This past Monday, Yahoo announced the purchase of desktop widget application Konfabulator. With the purchase came the announcement that Konfabulator would be free, and anyone who bought version 2.0 or later would be eligible for a refund of the application’s former $20 charge.

I like Konfabulator almost better than Dashboard. Dashboard seems to have more useful widgets, while Konfabulator seems to have more “just for fun” widgets.

However, Konfabulator offers cross-platform ubiquity and, with the involvment of Yahoo, an open API for developers to make the most of this potential content delivery system.

My solution? Use both! With 1.25 GB of RAM, I have the specs to handle it, and the 20” Cinema Display definitely offers the screen real estate. I only run a few widgets in each application, and it’s not too taxing on my system.

The picture frame widget now integrates Flickr photos, and the weather widget provides a link to Yahoo weather and gets its weather information from the Weather Channel, which is marginally better than AccuWeather (I prefer Weather Underground for accuracy.)

With the availability of the same widgets on both Windows and OS X and the involvement of a new Yahoo dev community, Konfabulator could be well on its way to becoming a new means of grabbing the information that you want, whether it’s from your system or from a feed of your favorite site.

This all leads me to wonder: What will Google’s answer be?

One of the first things I do when sitting down at a Windows machine is to switch the appearance to Windows Classic. The default theme is too unimaginative, and looks like a candy shop. I do use Windows, especially at school where they use Visual Studio to code. I like Windows and I know my way around it quite well, but it’s no OS X and I use it as little as possible. Therefore, the look and feel is quite important to me, even if I’m only using it for a small percentage of the time.

On more than one occasion, I had seen a theme that was strikingly similar to the default Luna theme, but much more professional looking. It was glassy; more Aquified if you will. There was only one problem. I had no idea what the theme was called, and no way to start looking for it.

Enter Ask Metafilter. Metafilter is a sort of community blog. Members are allowed to post once a week, and are expected to post to some of the most interesting sites on the web. The idea is that the community will filter the web so that only the great and interesting things are posted. AskMeFi is a subset of this community; members can ask any question they like and normally have an answer within a few hours.

I asked the question What theme is this? and had my answer in less than three minutes. Absolutely amazing. I even had someone come and comment on my last post to tell me the answer to my question. Thanks, guys!

It turns out that the theme is called Royale, and it was available through the Windows Media Center edition. Fortunately, a site had hosted a ported-to-XP version of the theme. Later it was found that Microsoft had officially packaged and released the theme, but in order to download the theme, one must go through Windows Genuine Advantage verification.

The theme is no Aqua, but it’s much better than the Windows Luna default. It’s glossy and the colors are not quite as loud; in turn, that makes it less obtrusive and easier to use. This should be the Windows default theme without a doubt.

Thanks again, AskMeFi, for making the view out of the Window just a little bit brighter!

I posted earlier about Google’s customizable home page, and how Slashdot aggregation went awry. That was fixed shortly after I posted, and I have been using the Google page as my home page ever since. Last night, Google made some improvements to their page in the form of some nifty Javascript resizing and a new side bar from which to add new content to your personalized page.

However, I had some issues before I could make the portal work properly. I use the Greasemonkey Firefox extension, and one of the scripts I had enabled Google Suggest functionality on all Google pages. It never worked on Google’s personalized web page, so I had forgotten that it was installed. This user script was preventing Google’s own Javascript on the personalized page from working properly, forcing me to use Internet Explorer to personalize my home page. I won’t link to the script because it is broken, but it is available on the Greasemonkey Script Repository.

I had a rant already written out about how Google of all companies should realize the importance of cross-platform compatibilty and conforming to standards. Of course, Google did take care of this, and it does in fact work in Firefox. Fortunately for me, I cannot post from work, so I avoided being slightly embarrassed (yeah, right, as if anyone is even reading this blog.)

Having said that, a lot of people seemed to have trouble with it on Slashdot, so either that script was quite prolific or any user script that affects the http://google.com/ig URL was interfering with the intended functionality.

After the initial speedbumps, I found that these new additions to Google’s homepage were excellent. I have Google News, a stock ticker, Slashdot, Lifehacker, and Boing Boing feeds, weather, and a Gmail preview all on my homepage. All of this is customizable with regards to size and location.

Another added bonus is the Bookmarks section. I use and love del.icio.us, but sometimes it can be a little wonky with the proxy servers at work. If I find a neat site at work or anywhere that del.icio.us is inaccessible, then I can easily and immediately add it to Google and later post to del.icio.us. I realize the same is available with My Yahoo!, but I haven’t really warmed to the idea of “My Web” yet.

I can’t wait to see what Google rolls out next.

The Firefox web browser had a version realignment today, ultimately resulting in the release of Firefox 1.5 in August / September, with work on FF2.0 and FF3.0 after that. There will be no Firefox 1.1 release.

With all this versioning adjustment, I got to thinking about the things I wish that I could see from Firefox. Here’s a quick little list of features I’d like to see from everyone’s favorite red panda. Some of these features might be a little skewed towards the Mac version, but you can’t hold that against me.

