Firefox 3 was downloaded by more than 8 million users in 24 hours and it might well go down as the most downloaded software in 24 hours !

India’s contribution in the above 8 million was 226K  and US was the highest with 4632K.

Talking of new features in FF3, Alex Faaborg, the user experience designer who worked on Firefox 3 has a very detailed post on the new UI features here

http://tinyurl.com/yv5xp4

Below are 2 unique features in FF3, which I haven’t seen in hundreds of posts that cover the new FF3 features.

Scrolling using Spacebar

If you are keyboard junkie, I am sure you too will love this feature.

Till now, If you intended to scroll a web page, you either had to enable the Caret Mode (F7) and then scroll the web page or use the keyboard Page up and Page down key.

The first option isn’t that straightforward and the second one for some reason wasn’t always working reliably on FF2. Even in FF3, scrolling via Page keys doesn’t work properly.

However in FF3, you can easily scroll using the "Spacebar"

Spacebar - Scrolls the page down
Shift + Spacebar - Scrolls the page up

Reopen/Undo Closed Tab

Tabbed browsing keeps your taskbar clutter free and also makes you more productive.

However you might also end up closing tabs (browser pages) which you did not intend to !

FF3 has a new feature using which  you can quickly reload a closed tab. All you need to do is press Ctrl + Shift + T

Ctrl + Shift + T - Reopen closed tab / Undo Close tab operation

The shortcut is also kind of easy to remember since Ctrl + T is used to open a new empty tab.

Also FF3 does not just reload the last closed tab; in fact it maintains the history of closed tabs.

If you continuously press the Ctrl + Shift + T, you can reopen all the closed tabs in the session (the most recently closed is reopened first)

For the complete list of Firefox 3 shortcuts, check out this page

http://tinyurl.com/5hucpj

Firefox has been the default browser on my PC’s from quite some time now. Firefox for some reason has always been able make its way back every time I try to adopt a different browser !

Flock and Safari were the two browser which gave serious competition to Firefox !

From the past few weeks I have been using the RC1 release of Firefox 3. I haven’t explored all the new features in FF3, but it does look faster compared to FF2 and does have a lot of UI enhancements.

The final release of FF3 is going to be some time in June and Firefox is aiming to set a new Guinness Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

I already pledged my support and if you are also a Firefox fan,  you should definitely head over to this link to pledge your support !

Don’t forget to spread the word around

WordPress 2.5 was released some days back and I upgraded to the same with some minor hiccups. There were high expectations from me and everybody with respect to the Admin user interface.

I for one was totally disappointed when I found out that the menu items in the interface were taking almost 50% on my 15″ widescreen.

Also I found that it was not just me complaining; Many found that the new admin interface was not that user friendly including Dean Robinson who came up with Fluency Admin Theme for WordPress 2.5. The theme moves the main options to a sidebar and the sub-options to the top (screenshot below)

It just looks so neat and it even simplifies the user navigation. The only limitation of this theme is that it works only with CSS2 compliant browsers i.e. Firefox, Safari and IE8. If support is added for the other browsers, it should definitely qualify to become the official theme for WordPress Admin UI !

Thanks to Raj Gaurav for pointing me to this plugin!

Download Fluency Admin Plugin

Windows Live Writer Beta 3 was released a few days back and this is one tool from Microsoft that deserves a lot of praise. It definitely simplifies the task of writing posts for your blog.

Beta 3 has the following new features:

• Insert videos using new ‘Insert Video’ dialog
  

• Upload images to Picasaweb when publishing to your Blogger blog

• Publish XHTML-style markup

• Use Writer in 28 additional languages

• Print your posts

• Justify-align post text

• Better image handling (fewer blurry images)

• Resolved installation issues from last release

• Many other bug fixes and enhancements

More on Windows Live Writer

• WLW – Powerful Desktop Based Weblog Client
• Live Writer Beta 2 Reviewed

If you are still using your favorite blogging platform’s web based console to write posts, its high time you switched to Windows Live writer !

Every now and then when I get bored with browsing on Firefox, I switch to Safari and the one thing I like in this browser is the rendering of web pages. Each site looks different and nice .

Today I was trying to login to Digg and I found that the login form just wouldn’t show up in the Safari Browser.

When you click on the the login link, the form pops down from the top of the header.

