Geeky Ninja » Firefox

How To view iPad version of websites on your Computer

Sharninder — Sun, 30 May 2010 18:23:26 +0000

The iPad has been a roaring success. There are no two ways about it. It is an awesome device and the built-in web browser is the best in it’s class.

Even though most websites work perfectly fine on an iPad, a lot of web publishers have optimized versions of their websites available for just the iPad. Often, the iPad optimized versions are designed with a touch interface in mind but sometimes the desingers get a little more creative and take the single tasking focussed of the iPad and design an interface that is not only a delight to use on the iPad, but would also serve as a better interface for the desktop version.

Take, for example, the iPad version of Gmail. The regular desktop browser based Gmail is fun to use and, IMHO, has one of the best interfaces for email on the web. But, the iPad optimized version of Gmail takes GTD to a whole new level.

If you want to use the iPad version of Gmail on your desktop computer, all you’ve got to do is fool Gmail into thinking that you’re actually visiting the site from your iPad instead of your desktop browser.

Launch Firefox and Install the User Agent Switcher extension from the add-ons directory.

Now, go to the Tools menu and edit the user agent settings from the Tools->Default User Agents->Edit User agents menu. You can add a new user agent for the iPad by clicking the New button and entering the following values in the window that pops up.

The most important value that you need to add is the “User Agent” one. Set it to the following:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

Just copy the rest of the settings from the image above and you’re all set. Set firefox to use the new iPad setting as the default user agent and browse over the Gmail and you’ll be presented with the iPad optimized version of Gmail. You can also try it with any other site that has an iPad optimized version.

In theory, this trick will work with any browser but since I’ve used a Firefox extension to switch the user agent, I’m tied to the Firefox browser. If you can change the user agent in your favorite browser, you can use this trick on that browser too.

Fix Twitter Retweets using a Greasemonkey script

Sharninder — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:35:16 +0000

Retweets have always been one of Twitter’s most powerful features, except, that ReTweeting was never even a feature that the Twitter team developed.

Retweets using the RT (or the ‘via @user’) format were pioneered and popularized by the early adapters of the service and it is only when twitter attained a mass following did everyone else recognize the potential of retweets.

The official stance on retweeting, however, was still that they’re just a type of tweet and the twitter development team never made any moves to incorporate retweets into their web interface even as almost all third party twitter clients supported retweeting in one form or the other.

Last month the twitter team’s stance changed, though, and they launched a new ReTweet feature that is now a part of the web interface and is now officially the way ReTweets are supposed to work.

Ever since the retweet feature launched, a lot of people have been complaining about the way it has been implemented, specifically the fact that the ReTweeted tweet displays the original tweeter’s DP rather than your friend who RT’ed it.

If you’re one of those who’re annoyed by this implementation, Leonard Lin from userscripts, has a solution for you.

ReTweet Avatars is a Greasemonkey script that changes the way ReTweets are displayed in your timeline and makes it easier to understand the user who retweeted the tweet while still being able to figure out the original author of the tweet.

You need Greasemonkey installed and if you already have that, Just click on the ‘Install’ button to install the Userscript. That shouldn’t take more than a minute.

That’s it. The next time that you visit twitter.com and see an RT’ed tweet, you’ll see your retweeting friend’s avatar and a smaller inset avatar of the original author.

So, in this case Scobleizer is the person I follow and whose Avatar I get to see in my time-line, but I can also see that RWW is the person who originally tweeted out the tweet that Schobleizer RT’ed.

So, do you like this new format better ?

If you’d rather have the original author’s Avatar as the more prominent one and the ReTweeter’s Avatar as the smaller inset, you can make a small change to the script that you just installed.

Just right click the Greasemonkey icon in Firefox’s status bar and select the Manage User Scripts option.

Now, select the Twitter Avatar script and click the Edit button.

This should open up an editor window. Search for the text “inset_retweeter” and change it’s value to 1 from 0.

Save the script and quit the editor.

Now, when you visit Twitter.com, all RTs will show the original author’s Avatar with the ReTweeters Avatar inset.

Do you like the way the new ReTweet functionality has been implemented ? Would this extension solve your problem ? Let me know in the comments.

Download manager for Firefox – DownThemAll

Sharninder — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:10:09 +0000

If you’ve ever had to deal with an errant internet connection while downloading a set of hefty multimedia files, you’ll know how irritating that can be. The internet keeps going down and the browser keeps trying to start your download, all over again. Even if the connection is holding up well, the Internet and TCP/IP in particular, was never designed for the huge files that we transfer these days, and sooner or later you are bound the drop the connection or have your download timed out.

Back when most people used dial up to connect to the Internet, download managers were pretty much the only way to download files off the Internet. Well, the download managers still exists and they’ve gotten a lot more smarter. DownThemAll is one such download manager.

DownThemAll is a download manager as well as a download accelerator built as a firefox add-on. A download accelerator is a program that breaks up the requested file into several chunks and downloads them all at the same time, thereby accelerating the download, and then joins all the pieces together at the end.

DownThemAll can be downloaded and installed from the mozilla add-on repository. Once downloaded, restart firefox and the very first time after the install you’ll be asked to setup the default directory for downloads. This is something you can select and change later also. All the settings and preferences for DownThemAll are available from the Tools menu of firefox.

