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Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Whenever you hover over a link, Firefox extension Status Address Bar displays the URL a link is pointing to in your Firefox address bar, eliminating the need for your status bar and freeing up precious screen real estate.

For many, the only reason Firefox’s status bar is even useful is so they can see what URL a link is pointing to before they click it. If that’s the case for you, those extra 14 or so wasted pixels at the bottom of your browser window are probably better suited for adding a little more height to your browser’s viewing area. The Status Address Bar gives you the best of both worlds:

With this extension installed, you can hide your Firefox status bar (View -> Status Bar) and still see where links are pointing—only rather than displaying the URLs in the status bar, Firefox will display URLs when you hover over a link in the Firefox address bar.

In the screenshot, for example, I’m at the Lifehacker homepage (http://lifehacker.com), but my mouse is hovering over the first post. As you can see, that post’s URL is visible in my address bar. It’s not groundbreaking, but if you’re looking for more ways to maximize Firefox’s viewing area without sacrificing functionality, it’s a nice addition. Status Address Bar is an experimental Firefox extension, works anywhere Firefox does.

Originally posted 2009-10-13 18:25:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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: Apple, iPhone, App Store, SDK, iPod touch

After all of the kerfuffle earlier this week about Apple shutting down racy apps in the App Store, it appears that the company might be creating a special place for all of that suggestive and sexy content.

We received a tip and a screenshot (seen above) from a developer who pointed out the new “Explicit” category in the tool used to submit apps into the store.

While TUAW has not yet been able to confirm this, The new category could be the first sign that Apple may provide enhanced parental controls or even a separate “adult” App Store. This would not only maintain the revenue stream from these apps for both Apple and the developers, but would stifle comments that Apple is being too strict with providers of adult content.

We will update this story as it develops.

Update: The new category is corroborated by Cult of Mac and MacRumors as well.

Update #2: Cult of Mac reports the category appears to have gone missing, although we’ve heard that when it was available earlier choosing the category wouldn’t stick — so perhaps we’re seeing some iPhone OS 4 action here?

TUAWApple creating “explicit” category for App Store originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over six months ago, Google announced it would start phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 on Orkut and YouTube, and started pushing its users to modern browsers. The search giant has now given a specific kill date for old browser support on the video website via a page on Google.com titled Solve a Problem: Upgrading your browser:

Support stops on March 13th. Stopped support essentially means that some future features on YouTube will be rolled out that won’t work in older browsers.

As you can see in the screenshot above, YouTube will have an interstitial appear when users on older browser try to watch a video on YouTube. Google says the interstitial will show up indefinitely every two weeks until the user upgrades to the most recent version of their browser. Google deems anything below IE7, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0, and Safari 3.0 as an “older browser.” Users on these browsers will still be able to watch YouTube videos, but additional features that Google plans to roll out may not be supported in these older browsers.

Late last month, Google announced it will end old browser support for Google Docs and Google Sites on March 1, 2010 and earlier this month, the company announced it would start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar by year end. Google is pushing both enterprise and consumer users towards newer browsers on all its Web properties.

Google’s stance on IE6 varies from Microsoft’s because the search giant does not need to support Windows XP, the operating system with which IE6 first shipped, as long as Redmond (which will support XP and IE6 until April 8, 2014). Microsoft, on the other hand, which has stated time and time again that it wants to see IE6 disappear as much as anyone else, refuses to force anyone to upgrade (though it’s worth noting that the software giant’s Office Web Apps won’t support IE6 either, just like Google Docs) and says the decision is ultimately up to the user.

Microsoft is trying to push users to upgrade by touting IE8’s many features over IE6, particularly in the area of security. So far, this has worked relatively well, as IE8 is the most popular browser, although IE6 is still used by about 20 percent of surfers worldwide, according to NetApplications.

Firefox/Chrome: If you love using your keyboard and shun your mouse, you’ll definitely want to try gleeBox, an awesome add-on that let’s you effortlessly browse the web without your mouse. Check out the video inside to see it in action.

Click on the picture above for a closer look.

Browsing the web without a mouse isn’t easy. Without any add-ons at all you’re stuck furiously punching the tab key to move through all the available links on the page. Other add-ons help you to navigate without your mouse but often not very intuitively.

Gleebox offers a highly customizable and intuitive way to navigate web pages via keyboard. At its most basic gleeBox allows you to hit the G key, and every link on the page is highlighted and you can navigate to it by typing part or all of the link name into gleeBox. Check out the videos below to see it in action.

After you’ve watched the intro video above to get a feel for how gleeBox works, this video showcases the newest features and customizations:

GleeBox is so neat we of course had to try it out immediately on Lifehacker.com and then make a custom script to browse Lifehacker with ease. The following screenshot shows the options menu of gleeBox with the entry you’ll want to make to enable “ESP mode” on Lifehacker. ESP mode allows you to narrow the range of links on a page so that only the important links are selected.

For your cut and paste convenience this is the value from the screenshot above: div.content>h1:not(div.menubar-bg). That entry will highlight all the articles in the main column on Lifehacker, but will not highlight the main title bar or top stories. If you don’t mind the big Lifehacker logo being highlighted in exchanged for the top stories being highlighted too, you can trim the entry down to just div.content>h1 to highlight all stories.

Definitely check out the manual for more gleeBox tips and tricks, and before you slog through creating a new ESP mode entry for a favorite web site make sure to check out the gleeBox TipJar where users submit new commands and ESP modes they’ve created.

