Mozilla released a plugin for Firefox called Snowl yesterday that has the potential to completely change the way you use your web browser. Or it could just frustrate the heck out of you. Here's what it does: it brings messages from various sources (Twitter, RSS feeds, and eventually instant messaging services) to your browser.
The concept is interesting. Why rely on pop up notifications to let you know that you need to switch browser tabs or applications to keep up with conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, or other locations when you can just see everything on one screen? Snowl lets you browse the web while keeping an eye on all of those conversations.
But the truth of the matter is it just sort of makes a browser screen look crowded. If you've got a 24 inch display, that might not matter. But if you've got a 15 inch, 1024 x 768 display, this is not the plugin for you. Snowl does present a few interesting ways of looking at your messages. There's an Outlook-style 3-pane view with contacts and sources on the left, headlines at the top and full text in the bottom. Or you can use a "river of news" style view that shows a newspaper-like list of updates.
Snowl is still in the early beta stages. Mozilla admits that there are a ton of known bugs, but the developers wanted to see if there was any real interest in the project before continuing. Thus the public release. What do you think? Is Snowl useful or just another distraction?
The Windows Explorer shell is great and all, but I've written before about some of it limitations and omissions - and offered up some downloads that help patch the holes. DM2 is yet another solid choice: it's free, tiny, portable and it's got a ton of useful tricks up its sleeve.
DM2 looks like any other shell enhancer at first, offering all the expected tweaks: it'll minimize apps to the system tray or to floating icons, hide, align, and change opacity of windows, and roll up windows to the title bar. With DM2, however, that's just the beginning.
Minimize, restore, and maximize just aren't enough options, so DM2 amps them up by letting you add right-click and control, alt, and shift click actions to them via the app's control center. For example, I've set right click on the minimize button to roll up, right click close to send to tray, and shift + right click close hides my window. But wait, it gets better.
If you've recently switched to Firefox for Mac, you're probably getting used to hearing all your problems answered with "there's a plugin for that." Well, here's one more problem plugins can solve: inline PDF viewing. Safari does it automatically, and you might be missing it if you've switched recently.
You could always download the PDFs and open them with the notoriously slow Acrobat Reader or a faster 3rd-party app, but if you want them to open right in your browser, just grab this plugin. No frills here, the description on Google Code simply says it, "uses PDFKit to display PDFs in the browser." We tested it out on some huge PDF magazines, and it handles them just as well as Safari can.
Attempting to capture the different ranges you see with your eyes on camera is quite difficult. For the most part, digital cameras attempt to accurately capture an image but sometimes details are lost in the shadows or in the highlights. In high dynamic range (HDR) photography multiple photographs of varying exposures are taken of the same subject and later combined to produce a photo with a greater dynamic range than if only 1 photo was taken.
There are many ways to go about creating an HDR image and if you're an Aperture user, the folks at Creaceed may have a solution for you with their Hydra 1.5.3 plug-in. While currently wearing the beta badge, Hydra allows Aperture users to select up to 4 photos to create their HDR image and also offers the option to auto align your selected images, allowing you to take photos without the use of a tripod. This is an important feature, as when you are overlaying multiple photos it's important that they all line up perfectly. Controls are well laid out and results are fast and impressive.
While producing a quality HDR image is more than just having the right software, Hydra attempts to ease the post production work allowing you to concentrate on the most important part... what's happening through the lens.
Have you ever accidentally visited MySpace? Yeah, we probably have too, though, it was never a noticeable problem. In fact, we can't even remember it happening, but it seems like it has to have happened... right?
Well, this Firefox add-on promises to detect MySpace in Firefox, and provide a pop-up menu to stop unsuspecting web-browsers from hitting up the social network. The plug-in is obviously a joke, but we found a great use for it anyway -- avoiding phishing.
It's called AmIOnMySpace.com? and it can be used to detect the real MySpace site. If for any reason the message doesn't pop-up upon first visiting the social network, you're not on the real site. The biggest problem with using this as a way of avoiding phishing sites is that it doesn't alert users when leaving MySpace, so it's still possible to get attacked from within.