Since, this is a firefox add-on we’re talking about, I have to tell you about the awesome integration that DownThemAll has with firefox. I’m sure all of you have seen the window that firefox pops up when you click on a link to download a file. dTa integrates with this window and all you have to do to have dTa download the file is select the option that says so.

By default, DownThemAll downloads a file in 5 segments, which means that the file will be divided in 5 pieces and all 5 will be downloaded simultaneously. You can, of course, change this default as well as a lot of other settings from the Preferences dialogue (Tools->DownThemAll Tools->Preferences).

DownThemAll is definitely my favorite download manager, not only for it’s awesome capabilities but for the fact that it has the best integration with firefox, which is what I use as my browser.

Do you guys use any download manager ? Which is your favorite download manager ? Let me know in the comments.

How to download an album from Facebook

Sharninder — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:30:28 +0000

Facebook is, by all accounts, the biggest photo sharing site on the planet. Millions of photos are added everyday to facebook and the number is only going to grow given the ridiculous growth that facebook is seeing.

The photos application is also one of the more social aspects of facebook and everyone loves to tag, comment and generally have fun with photos.

All that is well and good, but what do you do if you want to download a complete album to your computer and view it offline. Facebook doesn’t provide any tools to do that. Sure, you could save each photo individually but that’d take a long time and be really painful.

FacePAD is a firefox extension that lets you download an entire facebook album to your computer with a single click. To install the application, Start firefox, go to Tools->Add ons and type FacePAD in the search box. Add the extension to firefox by clicking on the “Add to Firefox” button and you’re all set.

Now, with the Add on installed, login to facebook and browse over to any photo album that you’d like to download to your computer. Right-Click on the name of the album and select the option titled “Download album with FacePAD”.

FacePAD will then proceed to download each photo in the album to the default downloads folder of firefox. If you have more than a page of photos in the album, FacePAD will prompt you each time it moves over to the next page. This is because of the way facebook is structured and is a minor inconvenience.

FacePAD lets you download not only your own photo albums but also albums belonging to your friends, events or groups. Of course, you need to have view access to the album to begin with.

Are there any other similar utilities that you guys know of ? Let us know in the comments.

Control firefox with the keyboard using ubiquity

Sharninder — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:00:38 +0000

Well, actually, Ubiquity can do a lot more.

Ubiquity is a firefox extesion that is can really only be described as a launcher for the Internet, integrated with the web browser, which in this case is Firefox. Confused ?

Well, Let me explain. Ubiquity allows you to use your keyboard to give commands to the browser that’ll let you do anything that you would otherwise use the mouse for. So, for example, if you want to search for something using google. You can Just use the keyboard to instruct ubiquity to do that for you. If you want to search amazon for the latest gadgets, Ubiquity can do that too.

Ubiquity is like Quicksilver (or GNOME Do, if you’re so inclined) for the Internet browser.

To get started with Ubiquity, Install it from this location.

When Ubiquity is finished installing, you’ll see a page which among other things tell you the shortcut key that you can use to invoke Ubiquity, and lets you change that key to any key combination that you chose.

This is how Ubiquity looks like when you invoke it using the key combination that you chose.

Now, for something interesting. I’ll Start typing something in the Ubiquity window, say for example Google. As soon as I type G, ubiquity presents me with a list of options, The first one of which is Google, the second gcalculate, the third a command called get-email-address and so on.

If I want, I can, at this point just press G and space and start typing a search string. Ubiquity will automatically present me the search results in its window. If I press the down arrow key, the focus will shift to the gcalculator option and now if I type 3+3, ubiquity will tell me the value of the expression 3+3.

You can even manage your calender using Ubiquity. Ubiquity comes with built-in support for Google Calender only, so make sure you are logged into your Google Calender and then issue the add-calender command.

Actually, just start type Add and you’ll see that add-calender is the first option. Start typing the event just after the add. So, the full command will look something like this – add Send birthday cake to John. That’s all !

As you can see Ubiquity can be a very cool and useful extension. It can help you save lots of time, definitely raise your productivity level a few notches up and make you popular with the girls … Well, maybe not the last one, but the rest it can definitely manage.

Play around with Ubiquity and let us know in the comments how you like it.

Manage your Photos with Firefox using GPhotospace

Sharninder — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:49:31 +0000

In the past year a lot of online storage companies have sprung up and a lot of them had to shut down. With the exception of Adrive (and now Skydrive) most companies only give away a measly 1 or 2 GBs for free with their basic offering. I mean come ‘on, Gmail gives more space than that.

The only problem is the space available with Gmail can only be used to store Email. What if I wanted to use the extra space lying around (7GB and counting) for storing Photos.

Gphotospace is your solution my friend. It is a free firefox extension that uses Gmail to store all your photos online. Donwload and install Gphotospace from the above link and you’re all set.

To start using Gphotospace (Can I just write Gphoto from now on, please ?), Click on the Tools menu and select Gphotospace from there. You will be asked to login to Gphoto with your Gmail account credentials.

From here on the process is as simple as Creating a new album, uploading your photos and Saving the album. The interface is very simple and useable.

Gphoto also lets you share the album that you just uploaded. Select the album that you want to share and click the Share button. You will be asked the Email address of the person with whom you want to share the album and that’s all. Simple, isn’t it ?

What do you guys use for storing you photos online ? Any other free solutions that we should know of ?

Geeky Ninja » Firefox

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