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In Detail Blogger is a blog publishing system from Google with a friendly interface specifically designed for creating and maintaining weblogs. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content a… More >>
Firefox: If you hate having to search through your folders every time you change the type of file or directory you’re saving to—and we certainly do!—Save File To helps you make custom context menus for file saving bliss.
The problem arises with the way Firefox retains the previous folder you’ve used to save something. That’s great for when you’re saving a bunch of the same thing in a row—who would want to navigate from the default directory every time you opened up the save as dialogue?—but if you’re frequently saving a variety of files you want a faster way to move between directories.
Save File To is a Firefox add-on that enables editing of the right-click “Save As” context menu. Immediately after installation it adds in your Desktop and My Documents folders as available entries—and you can navigate down through those folders—but you can also specify custom folders and reorganize the menu. It’s easy to add in a folder for a specific project you’re working on or create custom links to save to your wallpaper collection, music collection, or any other system you want to set up. Although we used an image as our example in the screenshot above you can customize all the Save As menus in Firefox including how you save pages, links, images, and other files.
Visit the link below to install Save File To into Firefox or check out the via link to see a step by step tutorial at How-To Geek on setting up Save File To. Save File To is free and works wherever Firefox does. Have a favorite add-on for customizing the menus in Firefox or a similar tool for another browser? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
Filed under: Software
I’m a big fan of Zykloid Software’s Posterino, a Mac app that allows you to create elegant collages. Similarly, you can use Shape Collage to create a collage. However, as implied in the app’s namesake, you can also customize the shape of your collage to one of the many included preset options, as well as your own customized shape. One example would be pictures of hundreds of shoes in the shape of the Nike swoosh logo — you get the picture.
While the app is billed as “free,” the free version stamps a watermark that, while small and light, is nonetheless noticeable. US$25 removes this watermark, and adds the ability to export to an Adobe Photoshop PSD (where you can manipulate photos).
Shape Collage was created by developer Vincent Cheung, and is available for download here.
TUAWCustomize your collage with Shape Collage originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If you spend much time in the comments around Lifehacker (and you should—some of the best stuff on the site happens in the comments!), take a look at the comment viewing options hidden away in your profile settings.
To access your comment display settings, first make sure you’re logged in (anyone can register for account here), then click on your name on the top-right of the page to go to your profile. From there, just click the Settings link next to you name on the profile page to bring up the dialog above. As you can see, currently you can set comments to show featured only or all comments by default, display replies as collapsed or always expanded, and adjust the order that comments display.
We’ve gotten several complaints from annoyed readers over each of these commenting options, so if you’d like to tweak the way comments are displayed on Lifehacker, these settings should help you do just that.
Start pages are a dime a dozen, but considering how many times you open a new tab every day, it’s nice to have something attractive to look at. Web site Fav4.org is a minimal start page that’seasy on the eyes.
The default four sites are the four you see above—Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, and Twitter—but you can customize your Fav4.org start page with a number of different popular sites (though we can think of at least one blog that, ahem, appears to be missing). Click the site settings link in the lower-right corner of the window to adjust your favorites or suggest a site you’d like added. There’s not much to it beyond that. It’s lightweight and attractive. My main feature wish: keyboard shortcuts for launching your favorites.
Just when you think you’ve tried every Twitter app out there, a few more appear on the scene. For Mac users that might have either grown tired of, or are looking for alternatives to, Tweetie, Twitterrific, Kiwi or Socialite, never fear, there are indeed other native Mac OS X options out there!
While some of the best Twitter apps, in terms of power, are still the Adobe Air-based Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck, there are also some great, free native OS X clients (and one that runs on Mozilla’s XUL platform) worth checking out.
Itsy is for the Twitter minimalist — someone who wants to have the ability to send a tweet, view @replies and maybe perform a search, but doesn’t want the app to take up tons of real-estate or attention. The app has a very small footprint, both in terms of memory and screen size, and offers up the basic Twitter features. Plus, it supports Growl notifications and keyboard shortcuts. If you want something simple and something that will stay out of your way, this just might be your app.
