Mozilla – The New Firefox, and Thunderbird

Recently, I just disovered an awesome Firefox Addon. It doesn’t really help in productivity, but it is visually appealing. But, I mean, some would argue that if one thing isn’t visually appealing, that it wouldn’t help in productivity. I agree with that statement because you’re only as good as your environment is. If you’re in a place with less distraction, nicely painted, and visually pleasing, you want to be there, and be square about being there and doing whatever you need to do. Heck, you may even want to stay where ever you are, and never leave.

I’m at this point with Firefox. After using many other browsers in the past, I’ve never been happier in geekdom. The appearance of Firefox, and Thunderbird now has made my Desktop, or GNOME desktop environment visually pleasing. I can customize the look of Firefox, or Thunderbird to make it stand out and not just let it drap around like I did before. I won’t lie, I even did it with Firefox, and various others.

As mentioned before, they’re not really for producitivity. Personas for Firefox are more visually pleasing to the eye than anything. It lets you customize the looks of Firefox, or Thunderbird just like any other theme available for Gnome, or KDE but, it’s only for Firefox, or Thunderbird. They’re simply skins which is driven by the commity of users who want to create their own. You can design, and upload your own which will individualize your browser.  There are hundreds of artist-created skins as well.

What makes Personas really shine is the ability to look at them via your own browser – just by opening the browser up. Once Personas are installed, the bottom left side of the bar Foxy’s head appears. Just simply click on the head, and you can have your choice of what skin to use. There’s a huge variety of whatever you want. Even hovering over each skin that’s in the addon, it will change the theme while just hovering over the picture(or name) with your mouse.

It’s easily one of the best addons I’ve used because of the quality of the addon, and the aesthics are pleasing to the eye like I’ve mentioned before.

NOTE

Personas come as a default installation with Firefox-3b5. However, if you want to use Personas in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope’s version of Firefox which is Firefox-3.0.10 you’ll have to download the addon. And, if you don’t have Firefox, and want to download and install Firefox to use Personas – here’s the URL: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

To use Personas in Thunderbird, you’ll have to download the beta version of Thunderbird which is Thunderbird-3b2, and install Personas via the URL above. Download the .xpi file, and install the addon like any other addon. You’ll come to an “install” button in the window – just browse to the file and press ok to install. Here’s the link to the Thunderbird download page.

In Jaunty Jackalope, I downloaded Thunderbird into /opt so I have the beta, and stable versions so if the beta messes up, I have the stable to use. Just symlink the thunderbird executable in /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird into /usr/bin. Here’s the code: “sudo ln -s /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird3″ without quotes. This will let you have two working Thunderbirds in an installation. Create a new profile with, “thunderbird3 -P”. Howto in the ubuntuforums.

Hopefully this helps you.
Enjoy.

Justin

The Mozilla: Firefox Update

What internet browser do you use? Hopefully not internet explorer, or Opera. Firefox has been awesome ever since I’ve stepped foot into using it. I love the user interface, the way I can handle addons(or plugins), the way it performs, and the ability to do whatever I want with it. It just keeps getting better, and better.

Prior blog posts I’ve named off a few addons I’ve used, and still use. Some addons I don’t use, and addons I’ve moved onto something better  because they’ve simply evolved, or there’s just simply something better out. There’s going to be more of that because Mozilla just changed how addons are made with jetpack. Jetpack is an API that will be far more superior than a lot of things they have done. Now any user that knows html/css or javascript can make addons for the browser. This is a good step that Mozilla put forth for the user because now it’s not an impossible task for the user to make something of their browser and have a choice. You don’t need to be a programmer, or know what you’re doing to customize the addon you want. Someone with no knowledge can have the ability to make addons and fool around with the API with the various examples on the Mozilla Labs website where you get Jetpack. With this going for Mozilla, I think it’s going to help a new breed of programmers, and people who do want to learn how to program, or code since it’s possible to do so. It’s not an impossible task. You can learn how to interact with an extensive API, and see the changes you want to see right after a refresh of the browser.

Jetpack as stated is an API for web development languages which means it’s good for the web-2.0 crowd. If you want a Digg counter on your bottom panel of Firefox, it’s possible. If you want a switch to turn off ads and other such things that are annoying, you can. What about removing embedded movies, or objects? It’s possible. What about statistics, and a graph? It’s possible! There are endless possiblities that anyone can explore.

I’ve yet to try this addon yet, but it does look interesting, and has me intrigued. I have it installed, and ready to go in Firefox-3b5. I’m more of a user than anything. I’m not a developer, I don’t code. I am part of a community of users, programmers, and activists. At least I’d like to think I am. Linux is a wonderful thing.

Jetpack – A Call For Participants
Mozilla Labs – Jetpack

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Linux: Best Programs That Suit Me.

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I haven’t updated this blog in a while, and I guess this is a good time to do so with a post of the current programs I use. Since the release of Ubuntu: Jaunty Jackalope my program selection hasn’t really changed. But, I mean, I do relatively use the same programs I did before. Here’s a list of them:

Internet Browser:

I like both Firefox, and epiphany-browser. I mainly only use Firefox because of the add-ons it has. In another post I’ll update you on what add-ons I use.

