Blog about Sourcing... and Stuff

This is part 3 of my Mozilla coverage and I wanted to discuss one particularly odd, yet incredibly useful addon/application.  This one is by far the most useful of the ones I’ve reviewed so far and let me tell ya, my uses for it just keep growing by the day.  The name of this wonderful creation is Prism and here’s where it’s hiding.

What does it do?  Well, in a nutshell, prism is capable of taking a web page you’re viewing and turns it into an independent application with it’s own set of independent passwords and such.  So let’s say you have multiple twitter accounts, and logging in/out is a pain.  All you do is visit twitter.com, turn the page into it’s own application.  What will then happen is you’ll have the choice to select where you want it added and what you want to name it amongst other features.  You would then select let’s say… “desktop” and call it “Twitter Account 1″.

From there, you would look to your desktop and see there now an icon for “Twitter Account 1″.  Double click on the icon and it’ll open a single browser window to the twitter home page. Simply login, tell it to save your pass/user and remember you.  Now close it.  Go back to your FireFox browser and add another to your desktop calling it “Twitter Account 2″.  Repeat the steps of opening, saving passwords etc…

Now, you have 2 icons on your desktop, which can both be run simultaneously, displaying both of your twitter home pages and logging you in automatically each time.  You can use this for anything…. including your ATS, CRM, Web calendars, Emails, etc…  Yes, tabs are great, but when it’s something specific you want, you can add that icon/app to any of your shortcut bars like quicklaunch, rocketdock, start menu, etc…  and it’s 1 click to login to whatever place you want w/o having to mess w/ tabs.  Then just use alt+tab to switch between and you’re golden!  I highly advise checking this app out, it’s just…  too good not to!

Here’s the link for the addon download.  You can also chose to install it as a stand alone application which in and of itself is pretty cool…

Mozilla Prism Download site

Cheers^^

In continuation with my series of recommendations for Mozilla tools, thought I’d follow up with one I’ve really quite come to enjoy.  It’s called Snowl and it’s essentially a media/news aggregate addon built into FireFox.  Snowl has been out for a little over 2 years I guess and it seems like something you’d give up on…  but they haven’t, and neither have I.

With so many of these out there, you might wonder why it is that I’m enjoying this so much…  well, the short answer is…  LAYOUT LAYOUT LAYOUT.  Yes, I have Seesmic and Tweetdeck, and belong to every Twitter/Feed tool out there… but this one… something about it.

You can download SnOwl here.

It’s not something for everyone, and it’s still in beta, but it’s pretty cool.  I have the people I read on a regular separated by blog and tweet, and while i’m surfing the web, i can keep an eye on anything coming from them.  The breakdown is really sweet, and you can use it as side or top bar function.  You can also use their “River” of news which is a play on “stream” I guess which is kind of unique. It’s almost like reading your content in a newspaper format.  Kind of like if it were all spread out on large sheets of paper and you can flip pages, sort by subscription, or look at the mass group of all.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the best solution right now, but it beats having to constantly visit the twitter home page, or open my deck or seesmic everytime i want to see something going on.  The biggest downfall about it is the ability to send back.  you can’t just click for auto-reply or dm…  you have to type the persons name in when you want to send… I think anyway, haven’t found any other way to do it.  But it’s a time saver when it comes to app switching and just reading and keeping up on your core content.

Give it a shot, let me know what you think^^

Cheers^^

Today I’m going to being a series of postings covering some lesser known tools published by Mozilla.  For those of you who weren’t aware of anything beyond FireFox, I have to tell ya, you’re missing out.  Mozilla in addition to FireFox, offers an email client similar to outlook called ThunderBird, a scheduling/calendar agent called Sunbird, a hybrid email client/browser/social media handler called SeaMonkey, and a LOT of other stuff.

For today’s post, we’re going to go a bit deeper than some of their more main stream products and discuss a very cool new FireFox tool called “Weave“.  Weave is in the Mozilla labs and is still in early phases of development, but what a time saver!!!

Have you ever found yourself in a position where you just formatted your pc and were missing all of your saved passwords and bookmarks etc?  Or what about being at a friends house and not being able to show them something or share your bookmarks with them?  Well… the second one is a little “risky” depending if we’re talking work or pleasure, but what it boils down to is this.

Weaver is essentially and online backup of your history, bookmarks, passwords, tabs, and preferences.  So once you’ve backed up everything into weaver, all you need to do is install it on another pc, enter your user and pass, and wallah!  It’s like you never left home!  Definitely worth checking out, especially from a business aspect.  Let’s say you had a series of corporate bookmarks and such that you wanted to share w/ all of your colleagues.  All you need to do is give them your user/pass and BAM!

Take a look, have fun, enjoy.  Cheers^^

A Little late.. I suppose but later is better than not at all?  Actually, I’m not sure I can keep up w/ an addon and software every day so look for these to be more…  every other day or so.  Anywho, onto today’s recommendation!

I want to recommend this little piece of video watching software.  It’s small, simple, plays everything and is constantly being updated.  Truly a great piece of work and I highly commend the folks who work on it.  It’s constantly being updated, and just… works wonders w/o any extra codec installations required.  Here’s the link:

Video Lan Player

Cheers^^

Let’s talk Dashboards… People seem to be obsessed w/ Tweeting these days including myself a stitch.  I’m still relatively new to the whole thing, and if it weren’t for dashboards, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second look.  Well at least til I got to SourceCon10 that is.  Since this is just a recommendation section, I’m not going to go into a whole bunch of details, but I will say there are only 2 Dashboards I actually like.

The first one is TweetDeck, though I’m told it’ll lag out… not sure.  I don’t have a whole lot of followers, so I haven’t run into any issues.

The second one is Seesmic, and… I’ve had some issues w/ it.  Since the executable is really an Application Reference and not so much an executable… it would seem that it disappears or locks up and becomes unavailable for use until I’ve restarted.

They’re both pretty nice though, and definitely make managing your tweets much simpler.  Both install via Adobe Air which is pretty neat also.

Cheers^^