacher has his own forums (which I helped him install), however he seems to have gone a little crazy with the word censors. When I made a post yesterday on there, I couldn’t help but notice that every time I wrote the word “mass” or “assume”, it would be automatically be substituted by the word “backside”. It seems that one of the Word Censor settings is set to replace *ass* with “backside”, meaning that any word that has a-s-s anywhere in it gets replaced! Ooh boy, he cracked up when I told him that today.