Itsy is free and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher.
Twitt is a Twitter app for the Mac user who appreciates a good user interface and likes the ability to customize or theme his apps. Like Kiwi, Twitt supports HTML+CSS themes that are easy to install and change around. The app has the basic Twitter features covered, but adds a few things that power users should like too.
For instance, if you like to share photos via Twitter, you can use the built-in image uploader to send stuff to TwitPic or yFrog. It also supports multiple accounts, Growl, offline reading, the official Retweet button, plus you can set up notifications for certain content and create filters to prevent certain stuff from showing up in your timeline.
The only real feature that Twit lacks is Lists support, but as it stands, most native Mac apps don’t do that yet anyway. Twitt is free.
Echofon for Mac is a desktop version of the popular iPhone app. The two apps share a lot of similarities, lots of features, and a clean, if not mindblowingly-awesome user interface. Echofon has a really nice browser drawer that can slide out of the side of the client, showing off conversation history or user information or user timelines, without obstructing your other screen. This is a great compromise between either having something always open in a browser, or the menu and column madness that some of the more powerful Twitter apps use.
Like Twitt, you can easily drag and drop to upload photos, a feature that’s a nice touch and something that many desktop clients ignore. You can also easily look at Twitter trending topics or view your saved searches from within the app, a feature that’s really handy.
If you use Echofon Pro for the iPhone, you can sync your unread tweets. And if you send an @reply or direct message to someone using Echofon for the iPhone, they can receive a push notification of your tweet instantly. Again, the only real feature that Echofon lacks is Lists support, but if that gets added, this will be a real competitor to the power-user apps. Update: Echofon for Mac just added list support, making it a very attractive option!
Echofon is still in beta and is free right now. Full pricing details will be announced in the future.
Yoono Desktop is a desktop version of the popular Firefox add-on and it actually controls more than just Twitter. It also supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and MySpace IM. The nice thing about Yoono is that you can update your status across networks and connect to all networks at once. It also supports real-time search across your different networks.
As a desktop app, Yoono includes most of the big features that came in the Firefox add-on. Unlike the other apps in this round-up, Yoono is not written using Cocoa — it’s based on Mozilla’s XUL-runner framework. That’s the same base that Firefox and Thunderbird use. I mention this because some of the interface features are going to differ — similar to what happens when you run Adobe Air apps. However, while XUL still tends to be poor with memory management in Mac OS X, it’s nowhere near as bad as Adobe Air. Users who want a powerful client that isn’t Air-based, this might be fore you.
Yoono can be run in a more compact space, but it really likes to take over as much of your screen real-estate as you can give it. Depending on what you like to monitor, that may or may not suit your needs. Still, for a power Twitter client that isn’t based on Adobe Air, Yoono is a great option. Mac users should also check out the Firefox add-on if you want a slightly more integrated approach.
Mac users, what is your favorite Twitter client? Let us know!
- 5 Mac Apps to Boost Your Productivity
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– Top 10 iPhone Apps as Judged by Mashable Readers
– 10 iPhone Apps to Avoid Work Disasters
– 20 Creative Apps For Your iPhone
Tags: apple, apps, desktop, desktop apps, desktop apps list, echofon, itsy, List, Lists, mac, trending, twitt, twitter, web apps, yoono
Good news, laptop hunters! No, not those laptop hunters…. Anywho, two of Lenovo’s CES-announced machines are now ready for you to customize and order, with the 14-inch G460 packing a 2.13GHz Core i3-330M processor, integrated Intel graphics, Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit), 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 1,366 x 768 resolution panel, 320GB hard drive, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, dual-layer DVD writer and a 6-cell battery. The 15.6-inch G560 adds a marginally larger LCD and, well, that’s it. Thankfully, both units get going at the same $799 price point, so choosing between the two really boils down to how awful your vision is. Got that, gramps?
