When it comes to paring a browser's UI down to the smallest possible size, the discussion always seems to focus on Firefox. Granted, Firefox is a very customizable browser, and with the right extensions cleverly applied, you can minimize its UI. But as John Holdun notes, often overlooked in this regard is the fact that Safari is very capable of being pared down to almost nothing, and you don't need any add-ons to do it.

In fact, if you're comfortable with keyboard shortcuts, all you need to do is learn a few key ones and you'll be able to minimize Safari to a Title bar and tab bar. One warning - I've only tried this using Safari 4.0 on a Mac; I don't have easy access to Safari running on Windows, but I imagine that there are equivalents for the keyboard shortcuts I'm about to discuss.

Firstly, let's get rid of the Toolbar -- that is, the bar with the back and forward buttons, address bar, and search field. To hide the toolbar, click View > Hide Toolbar from the menu, or simply press the Command-| shortcut key. Don't worry, if you need to enter a web address quickly, you can either show it again using the same shortcut key combination, or better yet press Command-l to have the cursor automatically placed in the address bar. Type something and press enter, or tab to the search field and type something and press enter, and your page will open, and the Toolbar will immediately hide again. Slick.

The other desktop real-estate offender is the status bar at the bottom. Hiding it is just as easy - the shortcut key combination is Command-/. Like John, I tend to like to use the status bar to snoop on the destination address of links by hovering over them. This takes an extra step now, but the extra room gained by not constantly showing the status bar is worth the occasional inconvenience for me.

Is there anything more addictive than Twitter? If you're in full-blown Twitter addiction, you might be looking to spruce up your Twitter profile page. While you can change a few of the colors, the most effective way to differentiate your Twitter profile is to change the background image. If you want something professionally done that will really wow people, check out Twitter Image. They've done free designs for a number of well-known twitterers, and you can browse through screenshots of the professional designs they've done. Or, if you like, you can browse their currently two pages of royalty-free generic background images.

The free ones are part of a limited time offer that Twitter Image is offering for popular twitterers. If you have more than 2000 followers, Twitter Image will create you a custom background for free. For everyone else, they are currently offering 25% off (or more) of the $100 price, though the "or more" part is not clearly defined.

What I'm wondering is if there is actually anyone out there that is willing to shell out $100 for a background image for their Twitter page? While I'm not a heavy Twitter user, I follow over 100 people regularly, but do so almost entirely through client applications - in my case, Twitterrific on both my Mac and my iPhone. I could care less what background is on my own Twitter page, much less those of the people I follow - in fact, I find the customizations either forgettable, or annoying.

Am I out to lunch? Is there a market for $100 background images? Where do you stand? Let me know in the comments.

There are plenty of things the Windows shell does really well, but there are other relatively minute details that have been overlooked since Windows 95 that really piss us off - like the ability to click and drag taskbar buttons.

Thankfully, this 600k app that will let you do just that. Taskbar Shuffle is 32-bit Windows-only (it works on all versions, 95 to Vista), obviously, and it gives you free reign over your taskbar buttons and system tray icons. Yes, at long last you can drag them all around to your heart's content.

We first looked at Taskbar Shuffle in 2006, but it's such a simple app with such great purpose that it deserves another look.

There are a couple added features as well, like the ability to middle-click to close a task button or group and tweaking for the "group similar buttons" function. Several improvements have been made since 2.0: settings are no longer stored in the registry, shuffling buttons in a group is possible, and it is now portable (and we love portable).

Of course you're going to give up a few resources, but the cost is minimal. Taskbar Shuffle uses only 5mb of memory barely any CPU. It's a tradeoff we're willing to make to gain some long-awaited functionality.

If you've got a mammoth widescreen monitor on your desk and you're a Windows user, you may be wondering what to do with all the extra real estate you've got. Why not use it to visually manage your running applications?

Microsoft Scalable Fabric takes your monitor periphery and turns it into a tumbnail gallery of your non-active windows. After installing the app (which requires the .Net 1.1 framework), the middle of your desktop becomes a hot zone. It's totally customizable, so you can stretch the boundary lines as far to the edges as you like to prevent accidental resizing.

Drag a window out of the zone, and it will shrink, getting smaller as you drag it farther away from the boundary line. Drag it back, and it returns to its restore size. It's even smart enough to remember the position you drag your windows to - click a taskbar button to minimize, and it'll shrink back to it's thumbnailed home.

Oh yeah, there's a little more eye candy inside: minimize and maximizing are animated, albeit somewhat poorly. It's a good way for anyone who heavily multitasks to keep their arsenal of applications at the ready.

The world of web browsers is a very unfair place. Internet Explorer isn't the best, yet everyone's using it, and it seems like Firefox gets all the cool add-ons and customizations. The Opera web browser is popular, but primarily with the mobile crowd, and as for Safari, well, it's nice. Safari add-ons aren't exactly the latest craze, but the few that exist are fairly useful.

Introducing: Safari AdBlock, the open source way to avoid internet ads. It's free and (like someone we know on too much rum) easy. To install, simply point your browser to the Safari AdBlock page at SourceForge and hit "Download." The rest is pretty self explanatory. Safari AdBlock should successfully block most ads, although one may get through on occasion. Theoretically, this should decrease a page's load time since you'll no longer have to load ads, but there's a lot that goes into load times so you may not see any increase in performance at all.

Safari AdBlock works with Safari 3 and runs on Leopard (not Tiger and Windows). Those looking for a paid option should check out Pith Helmet, which costs $10 and works with both Tiger and Leopard. If you'd like to further customize your Safari, check out Pimp My Safari.