• Bookmark Management I love Safari’s bookmark management, and I like Camino’s even better. It can’t be that hard to integrate into Firefox. The sidebar is clunky for bookmarks, and you can’t really edit the bookmarks comfortably from there. Showing keywords as a column in the bookmarks manager instead of in the properties would be nice, as would making all bookmark properites available when bookmarking a new site. Just the title and location doesn’t cut it, not when quick searches make browsing so much easier. FTP synchronization of bookmarks would be nice, but any way of backing up and making bookmarks available over the internet (email?) would do just fine. I also think that quicksearch keywords that are entered in the location bar with no search parameters should go to the page that the search is located on, or even the top level of that particular site. Whatever methods are used to improve the Bookmark Management UI should also be used for the Extension Management UI. I hate the current implementation, and it needs to change. Little windows that pop up just don’t cut it anymore.

• Speed Especially on OS X, Firefox can be a little sluggish. Some of those issues have been fixed with the Deer Park releases, which will eventually become Firefox 1.5, but if Camino and Safari (most of the time) can be blazing fast, it shouldn’t take much code rewriting to achieve that on OS X.

• Native Widgets Windows doesn’t have too much of an issue here, but I am pretty sure that the Linux version could use a makeover, and I know for certain that the OS X version needs the GUI equivalent of plastic surgery. One of the biggest reasons besides speed that Mac users don’t use Firefox is its appearance. A Mac-ified Firefox has been promised for several months now; can we please see the results of any of the work that has been done with regards to this issue? Kevin Gerich had some awesome Mac-ish widgets, but they seem to be broken in FF1.0.5/1.0.6 and he hasn’t updated that blog since January.

• Inline Spell Checking With the proliferation of blogs and news feeds comes an avalanche of feedback comments. Most of these comments are quick little blurbs that don’t warrant the use of a text editor. OS X has a system wide spell checker, and I’m sure that something could be worked out for the Windows version. I know about Spellbound, but I want it inline. That would be awesome.

Having said all that, Firefox in its current form is amazing. I use Firefox, Safari, and Camino on my Mac, but Firefox is my main browser. After a short stint of using Safari after Tiger came out, I went back to Firefox for Greasemonkey, Adblock, cross-platform zen and overall awesomeness. I know that some of these are on the roadmap, and some are bugs that will eventually get fixed, so I can rest assured that Firefox development is coming along very strong.

I am nitpicky, anal, tidy, obsessive, and compulsive about my songs and their ID3 tags. I have over 7000 songs in my iTunes library; navigating an iPod without the correct tags would be nearly impossible.

On a relatively unrelated note, I’ve been using Backpack for a while now, just to keep track of miscellaneous little things about which I need to be reminded.

Often when listening to my iPod at work, I note that some of my tracks are not tagged how I prefer them to be (every word capitalized, correct genre, numbered according to total tracks) and make a mental note about changing them in iTunes when I get home. Ha! Mental notes really work, don’t they? I’m either too busy or, more likely, I just forget.

So today I thought that if I had some kind of todo app that I could use to remind myself, my tracks would get tagged in a more timely manner! Lo and behold, Backpack fits the bill perfectly.

I came up with a format for corrections (mostly capitalization errors) and started posting any errors to my iTunes Corrections Backpack page. Check it out:

As you can see, the format is

The result is that I know which tracks to correct, and they conform to my own liking. I like and use MusicBrainz for large-scale mass tagging, but sometimes the tags are not totally correct. This method lets me do it on my own time and in my own manner.

There was a Lifehacker post yesterday about someone who uses the Firefox location bar to search their del.icio.us bookmarks and tags. Two days before that, there was a post on The Apple Blog that briefly mentioned QS and del.icio.us. This has prompted me to demontstrate how I use del.icio.us and QS together.

First, the del.icio.us plugin needs to be installed. In B40 and above (the Tiger versions of QS), plugins are available for download in the preferences. Change the drop down at the top left of the Plugins pane to “Available” in order to see the plugins that you can install.

After installing the plugin, go to the Catalog pane. del.icio.us bookmarks now show up in the Custom part of the Catalog. Click the “i” button to slide a drawer out in order to enter your del.icio.us information. Ta-da! Bookmarks now show up in your Catalog! Check the box to include tags; this is intrinsic to how I use this part of QS.

Now, invoke QS and start typing the name of a del.icio.us tag. I typed “int” and found the “interesting” tag.

Then, I pressed the right arrow and watched in amazement as all my del.icio.us bookmarks that are tagged with “interesting” appeared in the QS menu. Awesome!

You can also search for bookmarks by title as well. The really neat thing about this method is, if you have the corresponding plugins installed, bookmarks from Firefox, Safari, Camino, and del.icio.us are all available in one place, and they open with your default browser!

iTunes 4.9 was released this morning. Something rather interesting that I noticed, however, was the lack of the 30 GB iPod in the online store. The 30 GB iPod Photo is still advertised on the main iTunes page, meaning that this happened only very recently. Could this mean that new iPods are set to come out today?!

