Google Wave Notifier

Google Wave has had a great hype these days. Many people are having access to Google Wave accounts now as Google has started distributing the invitations to try out Wave. Google Wave has all good features but I feel it is not that useful unless you have some tool which notifies you when you get a new Wave.

Google Wave Notifier does this for you. It is a neat application, low on resources which informs you whenever you receive a new wave. It is simple to use and configure as it just needs you Google Wave account details to login.

It gives you options to select the browser in which it should open your new waves.
Plays sound when a new Wave is received.
Setup Proxy server.










Click here to download Google Wave Notifier

Hide the Menu Bar in Firefox 3.6 Beta 5

Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 has a new feature using which you can hide the Menu Bar. This gives your browser more pixels to display the information on the webpage. You need to right click the navigation or menu bar and uncheck Menu Bar item to hide the Menu Bar in Firefox. You can press Alt key to access the Menu Bar whenever needed.

You can achieve the same in Firefox 3.5 using one of the following extensions:
Personal Menu
Compact Menu 2

How a website would look on different resolutions

Google Labs has launched yet another application to ease our life. This time it has come up with Browser Size using which one can get an idea about his websites usability. It is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the "90%" contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.

This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page's user interface are visible by a wide audience. Once you land up on the home page an example page opens. On the example page that you see when you first visit this site, there is a "donate now" button which falls within the 80% contour, meaning that 20% of users cannot see this button when they first visit the page. 20% is a significant number; knowing this fact would encourage the designer to move the button much higher in the page so it can be seen without scrolling.

To view your own Web site with this same visualization overlaid on it, simply type its URL into the "Enter URL here" textbox at the top of the window and click Go. 

Adobe Reader Latest Security Hole

According to the report from ZDNet (http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=5119&tag=nl.e589) Adobe has confirmed a security hole in Adobe PDF Reader. According the report his you need to disable the Javascript in Adobe Reader to keep your machine safe from vulnerabilities. To disable Javascript in Adobe Reader follow the steps below:

• Open Adobe Reader
• Go To Edit -> Preferences
• In Preferences window select JavaScript in the Categories on the left side
• Uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript" and click Ok

 

A better solution would be switching to FoxIt Reader which is light weight PDF Viewer.

Take advantages of Google URL Shortener

I had previously written about Google URL Shortener which can only be used with Google Toolbar and Feedburner.
Interestingly there is a new extension for Google Chrome with which you can use Google Shortener URL to reduce the length of your current URL.

Click here to download Google URL Shortener for Google Chrome

If you do not use Google Chrome then you can use Google URL Shortener using the following link:

http://gaigalas.net/lab/googl

Connect website using multiple logins in Firefox

If incase you have multiple logins for a single website and you need to access both within single instance Firefox browser then Multifox is an extension you are looking for. For example if you have 2 Gmail accounts then you need to log off from 1 of the accounts to access the other account within same Firefox instance. Multifox makes it possible to access all your Gmail accounts at once within the same instance without interfering the other account.

Multifox adds commands to Firefox's context menu to start a New Identity Window.

Each Multifox window is flagged with a number indicating the identity profile. Logins made in windows with different numbers are isolated.
If you need to access 5 Gmail accounts you will need 5 windows with different identity profiles.

Multifox also prevents the identity profile of each window when Firefox restores the sessions

Click here to download Multifox for Firefox

Google Toolbar 6.4 Released for Firefox and IE

Google released its new version of Google Toolbar 6.4 for IE and Firefox.

The new toolbar as expected adds some cool new features like:

Share Web Pages
It is a feature that lets you share web pages using social networking sites, mail services, bookmarking services and other sites. You can select your favorite services from the settings page.
Google URL Shortener
If you share links using Twitter, you'll notice a new URL shortening service: goo.gl which shortens the URL's. Read more about Google URL Shortener.

Geolocation
Another new Google Toolbar feature implements W3C's geolocation API

, which allows web pages to access detailed information about the locations of their visitors. This feature is already available in Firefox 3.5 so Google only added it to the IE version of Google Toolbar.

Google URL Shortener

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are: stability, security and speed."

• Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
• Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
• Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

The service is only used by Google Toolbar and FeedBurner, so there's no web interface or API for goo.gl for now.

Set Default Page for new tab in Firefox

If you do not like the blank page after opening a New Tab in Firefox make sure you have NewTabURL extension installed for Firefox. Using NewTabURL you can simply set the page which should be opened on the New Tab opened.

Click here to download NewTabURL for Firefox

Google Video adds Cartoons and Slideshows Search

Google has added new feature to its video search to restrict the search results to cartoons and slideshows. To restrict the search you need to search for the content you are looking for, click "Show Options" and select "Cartoons" or Slideshows" from the options in the left panel.
Google claims that it uses video recognition technology to classify the videos and give you better search results. Not sure if this is that useful feature but Google ended up ruining a great feature "TV view" using which you could play the videos without opening a new page. YouTube videos are no longer played in the embedded player while the other videos are played on the search results page only if you click on "Play Video".