[via tuaw]

Tumblr is a new tumblelog service whose FAQs probably describe itself a nutshell the best: "To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks." It has the look, feel and functionality of a stream-of-consciousness blog, instead of the typical structure and theme/agenda that the traditional blogging platform has (sidenote: can we really refer to an aspect of blogging as 'traditional' just yet?). Everything that doesn't fit in another online space or blogging platform is probably a sure-fire candidate for a tumblelog. I also like to think of it as a linkblog on steriods, offering easy linkage and embedding of video, pictures, conversations, quotes and more.

A carefully-chosen tool set reinforces this linkblog ideal, offering a streamlined experience that oozes the "everything you need, nothing you don't" philosophy. The signup process is dead-easy, and after choosing a theme and a few other settings, Tumblr offers a simple though eerily intelligent bookmarklet that does all the heavy lifting when sharing that Flickr pic or embedding a YouTube video.

For those who want some control over their tumblelog, Tumblr offers some key features above and beyond the simple point and click. Customization is present in just about all the right places. The themes are 100% editable, and the official Tumblr blog says even more themes are on their way, with a "hugely robust system" for really strutting your stuff. You can also chose to redirect your Tumblr blog to your own domain, with fairly simple instructions in the FAQs.

All in all this tumbellog/linkblog is a fairly simple concept with much greater implications, and Tumblr's executing is fantastic. I'm already hooked, and I've added a new bookmark and 'marklet to my tool belt. The service is free and, like so many other web 2.0 startups, will remain free, with the possibility of a more feature-packed premium offering debuting at a later date.

[via Leo Laporte's Twitter]

Exactly as its name implies, the Tiny Menu extension allows you to compress your entire Firefox menu bar into one item. And, thanks to a recent update, that item is now even smaller. Setting up Tiny Menu isn't entirely intuitive, so I'll outline the steps to save you a bit of time:

1. Download and install Tiny Menu (don't forget to restart Firefox)
   
2. Click your 'new' menu (the M) and then select View > Toolbars > Customize...
   
3. One at a time (not that you have a choice) drag the items from your Navigation Toolbar into your menu bar until there's nothing left in the Navigation Toolbar
4. Click Done to return to the main Firefox window
   
5. Again, click your new menu and this time choose View > Toolbars > and then uncheck the Navigation Toolbar
   
6. Bask in the glory of your newly free pixels

Pikipimp isn't just another online photo tool. The site allows users to upload, and then customize photos by dragging and dropping pre-made objects like hats, wigs, bikinis, modify hairstyles, and even add scars and speech bubbles. Photos and objects can then be rotated, flipped, transparency set, cropped, and height and width changed until you get the setup you are happy with. When you are done with your image, preview it, and if you're happy with it, Pikipimp gives you code to embed the image into your website or social network, download it, or email it out to friends. Its a neat way to have some fun with your pictures and surprise your friends with a remix of them. Prepare for battle though, it can get addicting.

If you are a Mac user and want your Motorola Q to look like a Mac powered device instead of the Windows Mobile that it is, check out the home screens designed by Ray at KoolDezine.com. He has several Mac ones to choose from. In addition to the Mac one he has a fairly large selection of general ones to choose from. I downloaded several of them.

The best part is that they are free, but he does ask for donations if you like them and use them, which I am going to do since I am using one his cool looking Yankees one, which is in his fairly extensive "Sports" section. And most of them also use only standard plugins so you do not need any additional software for them. They are a cinch to install, just unzip them and copy the XML and JPG file to the 'Application Data/Home' directory through ActiveSync. Once the files are copied just go into "Settings" and the "Home Screen" option. You also need the "Color Scheme" and "Background Image" to be set to "Default" so the settings in the XML file are used.

Object Desktop 2007, described by its maker Stardock as "a suite of desktop enhancement utilities designed to allow users to turbo-charge their Windows experience," is probably best known for WindowBlinds, a program that allows Windows to be "skinned." Object Desktop really is a suite, though, and includes a whole pile of programs like IconPackager for replacing your icons in one fell swoop and WindowFX for adding new visual effects to Windows. CRN has taken the latest version of Object Desktop for a spin and gives it fairly high marks, recommending its interface customization features for kiosk use, but cautioning administrators against changing around interface features that users are accustomed to. Object Desktop 2007 costs $49.95.

Awhile back I blogged about changing Windows folder icons to make navigation faster. It's a great productivity booster and I've been doing it ever since, but I'm going to have to give iColorFolder a try. Like the folder icons, iColorFolder makes folder navigation in Windows easier, in this case by letting you assign colors to your folder icons, which is done from the right-click context menu. It also lets you assign custom icons and comes with three different icon skins, but it also works fine if you're already using some icon customization/skin tool. Even better, iColorFolder is open source software and takes up little memory.

[Via Lifehacker]

Chris Seibold at Apple Matters has written a fun how-to on tweaking the Mac OS X login window to display whatever image you want in place of the Apple logo and whatever text you want below. Sure, it won't really impress your coworkers, but if you'd like to be greeted by a picture of your cat or, say, Bill Gates when you boot up, then why not? It's kind of an involved process, but doesn't look too tough if you follow the instructions.

[Via Digg]

Tiny-but-featureful WIndows BitTorrent client uTorrent got a great new web site a few days ago, and along with it came a great new skins gallery. I had no idea uTorrent was even skinnable, but apparently it has been—to a degree, at least—for some time now. uTorrent's skin support is fairly minimal, only allowing toolbar buttons, status icons, and tray icons to be altered, but what more can you expect from a 130kb app? The skins come in the form of .BMP files and need only be placed in your %APPDATA%\uTorrent folder, and if you're artistically inclined making skins is a snap.