For some reason on Safari, the header does expand to accommodate the login form, but the text boxes which accept the user name and password never show up !!!

I am no web developer and I’m not sure if the problem is caused by the world’s best browser or Digg. (Safari is supposedly the only browser supporting 18 of the 19 CSS 3 Styles !!)

So if you are on Apple’s Safari, no DIGG for you ! Almost !

The only way to login is to click on the “Submit a new story” link after which you need to do an additional click to go the home page

Update

Digg just confirmed that its not the problem with their site and its due to the browser i.e. Safari

After launching the Internet browser on my HTC Touch, the first site I opened was of my own blog. The browser almost came to halt while loading the home page.

When I loaded other sites such as GMail, Flickr, Google Search one thing I noticed was that all these sites had a page compatible with the mobile browser. The content fitted exactly to the bounds of the handset display. Images were kept to minimal, so was the content !

A search for WordPress+mobile on Google took me to Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in for WordPress. The package consists of a WordPress plug-in which detects requests from Mobile Browsers. It also has a WordPress theme which takes care of rendering your site on the mobile browser.

You can easily read all the posts with no need for horizontal scrolling. The page fits your device display perfectly.

Here are some snapshots of my blog opened in IE mobile browser.

Even the images fit nicely into the display width. You almost have the same experience as reading on your normal web browser.

And if somebody is still interested in seeing the original page (loaded with ads and sidebar), you can always exit the mobile edition and view the standard browser edition.

Is your site mobile browser friendly ? If not install and activate Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition Plug-in. Probably I should start tagging my buddies to install and activate this plug-in

Download WordPress Mobile Edition

HTC Touch, also known as the HTC P3450 is a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone designed and manufactured by HTC (A Taiwanese based manufacturer)

I heard about HTC Touch Phone from my brother when he returned from Taiwan. When we stopped by a shopping mall we even had a check on the HTC Touch in a mobile phone shop.

However due to the unavailability of a demo phone, we were not able to get a good overview of this touch phone and hence decided to defer the purchase until we had good knowledge of its features and shortcomings.

I came back and had a look at all the HTC videos uploaded on YouTube. It did look cool. After reading reviews including the one from MobileBurn I came to the conclusion that HTC Touch was a worthy replacement for my 2 year old Sony Ericsson T630. And at 20000 INR, its probably one of the cheapest slimmest smallest smartphone available in the market.

Here is my quick take on HTC Touch !

Packaging

The packaging is an extremely sturdy all black box is contained inside a logo sleev; Opening the top flap reveals the Touch staring you in the face with the two earphones on either side.

The other package contents include:

• User Manual – I was also surprised to see a color manual
• 1 GB Micro SD Card
• Power Adapter
• USB Cable – To connect the device to the PC.
• Extra Stylus
• 1 CD Containing ActiveSync 4.5 and Outlook 2007 Trial Version (3 Months)
• Another CD containing GPRS Monitor and Sprite Backup Software. These 2 application setup files use only 10MB on a 600MB CD !!

Specification

• TI’s OMAP 850, 201 MHz Process- The processor is probably on the slower side;
• Windows Mobile 6 OS
• 128MB ROM and 64MB SDRAM
• 112g with Battery
• 240 X 320 dots resolution – With the removal of the hardware keyboard, you now have more space for the display.
• Supports Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth
• 2MP camera
• Rechargeable Li-lon battery with an estimated Talk Time of 5 hours
• Micro SD Expansion Slot – The device can support a maximum of 2GB memory cards on this slot.

Features
HTC Touch is supposed to be first touch phone released and I have seen in many places where this device is compared to Apple iPhone. Mac Fans even have accused HTC of copying features from iPhone.

However going by iPhone’s announcement date, I wonder if HTC had time to come up a phone design and release it before Apple released iPhone.

One of the features highlighted in HTC’s marketing is the TouchFLOW feature. TouchFLOW features the Touch Cube which is a 3 Dimensional interface that gives you one touch access to your messages, Internet , Contacts and more.

The home screen also looks stunning. It features a instant local weather widget along with a customizable program launcher.

The home screen also features a shortcut via which you can easily stop the running programs.

The phone feature worked pretty well. The phone pad is large and hence I faced no trouble in typing the phone numbers.

However the Speakerphone doesn’t work that well. There is a shrill noise along with the audio output. I still have to test the camera !

