Google Docs Viewer can display Powerpoint presentations, PDFs and TIFF images right in your browser, without adding extensions or downloading the files. The problem is that you have to manually open the Doc Viewer by pasting in a URL. There's a way around that, though, thanks to a slick userscript with an unwieldy name: "PDF/PPT/TIF viewer with Google docs."

With the script installed - you'll need Greasemonkey in Firefox or Greasekit in Safari - links to PDFs, PPTs and TIFFs will automatically open in Google Docs Viewer. If you need to download or print them, no worries: you can do that from with Docs Viewer as well.

[via Lifehacker]

Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people, but "pretty" isn't really the first one that comes to mind. It doesn't have to be that way, though, because you can give Twitter a clean, minimal new look with Helvetwitter. It's a script that lets you view the Twitter website in black and red, with all the type in Helvetica, and plenty of white space for all the words to breathe. This may sound somewhat familiar, because it's inspired by the' Helvetireader script for Google Reader, which made my list of the 10 best Greasemonkey scripts.

Helvetwitter isn't perfect for everyone. One if its big pluses is that it doesn't use the entire area of your browser window, so you can shrink Twitter down and drag it off to the side of your screen. On the other hand, the lack of icons can make it harder to pick out whose tweets you're reading at a glance. The lack of sidebar is both a plus and a minus: I personally don't miss it, but you might if you actually care about trending topics. You can install Helvetwitter in Greasemonkey if you use Firefox, and the site offers instructions on how to set it up on other browsers.

YouTube Auto Buffer is a userscript that fixes a lot of the things that annoy me most about YouTube. It's a beefed up version of the barebones one Lee wrote about last December. Instead of autoplaying a couple seconds of video and having to stop and start because nothing's buffered, this script turns autoplay off and clips fully buffer before playing.

I don't know about you, but I was doing that manually whenever I loaded a YouTube vid anyway. On top of that, it also turns HQ/HD on by default, so you're watching the best available version of each video, and hides the in-video ads that YouTube occasionally shows.

You'll need the Greasemonkey add-on to run YouTube Auto Buffer in Firefox, and the equivalent in other browsers (for Safari, it's GreaseKit). If you don't like all three of Auto Buffer's features, you can turn any of them off in the script's preferences. They're hiding in plain sight underneath YouTube's search box -- not in the Greasemonkey menu as you might expect.

[via Lifehacker]

While Greasemonkey, the popular extension for changing the way websites display, might not be currently available via the Firefox 3 addons manager or the Mozilla addons website, you can indeed install a working version from the developer's site. We installed the greasemonkey-0.8.20080609.0.xpi into Firefox 3 RC2 on Mac OS 10.5, and our scripts worked like a charm.

In case you're new to the Greasemonkey realm, here are three scripts to get you going:

• Gmail 2.0 Multiple HTML Signatures - allows you to maintain a set of HTML signatures for Gmail that are automatically changed when you select different "From" addresses in your compose mail window. Alternatively, you could use a bookmarklet.
• Digg Add Mirrors - adds links to Coral Cache, Duggmirror, Duggback, and Google Cache to Digg stories.
• Image Host Redirector - redirects image links directly to image instead of intermediate image host page.

[via gHacks]

I think it is time we in the software industry step up to the plate and offer our help. With what we know about artificial intelligence (AI), genetic algorithms, and natural-language parsing, it should be possible to develop a software program where TV scripts are created based on previous episodes.

What we need are:

• Characters in the series and their attributes (gender, personality, etc.)
• Tons of previous scripts
• The series formula, e.g. The new clue to solve the case between minutes 39 and 40 in Law & Order, or CSI.
• A genetic algorithm that learns the characteristic of the series through all the existing episodes, e.g. how each character behaves, their favorite catchphrases, and how the general plot line evolves. For many shows, just the catchphrase would suffice.
  
• A software bot to trawl the net for bizarre news as seed to generate new stories.

The scripts generated by this AI program would probably not very good at first -- but hey, neither was Seinfeld -- they might not make sense at all. But, after some teaching sessions by a human -- perhaps volunteers from the audience? It's all about crowd-sourcing these days, right? -- some reasonable scripts should result.

Granted this strategy would not work for proper drama like 24, Dexter, Weeds, etc. which all have major story arcs running through entire seasons but, it should work great for formulaic shows such as Law & Order, CSI, Numbers, Psych, where almost everything stays the same from episode to episode with only minor plot device differences in between.

How much effort would it take to develop this AI program? I don't have the faintest idea. I just suggest stuff, it's up to other people to handle the sticky details of implementation. I can imagine modifying an existing AI algorithm to accept TV scripts instead of whatever scientific research data, let it run on some beefy servers (may be run it as adistributed project like SETI@home? New TV shows are at least as important as finding aliens, maybe moreso.), and see what comes out at the other end.

