When I was looking over my news feeds yesterday morning, I though I had spied some exciting news. A few sites were reporting about a new Delicious extension for Chrome. Some of them trumpeted its arrival as proof that Chrome extensions were real.

I found that statement a little odd, because AdSweep has been around since early April. Didn't that pretty much prove the "reality" of Chrome extensions?

To make things even less exciting, the Delicious extension is about as un-noteworthy as they come. If you've got the 'Bookmark on Delicious' bookmarklet in Chrome already, guess what? The extension does the exact same thing. All it does is create a Delicious icon at the end of your address bar instead of on your bookmark toolbar.

I don't know about you, but that's nothing to get worked up about. Google's three example extensions? Equally yawn-worthy.

Heck, I'm still waiting for integration with Google services. Anyone else wondering where the support for things like Google Bookmarks is? It is their browser, after all.

Don't get me wrong - I love Chrome's speed and minimal UI, but after this long I thought we'd see some much more interesting extensions. If you know one, please share it in the comments. I'd love to see it!

There are lots of great things about bookmarklets. They're lightweight, compatible with any browser, don't require installing or restarting any apps, and they're just a click away in your bookmarks toolbar. If you're looking for some good bookmarklets, you might want to check out Bookmarklet Directory. It's a large (and growing) collection in the same vein as the Firefox add-ons directory or userscripts.org.

You can browse the Bookmarklet Directory according to the newest, most popular, or highest rated entries. You can also search for bookmarklets, or add one that they don't have yet. If you're making a move to uninstall a few plugins and get bookmarklets instead, don't miss this site.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

It's been about a week since Google launched the public beta of its open source web browser, Google Chrome. While the browser certainly ain't perfect by a long shot, it does render pages quickly and has a few innovative features like an unconventional placement for tabs and a unified search box/location bar.

Over the past week there's been a flurry of activity surrounding the browser. Not from Google developers, but by third party developers who have done their best to make Google at least as useful as Firefox or Safari. A few folks have taken a different approach and tried to make Firefox look and feel a bit more like Chrome. Here are a few of our favorite Google Chrome updates from week one.


Themes

If you like Google Chrome's layout but can't stand the bland light blue color scheme, you're in luck. It turns out that all you need to do to change the browser's theme is replace a single default.dll. Your first step should be to the ChromeSpot message boards where dozens of users have posted custom themes. You can also find custom themes at Google Chrome Themes. (Link removed due to allegations that the developers were stealing themes without crediting the authors).

One you find a theme you like, you should backup your default theme by making a copy of your default.dll file. It's located in \Documents and Settings\[username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\[version number]\Themes in Windows XP. Then just download the theme of your choice and unzip the new default.dll location to the same location.

If you're using Windows Vista the path should be \Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\[version number]\Themes\

Unfortunately since Google hasn't yet built a theme manager for Chrome there's no simple way to switch between mulitple themes from within the browser settings. If you're looking for an easier way to switch between themes you can try the Chrome Automatic Theme Switcher, but it won't work with the latest build of Chrome.

[via Lifehacker and Google Blogoscoped]

Chanpory Rith at LifeClever has published a list of 17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone, containing some truly useful stuff beyond the typical web app launchers that are quickly becoming a dime a dozen. At the top of my list are 'marklets like movie times and Wikipedia, which offer one-click popup access to search for local movie times or articles on Wikipedia (respectively). Other really useful ones are 'Find in this page' which is pretty straightforward, as well as 'Open links in new window,' which will reload the current page you're viewing on your iPhone and edit all the links on the page to, well, open in a new window. This is particularly useful since the iPhone doesn't seem to cache pages well (or it possibly uses a caching system that most sites simply haven't accounted for yet), but MobileSafari (the new name many are using for the iPhone's Safari browser) does tabbed browsing like a champ. In fact, it even remembers opened tabs after you power down and restart the phone, making a bookmarklet like this very handy to those like to truly explore the 6 degrees of the world wide web on their iPhone.

To get set up with these bookmarks, visit the LifeClever site in either Safari or Internet Explorer and add them to a folder of bookmarks you're synching with the iPhone. Perform a sync and you're ready to go.

If there was a category we could apply to things that spread faster than wildfire, the craziness that is Twitter would likely be the first example you could use for just such a category. One only needs to check our Twitter tag to find hacks like automatically twittering your blog posts, mapping out tweets and even putting Twitter on autopilot for you. But why stop there? New TwitThis buttons and bookmarklets are likely to take the web by an even bigger storm. As you might imagine, the button is ideal for placing on your website or blog, allowing readers to easily tweet (hopefully in a good way) about whatever you wrote. Fortunately, a full-on WordPress plugin is provided along with the raw code.

The bookmarklet, on the other hand, should make things a lot easier for the avid Twitter user who can't wait for website owners to adopt the button. Both tools make use of TinyURL (though in our opinion, urlTea has some cooler things going on) to ensure the link you're tweeting stays intact.
All of this is provided for free, as we can't find any donation links, and TwitThis even surprsingly offers a support email in case you have questions or ideas.

Gmail offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to the way you manage your email. Innovative features like labels, a dedicated mobile phone client and rich script-ability via Firefox's Greasemonkey plugin create a unique appeal for users from nearly all walks of life.