To get a quick overview of other features, check the following video.

The below video is my first directorial venture . YouTube seems to have screwed up the video while processing the uploaded WMV file. I suggest you to view the video in the Full Screen mode. If it still looks odd, have a look at the original video here

The software used to capture the actions does not capture the touch navigation clearly and the screen changes might get confusing at times.As you can see from the Video, the UI is rarely sluggish and even if you did observe few, they were due to the simultaneous video capture.

My Initial 2 days with HTC Touch

As with any HTC Touch owner, I first tried out the TouchFLOWfeature. I immediately got used to it and had no trouble in bringing the cube to the foreground. I switched on the Wi-Fi via the communication manager. The weather widget immediately refreshed with the latest weather update. The Bluetooth pairing also went fine with my notebook.

On the applications front I tried out mobile versions of GMail and Google Search and yes I didn’t forget to download a Sudoku game app . I even synchronized all my Plaxo/Outlook contacts onto the handset.

Typing SMS was troublesome with the small keyboard and hence I installed the HTC T9 Phonepad (Usage of same can be seen in the above video). If any of you are using a smartphone/Pocket PC let me know if there some “must have” mobile applications.

Conclusion

At my workplace we do develop and test handset applications and till now HP iPaq was the popular choice. In terms of build/size and features I should say that HTC Touch does beat HP iPaq by a huge margin. The same even applies for the pricing. As of now I am happy with my choice and hopefully this phone would last for another couple of years

There are thousands of WordPress themes available out there;every now and then I stumble on amazing themes which I would love to use for my site. The only thing keeping me off from doing this regularly is the effort required in modifying/customizing the theme.

I have made another theme change (4th) and this time I have adopted the Silhouette theme from Brian Gardner.

When Shankar initially showed me this theme, I felt that the header was a little dark. However when I applied and saw the theme in Safari Browser, it looked amazing.

The other reason for adopting this theme is the 3 column layout which I have been wanting to have from some time now. The theme does support WordPress widgets, however I am averse to using these widgets and hence used the “Disable WordPress widgets” plug-in.

The theme seems to be working fine in Firefox and Safari, but its breaking in IE 6.Can somebody confirm how the theme is behaving in IE 7 and Opera ?There are still lot of other stuff (Recent Comments,Top Commentators) etc which is still not in place.

If you are reading this post from your favorite RSS reader, spare some time to open the page and give your valuable feedback

In yesterdays post on Sandisk Cruzer Micro, I was mentioning how U3 Smart technology allows you to carry your favorite PC programs on the flash drive.

Turns out that U3 is not the only technology available to accomplish this task. There is an open source project called PortableApps using which you could turn any flash drive/iPod into a “U3 smart” device.

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind.

Even though you can run the PortableApps along with U3, I decided to first test it on my iPod. There are 3 different flavors of installation available.

Installation

Download any of the above 3 flavors and extract the contents to the root of your flash drive.

PortableApps Menu

Unlike U3 Launchpad, PortableApps Menu does not have the ability to auto-launch when the flash drive is connected to the PC.

The PortableApp application are of “paf” format and can be installed via the PortableApps Menu. The number of Portable applications is limited and is listed on this page.

Download PortableApps

I have been planning to buy a USB flash drive from quite some time now. My current 256MB flash drive is of no use in the sense that it runs out of space too quickly.

My 30GB iPod could have served as an alternative; however its little bulky to carry around and the “proprietary” cable that has to be tagged along with the device makes it much more difficult.

Transcend and Sandisk are the 2 major vendors of USB Flash drives. I had a look at the products offered by both vendors and was more impressed with the Sandisk range.

Sandisk flash drives looked much better; cute and compact. However compared to Transcend they are priced on the higher side.

The other reason for choosing Sandisk was because of the 2 Year International warranty. Transcend provides lifetime warranty only at the place/country where it is bought (The one I got was bought in Taiwan )

After going over the entire product portfolio, I finally settled on a 4GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro.