Remember, this idea is hardly new. It has already been done with financial news by Thomson Financial as reported by Wired back in 2006. Is it such a big leap from news to formulaic drama?

Come on, doesn't this sound like a fantastic final year college project? Surely the prospect of getting your final assignment done and being the hero who breaks the Writer's Strike deadlock sounds appealing to someone?

More interesting question is: Which one is smarter? Law & Order, or an artificial intelligence program? With Fred Thompson dropping out of the presidential race, our money is on the AI.

You have probably noticed this yourself: when you do a search on Google there tends to be a lot of unfilled, unused, or otherwise blank area to the right of the search results that could be used for better things. Things besides ads that might relate to your search. Such as Wikipedia summaries for your search term, or related images and videos, and dictionary definitions. That would be nice, wouldn't it?

Well, If you've ever had such dreams of grandeur, that wish has been fulfilled.

It's called Google Extra, a Greasemonkey script that adds just that extra functionality you've been looking for in your Google searches. Let's say you search for the term "monkeys." Not only are you served your usual search results about "monkeys" on the left, but results from an image search, video search, a Wikipedia entry on "monkeys," and the dictionary definition of what monkeys are on the right.

The nice thing is, you can organize the stack of result boxes in any way you want. So, if for convenience's sake, you preferred a dictionary definition at the very top before your image results, you can do that. The script remembers your preferences, locking in every last ounce of goodness from your searches. That, and the extra results load after your primary ones, which keeps the experience quick and snappy without a noticeable increase in page load times.

[via CyberNet]

Earlier today we showed you how to enable a preview for TinyUrls by using the 'Enable preview' feature from the TinyUrl website - allowing you to forgo the leap of faith these little links would usually require of you.

Wish there was a more elegant approach to the problem? Well, for Firefox users (and other browsers for which Greasemonkey is available) this has been solved, thanks to a Greasemonkey script that does for TinyUrl links what X-rays did for the world of medicine.

Once you have installed the script, all you have to do is hover over a TinyUrl link to see where it leads. So simple it's beautiful. And although you can always enable the TinyUrl preview option with a browser cookie from the TinyUrl website, it's not nearly as slick or integrated as the TinyUrl Popup Preview script.

So, if you're paranoid of people sneaking you weird links disguised in TinyUrls or simply want to know where that link in a tweet from a Twitter friend points to, the TinyUrl Popup Preview script for Greasemonkey fits the bill.

[via gHacks]

Gmail could very well be one of the most hackable web services of all time. One only needs to check our Gmail tag to see what tools are available for enhancing one's experience, and now we have a slick new cross-platform Firefox add-on to link to from our friends at Lifehacker: Better Gmail. As its name suggests, Better Gmail rounds up a number of popular Greasemonkey scripts and other extras into a handy management UI, complete with links to homepages if you need to find out more about any of the included extras. As you can see, this add-on packs a wallop, including many of our old (and new) favorites such as the Macros script (for many more keyboard shortcuts Gmail should really have in the first place), an Unlabelled label hack and a Filter Assistant which brings that handy email client functionality of building filters from a currently selected message. Of course, one could run out and find all these scripts on their own, but Better Gmail takes the clicking out of that process and wraps all this great stuff into one handy extension, complete with the ability to disable it all in one fell swoop in case you need to get back to Gmail's basics.

Better Gmail is of course provided for free here.

Why Google hasn't built something as fundamental as a todo manager into Google Calendar is beyond us, but now you have one more option for tasks on in gCal. While we've previously seen hidden code lead to speculation that todos were (finally) coming, as well as Remember the Milk integration, a new Greasemonkey script brings its own todo list to Google Calendar with an interesting twist. As you can see, this script from Google Operating System gives you a basic todo list without anything like alarms or filing in different calendars. The advantage here, however, is that the script saves todos as events in your calendar, which means you can get to these todos from any computer on which you install the script.

Check out Google Operating System's post for more details, or simply install the script to hit the ground running.

[via Lifehacker]

Userscripts.org is a useful repository of scripts for Greasemonkey, the killer Firefox add-on that allows you to augment the way some sites look or function. I've used the site for some time now, but was always a little irked at its not-so-intuitive design. As you can see, the new design offers a breath of fresh air, with a much cleaner and more streamlined experience, though it isn't quite a major feature update just yet. This post in their forums announces the new site and their intentions, while the roadmap at the bottom of their wiki reveals a bit more about what's to come.