Music Player:

I’ve switched around a lot, but I’ve found common ground with Banshee. I liked exaile for the longest time, but I haven’t used it in a long time. The last time I tried it, the program was acting really strange. The UI wasn’t looking proper, no EQ support and it was complete utter non-sense. With Banshee, everything seems to work wonders, even videos! Sometimes, I’ll use MOC too. It’s an ncurses program that is used in a terminal. It plays streams as well as MP3’s, and I’m sure other song formats too.

Torrents:

I Strictly use Deluge now. I used Transmission for the longest time. I liked it, still do, but I find I like Deluge a lot better. It’s a little more heavy than Transmission, but it does similar things.

Mail:

I’ve always used Thunderbird. It may be overkill with options, but I only use it with basic IMAP usability with GMail. It’s an easy system to use, and once it’s set up proper, it’s set up. No fussing around needed. I’ve heard ClawsMail client is also really good, and a lot lighter than Thunderbird. But, I like the Mozilla suite.

Here’s something you could also try out: In Linux, try installing prism. “sudo apt-get install prism” Prism is simple XULRunner based browser. Once set up, go into the menu, click on the menu option, tell it to go to gmail.com. Now, you have GMail right on your desktop with no configuration required. It can be done with any other site, too. They even have selected WebApps for certain utilities now, too. “sudo apt-get install prism-google-mail” and you’ll have the same thing you just did.

Graphic Design:

Not sure if I’ve included this in my other, “best of”, blog posts, but, I’ll assure you, it’ll be quite expanded.

GIMP has always been with me since the first day I used Linux. Eventhough it’s multi-platform, GIMP is a nice substitute for Photoshop, and other expensive photo manipulation software. GIMP is free too.

For vector editors I’ve always used Inkscape, but Xaralx is also very nice. A bit heavier in resources but it’s never ceases to amaze me. It’s a really nice application. Pencil is also a vector, and bitmap editor, but it’s mainly used for animation since it has a nice timeline to render to. It’s an excellent application for vector animation.

I’ve recently stepped into the 3D world of making objects just for the hell of it, and I can say I quite enjoy it. It’s quite a challenge, even with Wings3D. The Wings3D UI is basically good if you like clicking your mouse a lot. There are some shortcuts, but it’s not exactly like Blender where there are many shortcuts and once you memorize the Blender shortcuts, you’re good to go, and you’ll be making things with ease. I’ve yet to get a handle of Blender, but Wings3D is a lot easy to use at least for me. A bit more time consuming, but I like it. The nice thing about the 3D applications is that I can make something in Wings save it to a non-proprietary format, import in Blender, and render with Blender’s engine(s) which are far more superior. A lot of people do it like that.

Another small program I like is Agave. Agave is an eyedropper program. If you want to find out what colours people are using on a website, or in a theme, or another wallpaper you can use the program like a swatch to save the colour variants. Just click the eye dropper on the colour and the swatch saves for later use in the program. It’s not really hard to use, and it’s really useful.

Instant Messaging:

For a long time I used Pidgin as a multi-platform instant messenger, but, I don’t really like it now. I mean it has nice cosmetics, but I like to use empathy now. It’s far more better. It’s a lot more stable, and I’ve had no problems with it so far. It can do Jabber, XMAPP, MSN, IRC, ICQ, and others. Pretty well any popular protocol. Mics and webcams work under it too!

Bitlbee is another multi-platform instant messenger. But people use it for commandline interface usage. It’s best used with screen. Last time I tried it, it pretty well had an intuitive interface, but I’m sure once you’ve learned how to use it, it’s not so hard and it comes naturally.

Internet Relay Chat:

Since my introduction to Linux, I’ve always whole-heartedly used irssi, and I still do! I love the program. It’s one of the best programs I’ve ever used, and hopefully it doesn’t change for a very long time.

Screen Multi-plexer:

This is a whole category on its own, and I think there’s only one of its kind. It’s quite awesome even though I don’t use it. I don’t really have a need to. The screen multi-plexer used is called, “Screen”. What it does is, when you open a terminal you have a CLI. With screen, if you’re only running CLI, or a terminal you can minimize, close, or hide screen instances while they’re still running. So, you want IRC hidden, you can hide it.

Firewall:

I’ve used Firestarter for a long time. I remember trying to use it when I first started learning how to use Ubuntu. To be truthful, it was really hard to use. It was for me anyway. I couldn’t really use it because there was quite a learning curve. But, I can lay that to rest because gufw is here. Gufw has a simple interface, and ufw is the backend of it which is already installed. I’m assuming Firestarter used the ufw backend. I could be totally wrong on that though.

Anyway, that’s the end of the list of programs I mainly use. If you find any others worth using, leave me a comment. I’m always looking for the best programs for the GNOME Desktop Environment.