GleeBox is available as an extension for Firefox and Google Chrome.

Have a tip or trick for mouseless computer use, web brower-related or otherwise? Let’s hear about it in the comments. Thanks JBu92!

Windows: If you’ve found yourself wanting to send a song to your XBMC playlist or a start a video playing right away instead of navigating the menus on the XBMC, send2XBMC lets you beam a file or URL from Windows to XBMC.

Part of the reason you wanted a rocking XBMC media center to begin with was that it let you access all your media in your living room like a more traditional media center instead of poking around on a computer to play files. Sometimes however you’re at your computer—or you went to your computer to search for something on your media server when pecking away at the search function with your media center remtoe wasn’t cutting it—and you want to play the movie, song, or video URL you just found without having to go navigate around the XBMC menu.

Once you install send2XBMC, you’ll have the send to XBMC options—seen in the screenshot above—to play or queue a file in XBMC right from your PC. Check out the link below to see how to configure it to work with your XBMC, add the context menu, and send video URLs to your XBMC. Have a favorite media center app or tool? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Windows 7: Windows System Restore has long been a great way to recover your system after a bad software install or a critical driver goes missing, but you may not know you can also use it to recover individual files.

Earlier this month we published a guide to Windows System Restore and now we’re highlighting, courtesty of the How-To Geek computer site, how you can use System Restore to restore individual files.

You need to have System Restore on for any drive that you want to be able to restore files on. Once you’ve turned on System Restore and made a restore point—type “System Restore” in the Start Menu command box to open up the System Restore dialogue to turn things on and make your first restore point if you haven’t already—any folder or file on that disk can now be recovered. Right click on the folder the file used to be in or the parent folder if you’re trying to restore a deleted sub-folder, then click on “Restore previous versions”. The restore menu seen in the screenshot above will appear and you’ll be able to select the version of the folder or files you want to restore.

Check out the guide at How-To Geek for lots of pictures and a more thorough step-by-step walk through. Have a neat Windows 7 trick you’d like to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Keyword bookmarks are my absolute favorite time-saving Firefox feature. I use them literally hundreds of times a day—a good system of keyword bookmarks saves all kinds of time in the browser. Unfortunately Chrome isn’t so friendly to keyword bookmarkers.

After searching high and low for a way to tweak the bookmark dialog in Google Chrome to display an option to add a keyword to my bookmarks, turns out all I needed to do was turn to the help of a few clever readers who’d emailed in how to achieve keyword bookmark bliss in Chrome. The imperfect-but-workable solution:

I just realized that keyword bookmarking is as easy as managing your search engines. Right-click the omnibox (address bar), click “Edit search engines,” and add a search engine. Use a Name you will recognize, enter the keyword you want to use, and just enter the URL for your bookmark in the URL box. Voila!

Chrome’s keyword search tool, like Firefox’s, replaces %s in the URL with your search terms. However, you can add a keyword search in Chrome without adding the %s bit at all, so when you execute that keyword, it’ll just take you to the keyword’s URL.

To clarify, check the screenshot above to how I set up a keyword bookmark for Lifehacker would look like. After setting it up, any time I want to visit Lifehacker in the future, all I have to do is type ‘l’ and hit Enter. Chrome’s autocomplete is certainly smart, and for some people is enough to replace the need for keyword bookmarks, but if you’re a keyword bookmark junkie like I am, this is an important feature to ease any browser transition.

Unfortunately it’s more of a hack than a bookmark feature, and the search engine manager isn’t nearly as robust as the regular bookmark manager, but until the Google developers decide to add this feature (my birthday’s coming up, GOOG), it’s better than nothing.

Thanks Cadence, Erik, and Rupert!

Windows: Comical is essentially an RSS feed reader designed expresely for the reading of online comics. If you love a good dose of Amazing Super Powers or XKCD, you’ll want to check out Comical.

Click on the image above for a closer view.

Sure you could subscribe to your favorite web comics—Amazing Super Powers is featured in the screenshot above—in Google Reader or any other feed reader, but they wouldn’t download and organize your comics for you. Comical not only retrieves the comics for you automatically, but it catalogs them on your hard drive for future viewing and enjoyment—so you’re never stuck trying to tell your friend about that one comic you read last year that would be perfect for his presentation.

Comical comes with 41 popular web comics already listed in its database, you can add in any additional comics by creating a new entry and pasting in the RSS feed link from the comic’s site. Comical is freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool for comics or comic books? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

With little fanfare, Apple has doubled the 10MB 3G download cap for iPhones to 20MB.  Apple hasn’t offered any official reasoning regarding the change, but it’s likely that it is in preparation for the launch of the iPad.

The 10MB cap has been an annoyance for some time, since it prevents iPhone users from grabbing large files and applications when away from a Wi-Fi connection. Doubling the cap will help somewhat, but it’s still not enough to download a typical podcast episode. The move also hints at the potential size for future downloadable iPad media, like graphics-rich eBooks and the upcoming tablet version of the New York Times.

It makes me wonder how publishers are going to break up iPad content in general. When it comes to the NYT, 20MB isn’t enough if the paper plans to include video with the tablet version. Perhaps there may be an option to download the paper section by section, or a way to download the text and graphics content without bandwidth hogs like video and audio.

Apple needs to give publishers the tools to make these sorts of decisions. Kindle users are used to having unlimited access to content over that device’s built-in 3G connection without worrying about download limits. iPad users who spring for 3G access will surely want a similar trouble-free experience.

[Screenshot via Wired]