PayPal provides a quick and easy way to pay for goods on eBay, Half.com, or other sites that accept the service. But what if you want to buy something from a store that doesn't accept PayPal, but don't feel like giving up your credit card information? Last year PayPal launched a service that lets you create a single-use credit card number that is linked to your PayPal account. And the company has also launched a plugin that gives you easy access to the the Secure Card service in your web browser.
You can install the PayPal plugin by logging into your PayPal account and select PayPal Plug-in from the menu on the left. You'll be prompted to download a 5MB file which will install the plugin for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Note that the plugin is Windows only, and does not seem to play well with Firefox 3 yet.
Once installed, a window should pop up whenever you visit a site asking for your credit card information. You can also generate a card manually through a drop down menu.
If you're using Mac, Linux, or Firefox 3, you can still use the secure card feature by logging into your PayPal account and generating a card number. But the browser plugin makes the process much easier.
If you've ever tried to sync up multiple copies of Firefox over multiple computers, we feel your pain. The Google sync plugin hasn't been updated since 2006 and didn't even work with the latest release of Firefox. Ugh.
Have no fear, Mozilla Weave is here!
With Mozilla Weave you can sync all of your bookmarks, history, cookies, saved form data, and now passwords (for the first time!) with any computer with Firefox on it.
Do you have multiple computers running Firefox (or any other browser) and use another plug-in or service to stay synced up? Let us know in the comments!
Don't want to download a massive ZIP or RAR file just so you can extract one tiny file contained in the archive? ArchView is a Firefox add-on that will let you preview the contents of ZIP and RAR files posted online before you download them. And you can even download individual files from within the archive.
Archview hangs out in your status bar where you can click on it to enable or disable the plugin or change its settings. Future versions will add support for additional archive formats including ISO and 7z. Archview supports Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, but the version available at the official Firefox add-ons page claims that it isn't compatible with Firefox 3 beta 5 r Firefox 3 RC1. This isn't true, but you'll have to install the plugin from the developer's page if you're using anything newer than Firefox 3 beta 4.
Hot on the heels of the del.icio.us beta plugin for Firefox 3 beta, Yahoo! has released a beta plugin for Internet Explorer. While Firefox is pretty popular these days, we're pretty sure there are still more people using the IE6 or IE7 browser that came with their computer than a beta version of the open source Firefox browser. Which is to say, seriously, Yahoo! is just now getting around to this?
The Internet Explorer plugin packs most of the features of the Firefox version. That means you can search and browse bookmarks from your sidebar, view recent activity, or tag pages with a button in your browser toolbar. The plugin works with IE6, IE7, and IE8 and runs on Windows XP and Vista.
This plugin is being released as a pubic beta, which means some features may change before the final release.
Apparently social browser plugins are the next big thing. The other day we told you about Yoono, a Firefox add-on that brings FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking features to your web browser. Today it's Minggl's turn.
Minggl is a browser toolbar that works with Firefox or Internet Explorer. Every few minutes Minggl will scan your social networking accounts and display the latest updates. You can pull up a list of your friends or view an actvity stream in your sidebar.
The nice thing about toolbars like Minggl is that they let you keep up with the activity on your social networks without constantly opening a half dozen web pages and hitting the refresh button. On the other hand, the toolbar takes up some valuable screen real estate and provides a constant source of distraction.
The Minggl toolbar is currently in public beta, and supports Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, and LinkedIn, with more services cming soon.
Like the idea of having a web browser with Twitter, Facebook, and instant messenger integration, but don't want to install a whole new browser to get those features? Yoono is a browser plugin that makes Firefox behave a bit more like Flock, the social web browser built from the same Mozilla code. But instead of downloading and installing a whole new browser, all you need to do to start using Yoono is install a 2MB Firefox add-on. An Internet Explorer version is in the works.
So what exactly does Yoono do? It adds a sidebar to Firefox that gives you quick access to your instant messenger, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Piczo, and Friendfeed contacts. You can send messages, update your social feeds, or just see what all of your friends are up to from within Firefox. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can also leave notes about the web sites you're visiting, rate pages, and share your bookmarks.