Let’s go over the specification first

Dimensions: 7.94mm x 20.6mm x 57.15mm (D x W x L) (Please note that my photography skills are limited)

Walt Mossberg of WSJ is highly regarded as one of the most influential writers on information technology. After trying out iPhone for 2 week, he has his say on this post

Checkout this video too

Points to note from the video:

• He was able to get in terms with the virtual keyboard after 5 days of usage
• Access to Internet using EDGE is slow (However there is an alternative way to connecting using WiFi which is faster)
• The phone is locked on AT&T and if the AT&T coverage is not good, its not worth going for the lusty phone as of now.
• The web browser is in a league of its own and so is the E-Mail application.

I am wondering how much time it would take for the iPhone to arrive in India !

Meanwhile if you want to know more about Walt Mossberg, read this article. (Thanks to Apurv for pointing out this article)

One of the announcements made by Steve Jobs in WWDC was the availability of Safari Web Browser on Windows. As soon as I saw the news (it was around 1AM IST), I was tempted to try it out.

The windows installable is around 8MB. The Browser setup optionally installs the following components:

• Bonjour Networking Service
• Apple Update Software

According to Apple, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Also Safari executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

When I loaded web pages on Safari, I didn’t see any considerable change in web load speeds compared to Firefox. However there was some notable difference in JavaScript execution. Here are the 12 reasons that will make you love Safari !

 

One of the unique feature in Safari is Private Browsing; a mode in which no record of information about the user’s web activity is retained. The option can be enabled from the “Edit” Menu.

Note that the download is Alpha release and not even a Beta. Just with 5 tabs open in the browser, Safari almost gobbled around 140MB of memory on my system. Also when I opened few secure sites, Safari crashed and worse , there is no option to restore the crashed session.

I dumped Internet Explorer long back and have been a fan of Firefox since then. Flock did try to take me away from Firefox, but it failed due to various reasons.

Safari looks like a good alternative to Firefox and probably will switch once a stable release is available :).

Will you switch to Safari ?

Pingdom is a service which provides tools to monitor web sites, E-Mail Servers, FTP servers and a multitude of other services.

Though I didn’t find the service that useful, they do seem to have introduced a nice little tool (free) to check the page loading speed.

http://www.pingdom.com/tools/fpt/?url=www.venukb.com/blog

(Replace the “url” parameter with the URL of your site)

The Full Page Test loads the complete HTML page including all objects : images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars. It will help in finding the culprit script/image which is probably affecting the page load of your website.

Meanwhile Pingdom.com is linking to a red site according to Mcafee SiteAdvisor !!

More details here:
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/pingdom.com

Originally uploaded by venukb.

Trying out the “Blog This” feature of Flickr !

Also ever since I found out about the macro mode in my camera, I have been shooting photos of flowers like crazy !

Don’t believe me ! Check this flickr set

WordPress is truly a great publishing platform. It is written completely in PHP and is backed by a MySQL database.

The true power of WordPress lies in the extensible plugin architecture. Also you can change the look and feel just by a click !

However the Admin interface of WordPress has always looked dull and there were various plugins to spruce up the UI.

One such widely used plugin was the WP Tiger Administration Plugin from Steve Smith.

I had tried the old version of this plugin and was not that impressed. Some of the pages especially the “Write Post” were not appearing properly even in Firefox

Steve has done a complete redesign of the plugin and has released Tiger Admin version 3. It boasts a more streamlined design(OS X style) and better plugin compatibility.

I installed the plugin and I was totally impressed with the new look and feel. Thanks Steve !

A picture is worth a thousand words. Check this snapshot

Matt should definitely consider adding this to the WordPress.com plugin list !

Snap is a search portal which shows a image preview for each search result. Unfortunately the search engine is not that great, it would have been nice if the they had used the Google search engine to show the search results

However they have another service called Snap Preview Anywhere which I liked very much. It lets the site owners to add a “snap” preview to all the links in their website. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site

The links pointing to the site itself (internal links) are automatically detected by Snap script and it doesn’t show up in the Snap Preview. The service is free and its pretty easy to integrate into the website. Rollover this link to see Snap Preview in Action !

On the downside, the preview image is kind of small and it would have been nice if I could configure the preview image size.

Fore more info on Snap Preview Anywhere checkout the FAQ and the Official Snap Blog

Browster and CoolIris are similar services; However they integrate with your browser and they load the entire web page in the preview screen unlike Snap.

In most of the browsers, toolbars take a lot of space on the display. You can either remove/hide the toolbars or switch to Full Screen Mode.