UPDATE: I guess not. The 20 GB iPod now has a color screen, and there are only two full size iPods available. Cool, but where are the 20, 40, and 80 GB iPods?

• Adblock - It blocks ads. Really well. I use this site for all my filters. Instructions are in the directory at the top. Apparently, there is a new Adblock Plus in the works, but as of right now, it is not part of the official builds. The new version allows whitelisting of sites, but can anyone tell me when you want ads to be shown while browsing?

• Automarks - This nifty extension copies your bookmarks to Autocomplete so that when you start typing in the location bar, your bookmarks show up in the drop down menu. The only gripe I have is that you have to tell it to copy them yourself, meaning that after clearing your History you need to Automark again. Surely it could be made to update your Autocomplete history every few minutes?

• Bug Me Not - This amazing extension allows you to right click a login form on a registration-required site (such as nytimes.com) and use an anonymous login to bypass said compulsory site registration. Astounding.

• Disable Targets For Download - Ever notice that a new window ( or tab, for trendy about:config geeks) opens when you click a file to download? This extension stops those new windows, complete with a user-defined list of file extensions to use.

• Feedview - Why Firefox does not do this by default I do not know, but this extension displays RSS XML files with a pretty stylesheet. I know that Sage (see below) makes this superfluous, but this makes Firefox handle RSS more like Safari does.

• FLST (scroll down to the bottom) - Focus Last Selected Tab does exactly that. When you close a tab, Firefox will make active the last tab that had focus, as opposed to making active the next tab in line.

• Greasemonkey - This extension is probably one of the most flexible and versatile extensions out there. Greasemonkey allows you to modify sites’ content through javascript. This wiki has a lot of useful scripts to get you started.

• LastTab - Similar to FLST, this extension modifies the behavior of Ctrl-Tab to focus the last selected tab.

• Sage - This is my most used extension. Sage is an RSS aggregator that resides in Firefox’s sidebar. Click a button to discover feeds on the current site, add, and read. I use Jon Hicks’ Sage modifications for OS X, even on my PC. For Windows I get rid of the Mac throbber by commenting out the following code from userChrome.css: #rssStatusImage[loading="true"] { list-style-image: url("sage/checking.gif") !important; }

• Show Failed URL (third from the bottom) - By default, Firefox does not show the URL of a page that failed to load; instead it pops up a rather nasty dialog box. Before you install this extension, type about:config into the location bar, and then type browser.xul into the filter box. There should only be one option visible; change it to true. Now, when a page does not load in Firefox, the URL remains in the location bar and there are no more popup dialogs to click through!

• Sort Extensions - Pretty self explanatory. You can see the changes it makes to the extensions window in the image above.

• undoclosetab - This extension keeps a history of up to three closed tabs. Middle click the tab bar, or right click and choose through the context menu to enable. Unfortunately, it does not work between browser sessions, so if you close a tab, then close the window, it will not remember your last closed tabs.

• Copy Image - It adds Copy Image To Clipboard to the context menu of an image. Very useful, but why is it not built in to Firefox? I seem to remember enabling this in about:config, but I could not find it again. If anyone knows anything, please let me know.Update: After looking at my work PC’s context menu, I can see that this functionality is built in to Firefox 1.0.4. However, on my Powerbook at home, it was not available. I recently had to do a clean install of Firefox, which meant reinstalling all of my extensions, so I am positive that Copy Image was not there. Interesting that the menu item is “Copy Image To Clipboard” in the extension but just “Copy Image” in the Windows build. I’ll have to check on my Windows laptop at home to see if Copy Image is available.

A lot of my extensions come from The Extension Room and the Mozilla Add-Ons Page. Feel free to browse through those archives and let me know if you find anything interesting.

I bought 1GB of RAM from newegg.com the other day, and the results it gives me are absolutely amazing. My Powerbook is so zippy and snappy that I’ll have to watch my fingers before they get caught.

Ok, sorry! But I am excited! From 512MB to 1.25GB is quite a leap, and I can definitely see an improvement.

I am a little late to the scene with this one, but to be honest, I had no idea what del.icio.us was. I did not understand the premise of the service, and I did not (at first) see what benefits it offered.

I must have been blind.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking community. Buzzwords aside, del.icio.us lets one post bookmarks to a web page that anyone can access. The site keeps track of how many people bookmark a certain site and how popular sites are based on how many recent bookmarkings particular sites have had.

The feature that really makes investing is del.icio.us worthwhile is tagging. One may add as many tags to a link as he wants. For instance, if I bookmarked this site I would tag it with “blog” and perhaps even “apple.” Since I started using the service last week, I have about one hundred bookmarks and hundreds more tags.

del.icio.us can be used for countless different things, most of which make your life a lot easier.

At work, I’ll see an item I might want to buy while browsing, but I won’t have the time to look into it. Instead of gmailing myself with a new bookmarks file, I just click a little snippet of javascript in my Bookmarks Bar and the link is ready on my site for when I get home later that evening.

Instead of searching Google for Firefox keyboard shortcuts, I just typed “http://del.icio.us/tags/firefox+keyboard/” and found exactly what I was looking for.