You can also add several widgets to your sidebar that will let you view web sites or pictures related to the page you're currently viewing. There's also a YouTube widget that will show you related videos, the day's top rated videos, or videos from your contacts.
Yoono is in private beta, but we've got 200 invites to give away to Download Squad readers on a first come, first served basis. Please don't leave comments asking us for invites, just follow the link after the jump.
One of the nice things about modern desktop browsers is that there are tons of third party add-ons. These plugins let you do everything from change the way web pages look to making it easy to save web pages to social bookmarking services like del.icio.us.
Mobile web browsers haven't gotten nearly as much love from third party developers. That's why we're excited to see that Dale Lane has written a Post to del.icio.us plugin for Pocket Internet Explorer, the stripped down web browser that Microsoft includes as part of the Windows Mobile operating system for cellphones and PDAs.
When you click the link from the Menu toolbar, the plugin will automatically submit the current web page to your del.icio.us bookmarks, taking the name of the page from Internet Explorer. You can also add tags before saving your page.
Post to del.icio.us is available as a free download. You can also get the source code from Lane's web site. The plugin requires Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6.
We really like snarky comments. Or maybe we just really like the sound of our own voices, if by saying sound we mean "incessant tapping" and by voices we mean "keyboards." So needless to say, when we heard about iComment, we were intrigued.
iComment is a plug-in for either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox-based browsers. The install instructions have a definite Windows slant, but we can verify it seems to work quite dandily in Linux. The idea behind iComment is simple. It allows you to leave your two cents on any website, or photo, or bit of text that appears on a page. You want the rest of the world to know how freakin' annoying a gratuitous bit of Flash on a page is? Tell 'em!
Of course, there are some issues that limit the usefulness of this plug-in at the moment. The first and foremost is the one that really can't be helped -- every plug-in starts somewhere. Through iComment, we are able to see the comments other people have left on a site, as well as our own. Very cool, but it's a bit of a hunt to find sites with comments, as this is a relatively new service. It is sort of interesting to hear, though, that the development team is working on a "friend/private" function where you can share comments with approved friends.
If you like yourself some BitTorrent downloading action, we recommend you help Azureus fight BitTorrent throttling ISPs like Comcast, Adelphia, SusCom, and others by installing the Network Status Monitor plug-in for Azureus / Vuze. The plug-in monitors your network traffic for anything that might prohibit your computer from utilizing its broadband connection to the fullest.
Lately, some ISPs have been using BitTorrent throttling techniques to prevent BitTorrent programs from working properly. It is understandable that ISPs need to manage their networks in order to ensure that every customer gets a fair share of the bandwidth pie, but as individuals, traffic throttling techniques take away from the service we were promised when signing up.
If you choose to share the data collected via the Network Status Monitor, the Azureus team may analyze and compare it with the data collected from other users in order to develop ways of circumventing BitTorrent throttling. The plug-in only works on Windows machines for now, but Mac support is coming.
Windows Media Center includes a decent music player for songs stored on your PC. And you can use plugins like RadioTime to listen to pretty much any streaming radio station you can find. But until recently there was no good way to listen to songs from music recommendation and streaming service Last.fm. Well, now there is.
MceFM is aplugin for Windows Vista Media Center that lets you stream music from Last.fm. All you have to do is type in the name of an artist or song and Last.fm will dig up music by that artist and then find similar songs you might like and start playing one song after another.
You'll need to sign up for a Last.fm account if you haven't already, because MceFM won't play a single note if you're not logged in. Once you're connected, all you have to do is enter an artist name and MceFM will connect to Last.fm, find your music and set up a playlist.
The plugin can also find music similar to songs and artists already on your computer. Just locate a track in your music library and then click the More button on your remote (or hit the Ctrl+D keys on your keyboard to bring up the context menu and select More), and you can search Last.fm for similar music.
We really like snarky comments. Or maybe we just really like the sound of our own voices, if by saying sound we mean "incessant tapping" and by voices we mean "keyboards." So needless to say, when we heard about 