Lenovo’s G560 and G460 laptops now available to order originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 08:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
A young UK-based startup called Favilous has joined the crowded social bookmarking space. It hopes to differentiate itself from the legions of existing bookmarking services by building a community behind the bookmarks, so users can share descriptions of sites and help each other discover new online destinations (see a clip from one of their tour slides below).
On the site, users can see other users’ popular bookmarks as well as the most popular bookmarks in various categories, including “Top Sites” and picks for categories such as food, entertainment, and travel. Once you sign up, you pick a number of categories, for example, blogs or music, that are of interest to you. Favilous populates the top sites in each of those categories, and to edit this list, you need to expand the category to see “all sites” and narrow it down from there, or else enter in a URL manually.
When you register you can’t automatically transfer bookmarks from your browser to Flavilous, but they hope to add this capability in the next few weeks, according to founder Steve Whyley. Right now, it seems a bit too manual to me, and that may be why the service hasn’t seen much pickup, accumulating just under 200 users in about a week.
The company also plans to add customized theme pages in the coming weeks as well as the ability to integrate social networking profiles so you can easily share bookmarks with your friends.
The company plans to make money in 3 ways: by licensing the API to businesses and allowing them to customize Favilous for their own needs; by creating a subscription model to bookmark music playlists (they have reached out to Spotify to allow users to bookmark their playlists); and to possibly look at affiliate relationships and advertise to users, although they are hesitant to do that at this time.
The site is better looking than a lot of its competitors, but whether or not it will make for a better social bookmarking experience won’t be evident until the promised features roll out in the next couple of weeks.
Favilous was founded by Whyley and Mike Doyle. Competitors include Pinboard, Instapaper, which charges for its iPhone app but not for use of its site, and Delicious, which is free. Favilous is self-funded.
Apptizr launched a website last month to help you find applications for the iPhones and iPod Touch based on which apps you like and which you hate. Now it has taken the obvious next step — it’s available in the App Store itself, where you can download the Apptizr app for your iPhone or iPod Touch.
The iPhone app looks pretty similar to the website. You enter the kinds of apps you’re interested in, such as “entertainment,” “news,” or “navigation.” Then Apptizr gives you a list of recommended apps, and if you try them out, you can give them a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Then, like popular music app Pandora, Apptizr will customize its recommendations based on your tastes. You can either create a profile that stores your data from session to session, or do a “quick start” where you just enter your interests and get some recommendations.
There are plenty of other services available offering app recommendations — Chorus, for example, presents social data about which apps your friends are downloading and using, while AppStoreHQ makes recommendations based on news coverage and reviews. But Apptizr is different because it focuses on your personal preferences, not what your friends like or what reviewers think.
So how good are the recommendations? Well I played around with Apptizr a little this afternoon, and so far they seem solid, though I haven’t stumbled on any undiscovered gems that felt like a perfect fit. Not yet, anyway.
Apptizr is free — you can download it here. The Mountain View, Calif, company is self-funded thus far. The founding team previously created TradeVibes, the company information wiki that was acquired by VentureBeat.
We dig apps like Bandsintown for getting the scoop on our favorite bands’ local-ish shows, but it can also be a cluttered stream. Album tracker Roadie focuses on albums, pinging you on new releases by RSS or iCal feed.
It’s a really simple app, and it’s even more simple if you’re a frequent user of the web music service Last.fm. Enter in your favorite bands that you want to track and hit the “+” key to add them to your pile, or simply type in your Last.fm username and have Roadie pull your most-liked bands from there. You can, of course, start with a Last.fm list and add and subtract from there. Once you’ve got a good batch, you can save it as a bookmark to come back to later and customize further.
The feeds come through Roadie by way of Amazon’s servers, so if your band doesn’t release their material widely enough to be noticed by Amazon or its resellers, you might be out of luck. Still, for most bands and artists, you’re going to be right up to date on releases both right around the corner and way in the future.
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