In the latest version of Firefox (Version 2.0) the Full Screen mode will display only the Navigation Toolbar. However you are forced to switch back to the normal view if you want to access features in other hidden toolbars.

AutoHide is a nice little Firefox Extension which gives you more control of the browser in full screen mode.

Using the extension customization dialog, you can configure “Autohide” setting for individual toolbars. The plugin is intelligent in the sense that when you install a new toolbar, it will automatically show up in the configuration dialog.

The best option I liked was the “Show Status Bar on Activity“. With this option you could make the web page occupy the entire screen(100%) and also get a feedback when there is some activity in the browser (i.e. page load/refresh etc).

One more plugin added to my favorite Firefox Extensions List

[Via LifeHacker]

One of the nice feature of Firefox Web browser is the ability to add new features via extensions.

Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox, from a simple toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow you to customize Firefox to fit your own needs and preferences.

Note that extensions shouldn’t be confused with plugins, which perform a specific function like playing multi-media files etc. Acrobat Reader, Flash Player etc are some examples of plugins.

There are thousands of extensions available via Firefox. Even though the extensions are categorized, the sheer number makes it very difficult the find good, useful extensions.

However with the release of Firefox 2.0 filtering based on the rating has been removed. Using the advanced option, the best you can do, is filter based on platform and date.

So how to find useful, high quality Firefox extensions ?

Firefox has compiled a list of 25 recommended Add-ons. You can check it over here. Out of the 25 only the LinkedIn Extension is the one which is kind of “out of place”. I had tried the extension before and I didn’t see much value add in the add-on.

EConsultant has complied a list of 200+ Firefox extensions. The categorization of extensions is similar to that of Firefox, however only the top rated extensions have been picked and listed.

Check the list here.

I personally use these Firefox Extensions:

1. Google Browser Sync – Helps me to synch browsing history between my work PC and home PC
2. Del.icio.us – Easily tag and add bookmarks
3. FlashGot – Must have extension, can delegate all the “Download” links to your favorite download manager. The download manager I recommend is FDM (Free Download Manager)
4. GreaseMonkey – Helps me to run some pretty useful GreaseMonkey scripts. More on GreaseMonkey here !
5. McAfee SiteAdvisor – I wrote about this extension here. A very very useful plugin that tags along with the search results and protects you from visiting sites that spread malicious viruses or spyware.

   

6. StumbleUpon – Helps you to discover and share new web content.
7. CoolIris Previews – More info here !

I am sure many of you guys use Firefox and will have your own list of favorite extensions, put it down in the comments and mention why you use the extension

I am not sure how true this is, but it seems that Mozilla got a cake from Microsoft IE Team for the release of Firefox 2.0 !

Checkout some interesting comments for this post on Digg

even their cake probably has bugs in it

It was a nice gesture from the IE7 team. I guess developers don't take these "browser wars" as seriously as the users do.

One reason why the above comment is true is because the IE team needs browser wars to keep their jobs. If Mozilla doesn't keep posing a challenge, the Microsoft IE devs will eventually lose their jobs since there won't be a reason to keep improving. They're effectively thanking the Mozilla team for letting them keep their jobs.
And they're both probably laughing their asses off at the fanboyism. I wouldn't be surprised if Mozilla and Microsoft IE devs go partying together.

They should send us web designers a cupcake for all the headaches they've caused.

Somehow Comment 3 makes more sense ! Doesn’t it ?

Firefox 2 (codenamed Bon Echo) is now officially released and is available for download here. I checked for updates from within the browser, however I was prompted with a message saying that no new updates were available. This means that Firefox 2 is not being pushed via the update mechanism as of now !

I had got hold of the Beta version of Firefox 2.0, some 5 months back, when I was actually searching for Firefox 3; codenamed Minefield. You can find more about the Firefox 2.0 features here. The transition from 1.5 to 2.0 was not so painful. Most of the plugins were ported onto the new version (i.e. a new compatible version were automatically downloaded)

Somehow I can’t even compare Firefox with IE7. The “fox” beats IE in every other department. And as I have been telling in many of my posts, if you are still using IE, its high time you shifted to Firefox . Opera is another choice and you can find an interesting conversation on this browser here !

However compared to Firefox 1.5, the latest version was little sluggish while opening some of the sites including GMail. Hopefully it will be resolved in the patch releases

Download Firefox 2