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

All images © to their respected owners.

Top 6 Linux Applications

For the last few days I’ve been thinking of a good post to write since I don’t really frequent this blog too much. Well, I don’t really write any posts in any blogs, and again I’ve said before. I’d like to write more about things but my ambitions have been lacking. So here’s a list of a few Linux applications I use:

#1
Since I’ve been using Linux I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox as my primary internet browser and can say that it has been the proper choice. The customization, and ease of use is awesome. I can customize the user interface easily will a lot of add-ons and bring the browser to life.

I like my browser to be very minimal since I only use my laptop nowadays and it’s quite a small screen. It’s 15″, of course not the smallest, but I like minimal settings so I can see more of my content rather than just the UI.

Here’s a list of my add-ons I use with the browser:

• All-in-One Sidebar
• DOM Inspector
• GoogleEnhancer
• Scribefire(where my writing my blog atm)
• Smart Bookmarks Bar
• Stumbleupon
• Tiny Menu
• Toolbar Buttons
• Ubuntu Firefox Modifications

There’s one more add-on I’d like to download and use as well. Sometimes I like browsing the Ubuntu Forums, and there’s an add-on that will let me navigate to the forums from my menu. Of course there are a bunch of options to choose from and can become quite handy to use.

#2
Pidgin is a instant messaging program similar to what MSN is but the functionality of Pidgin is much greater. Not only can it handle the MSN protocol, but it can also handle many other protocols. Both open and proprietary protocols including:

• XMPP (Jabber)
• Google Talk
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• IRC
• ICQ
• QQ

  And many more….

Being a multi-protocol messaging system it also has many plug-ins for the protocols it supports including Internet Relay Chat. Pidgin has pretty much all the settings MSN has and then some. It’s like MSN on steroids.

#3
Exaile is a GTK based music player for large libraries of music. It’s quite similar to Amarok but, Amarok is built on QT. There’s really no point in installing Amarok when there’s an equivalent music player like Exaile. Not only will you be installing extra KDE libraries and using a KDE application, but you’ll be slowing down your computer if you install Amarok.

Exaile has a huge amount of settings, like an EQ that can be set to each type of music genre you listen to, but it also collects data in database that can be used to store how many times you’ve listened to a song or if you want to listen to the top 100 songs you’ve listened to, you can! It has last.fm support, album art support which means when you listen to a song, it will get the cover from the internet and will display in the Exaile UI. It also has Ipod, and MTP support. Listen to Shoutcast radio if you want as well. It’s jam packed full of options and not only can you add plug-ins but you can also change the user interface a bit to satify your needs. One other thing worth mentioning is that if you’re a podcast listener, or video podcast viewer there’s an option to listen or view podcasts.

In my honest opinion, Exaile is better than Amarok by a tenfold.

#4
Mozilla Thunderbird, an email client at it’s best. Just like Firefox, it can be customized with addons. Whether you need inhanced security, or a minimal user interface, it can be done.

Thunderbird is set up to access my Gmail email using IMAP to receive email, and SMTP to send email. It’s very easy to set up this way and it makes sense to do so. The way IMAP works is that you’re interacting with Gmail’s IMAP server, saving all of your settings and emails there. Emails don’t download onto your computer it’s all done from their locale. If you want to save a draft, the draft is saved onto their server. It’s very secure and it works great.

The tutorial I followed to get thunderbird working with gmail is here.

#5
The Synaptic Package Manager is the default package manager that is installed in Ubuntu and I can say it’s one handy peice of software. I couldn’t live without it.

What a package manager does is manage your packages of software. To install packages of software you need to enable trusted repositories that work with Ubuntu if you’re using Ubuntu. Once the trusted sources(repositories) are enabled you can start installing software from the said program(Synaptic).

As a whole, Synaptic gathers a conglomerate amount of packages(software) and gives you an option to see what the package name is, gives a description, lets you install or remove and ignore packages. It handles everything in one justified place instead of searching all around the internet for a package you want. Although whatever repositories you’ve enabled – package may not be listed so in this case you would have to look for the package and install it another way. This means that it’s less secure as it could be from an untrusted source and could be hazardous to your computer, a cracker could take full advantage of the situation because it may be an untrusted source.

Ubuntu is a Debian based Linux Distribution which means it uses .deb packages to install software. A .deb is much like a .exe file in windows. It’s an executable file that will do all the hard work for you. By hard work, I mean it will install all dependencies if needed and will install everything in the proper place. There are many different types of installation processes, you can even compile things from source code but it’s not that easy and you would be working with the terminal or commandline.

Here’s a website that will show you how to install anything in many different ways with Ubuntu.

#6
Transmission, a Bit Torrent client which enables you to download torrents. This application is by far very minimal and it just works.

There are really no plug-ins that I know of, and it ships with Ubuntu preinstallated, meaning, it comes with Ubuntu. Transmission works very nicely, and is actively developed and used by a lot of people.

Of course there are many other clients that do the same thing, but I like what it does, it’s not hard to set up, and it’s very easy to use and enjoy. Once opened, it will minimize to the notification area. When trying to close it, you can right click the menu icon and close it.

So far I can only think of those selected applications that I use mostly on a daily basis, and can’t live without. If I find out anymore good applications and start using them daily, I will make sure to post what I’ve started to use.

Please, don’t be afraid to comment, tell me what your favorite Linux applications are and what futures they have that are worth highlighting in your response.

Thank you for reading.
Justin