Since you can do so much with and to Gmail, I thought I would round up my favorite tips and hacks for users both old and new. Some of these are simple ideas for thinking about labels in a different way, while others add more powerful functionality for the most dedicated of Gmail ninjas. Of course, this list is by no means complete, so have at it in the comments with your own tips, scripts and workflows. For now, here are mine:

• Greasemonkey repository at Google Code: Started by Mihai Parparita, a Google employee (though unaffiliated with Gmail), this Google Code repository has some of the coolest and most functional Gmail scripts for Greasemonkey, an add-on for Firefox. Scripts for adding colors to labels, saving searches and even integrating Gmail + Google Reader can all be found here.
• The Macros script: Found at that Google Code repository, I firmly believe this is *the* essential Gmail trick to end all Gmail tricks. It adds a serious dose of productivity that can make Gmail more functional than any desktop email client on the block. This script has shortcuts for label navigation, simultaneously marking as read + archiving, labeling messages on the fly and much more - all from the keyboard. Once you get this script installed, pressing 'h' should display a slick overlay of all available shortcuts.
• Trick your labels: Using unique characters to prefix label names brings them to the top of the alphabetized list of labels. The @ symbol, numbers and even underscores are all useful for bringing important labels out of their standard organization, and they make labels more accessible to other hacks like the Macros script.
• Join the Power Users group: The Gmail Power Users Google Group attracts many users just like you, looking for ways to extend and bend Gmail to their will. If you find yourself getting as hooked on Greasemonkey scripts as I have, this is a great place to find other people who are customizing them to their specific interests.
• Quicker Contacts: Gmail includes a built-in chat feature with a clever pop-up window for easy access to some of the contacts with whom you communicate the most, but why limit this handy functionality to the tiny chat area? Quicker Contacts is another fantastic Greasemonkey script that adds this pop-up window to every message in Gmail. One catch, however, is that you need to be using Gmail's standard + chat mode in order for this script to work. If you don't like chatting inside of Gmail though, the good news is that you can simply sign out of chat and collapse the panel to avoid being bothered with it.
• Bookmark any label, folder or message type: Another apparently undocumented Gmail trick is the ability to bookmark a label, a standard folder or even a message type such as 'read' or 'unread.' It isn't quite as easy as bookmarking a website, but it's useful: simply copy and paste this link into your address bar: https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1: and then add any label name, folder or message type after the colon (examples: fs=1:todo, fs=1:Drafts and fs=1:unread). Press enter, and then bookmark that page once Gmail loads.
• Backup Gmail offline: Some Gmail users can occasionally find themselves needing access to their email when they're offline somewhere, or - worst case scenario - their account might have accidentally disappeared. No matter what the reason is, it's always a good idea to have a backup of your data, and email from an online service is no exception. Gmail offers instructions for accessing and downloading your email to a desktop client, with a ton of customized instructions for nearly every client in the book. As an added bonus, it seems Gmail has recently introduced a "recent" mode just in case you want to download your email with more than one client.
• Manage multiple Gmail accounts: For one reason or another, many Gmail users find themselves opening multiple accounts. Throw the ability to run Gmail on your own domain with Google Apps for Your Domain, and things can get complicated. Gmail Manager is an add-on for Firefox that untangles your Gmail web by allowing you to manage, swap between and receive new message alerts from multiple Gmail accounts, including those run on Google Apps.
• Fetch your other mail: A recent and quietly introduced Gmail feature is Mail Fetcher, which can check up to five other email accounts and download all that mail into your Gmail. To help keep things organized, Mail Fetcher can automatically label and archive all this incoming mail.
• Bookmarklets: These are typically javascript-enabled bookmarks that do something instead of simply 'mark something. To make Gmail more functional, there are two bookmarklets which the Gmail community have cooked up to make the web service feel more like a desktop app. The first is Compose (drag that link to your browser's bookmark toolbar or 'mark as you see fit), which skips directly to opening a compose window in Gmail (sidenote: To save my life I can neither find nor hack this one to open a new window; if any readers were more successful, I would join many others in thanking you if you shared in the comments). The second bookmarklet is really handy for sharing whatever page you're viewing: Gmail This opens a new, smaller composition window with the title of the front-most webpage in the subject and a link to the page in the body of the email. If you selected any text on the page, this will be added to the message body as well.
  
  [Update: Download Squad reader bcnewman hacked the Gmail This bookmarklet to create a new, blank compose window in a popup, just like the Gmail This 'marklet. Get the javascript from bcnewman's comment here, or simply drag this link to your toolbar to create the bookmarklet. Thanks a lot bcnewman!
  

Like I said, this list is by no means complete. There are plenty of runner-ups in my book, such as the dragdropupload Firefox add-on which allows you to (amongst other things) drag and drop files you want to attach directly onto the "Attach a file" link, so be sure to (try and) trump me with your own perfect Gmail setup.

Stikkit, the web-based PIM that thinks, has gained a few significant upgrades in the form of very, very powerful contact-related PIM management, as well as a couple of impressive new bookmarklets stikklets. First up is "a complete do-over" of peeps (that's Stikklet speak for 'contacts') that brings a relational aspect to keeping track of who, what, when and where. They produced a long screencast that demos the slew of Stikkit's new abilities which include updating a contact's information if new info is ever mentioned in another stikkit, aggregating related stikkit's on a peep's page such as emails and appointments you paste (or forward to) a stikkit, and a whole lot more. They definitely meant that "complete do-over" comment, so check out the screencast for all the new peeps stuff.

Last but by no means least on the list of big updates are two new 'stikklets' that let you add stikkits to your account from any page you're visiting. The first stikklet has the impressive effect of opening a new stikkit right on top of the page you're looking at, while the second opens in a popup window. Both of them can snag any text you highlighted and offer full editing (and Stikkit's impressive 'thinking') capabilities before you save and go on about your uninterrupted business. These two bookmarklets are sure to be handy tools for the online PIM power users in the audience.

If you're looking to learn more about this new web service, check out Stikkit.com (while not logged in, of course) and the company's blog, as they have linked a number of introductory screencasts, case studies and customer testimonials which should all help you wrap your head around what's possible with this most unique of PIM systems.