Individual script pages look good in this new format, with a clear description column and a sidebar containing all the pertinent metadata and tags. A big black "Install this script" button replaces the old, hard-to-find HTML link of the previous design, and I particularly like the link at the bottom of the content column to contributors who helped out with the script.

All things considered, I think this is a successful redesign that should bring the site more credibility and attention from both Greasemonkey script writers and users. I'll be interested to see how those new features roll into the site in the coming weeks and months.

Mihai Parparita, avid Googler and Greasemonkey script peddler extraordinaire, has been blogging a few updates to the fantastic Gmail scripts he's had a hand in. Mihai has made changes and added a few features recently, but also points to a Google Group where users have been trading their own mods to the scripts.

Most notably, the new features in Mihai's 'official' Gmail Macros script include:

• b: Remove label
• z: Mark unread
• o: Expand/collapse all messages in a conversation
• shift-x + a/n/r/u/s/t: Select all/none/read/unread/starred/unstarred
• h: Show help (reference for built-in and the script's keyboard shortcuts)
• Saved searches can now be selected using the 'g' label selector

Finally, to make the scripts more accessible (and possibly open source-able), Mihai has moved the scripts he's had a hand in to a Google Code repository. He's also considering opening up the 'project' so others can commit changes, though users can simply watch changes in the RSS feed for now.

If you want to make a PDF from your web pages for visitors to download, use FPDF, a very simple, powerful PHP class that is free to download, and easy to configure. There are several tutorials on the FPDF website on how to use the class, and the manual makes all the functions easy to use and modify. FPDF makes controlling every aspect of your PDF creation simple, including adding an image or logo, margin, auto-pagination, printing, preview, font, embedded links, and tons of other options. It takes less than an hour to setup and begin using it, which isn't too shabby for all the options you can set. All you need to use it is a fairly recent release of PHP on a web server. The test template that comes with the package is easy to modify for whatever uses you may need, without having to learn what each function does. If the code doesn't already exist in the file you download, FPDF.org has all kinds of examples and code references, some written by the fpdf community that you can cut and paste to wire up whatever you (or a client) may require. FPDF is great for pulling dynamic content from a database since it contains a simplistic HTML parser by default. Feed FPDF one HTML string (from a database, or static HTML) and it will polish off your PDF for you in grand style. For even more fun, you can setup fpdf to receive variables from a GET or POST form then insert them in the script to be displayed in your pdf as well. FPDF is powerful, fast, flexible, and very nearly fun. Not bad for FREE.

Ooh, now this is cool: Lifehacker points us to a this great Stylish script that gently tweaks Gmail to put meaningful icons next to messages with attachments. Instead of a generic paperclip icon, this puts a PDF icon next to messages with PDF attachments, an image icon next to messages with attached images, and so on for Word docs, Zip files, text files, executables, video files, and so on. Very cool.

In case you're not familiar, Stylish is a great extension for Firefox that lets you set up custom styles for web sites, letting you do little things like the tweak above to things like reskinning or totally changing the layout of other sites, and even Firefox itself. Userstyles.org is a site that has collected hundreds of such scripts and is not to be missed.

[Link and image via Lifehacker]

Continuing the buzz surrounding the new Google Reader, 3rd party Greasemonkey scripts are cropping up that either modify or add much-requested features (like integrating it with Gmail). At the top of this request list (or at least near it) is search - after all, it is a Google product. Unfortunately, the Reader team's own Mihai Parparita has explained in the product's Google Group that search is a bit tricky right now - but they're working on it.

While you wait though, why not add at least some basic search functionality with this Greasemonkey script? Be warned though, as by 'basic' I mean 'it can only search a single feed you're reading, or all blogs across the blogosphere, via Google's Blog Search.' For now, it can't search multiple blogs (a limit of the Blog Search engine itself) or folders of feeds in Reader, but hey - it's a start. On the plus side, the author is open to suggestions if anyone knows of an engine better suited to the task of searching multiple sites at once, so throw your two cents in if you want to make the only Google Reader search that much better.

Anyone who has hand-coded HTML (I know, oldskool) has wished for a tool like this real-time HTML editor, though regrettably the days of hardcore hand-coding HTML are pretty much over. I still code HTML in my free time just for the tactile feel of simple code beneath my fingers and remembering the old day before things got easy. Real-time HTML Editor puts your code into practice as soon as (and somewhat before) you type it. Through the power of AJAX, HTML is now more fun. This tool is obviously not for serious coding, but it can help a noob learn the basics or help you text a small script, such as a MySpace layout or something nonsensical like that. I checked it out for the nostalgic value more than anything, so if that is your brand of suck tape, give it a whirl.