Longtime readers of Virtual Fools know that I have terrible luck with computers. Whether it be broken hard drives, corrupted hardware, software flubs, or just fate, me and computers have never really gotten along. Too bad, too, since I’m a huge fan of theirs and am studying their technology at school. But sometimes I just don’t treat them too well. Take for example the following:
Even through the bad camera phone photography, you can see that I did a number on my ol’ Dell over winter break. I dropped it on a tile floor and destroyed both the screen and the hard drive. Pretty smart! At least most of the stuff on the HD wasn’t too valuable (still had a desktop for that). So I bit the bullet and waited until Macword ‘08 to see the new Apple announcements. The Air, while cool, just wasn’t going to cut it for my needs. So I made the “Switch” and bought a MacBook Pro. I’m very happy with it and am pleased with how much I’ve been able to customize it. Customization is extremely important to me. That’s why I love Firefox so much. In fact, the first thing I did on my MBP was download Firefox and copy all of my extensions and preferences from my desktop’s Firefox with FEBE. I use 23 extensions to make my life easier. I saw the video posted over at Unwired (a show I enjoy) about Wil Harris’s top five favorite Firefox extensions, so I decided to make my own list of the five that I really can’t function without.
Tab Mix Plus
A powerful tool for customizing tab behavios, Tab Mix Plus integrates directly into the preferences pane in Firefox. I’m so used to my customized functionality that I actually get confused when using other computers. Here’s what I use it to do:
1) Customize tab appearance so that highlight tab fonts are bold and black, unread are bold and grey, and viewed tab text is grey.
2) Open links that open in a new window into a new tab instead (to keep my number of windows down)
3) open new tabs for items in my bookmarks, address bar, search bar, and history
4) When I close a tab it focuses on the tab to the left of it
5) Double-clicking a tab to close it
6) Prevent blank tabs when downloading files
Swift Tabs
Swift tabs allows you to assign hotkeys for navigating your tab list. So now, when I hold either CTRL/Apple and press left and right it will cycle either forward or backward through my tabs. It’s great when I have six pages open and want to blast through them.
UI Tweaker
Again with the Firefox interface customization. UITweaker does a number of things for me.
1) Combine the stop and reload buttons, remove the ‘go’ button, remove the arrow from the address bar, and only show the icons of my bookmark toolbar to save space. On my MBP I only have one toolbar open which has all of these things in one line.
2) Add a input box for a keyword when bookmarking a site. Keywords allows you to type a shortened word into the address bar instead of a URL. This is a default Firefox feature, but you normally have to bookmark a page and then right click the bookmark to add that keyword–this saves you a step. So, in the address bar, typing “m” takes me to Gmail, “d” to Digg, “vfd” to the Virtual Fools blog dashboard, “cell” to my AT&T cellular account, and “bank” to my Wachovia login page. I must have 20 or so keywords to save me from going through my bookmarks.
3) Turn off autocomplete in the search bar, address bar, and HTML form fields. I don’t like when those things show up, especially when other people are using my computer.
PDF Download
As a student, I see a lot of PDF files in my life. PDF Download does the simple task of letting you choose if you want to download the PDF you clicked on, view it in the browser, or view it in HTML. Combined with Foxit Reader, PDF viewing and printing is much less a pain in the ass.
Menu Editor
Menu Editor does exactly what it says. It allows you to change what is shown in your application menus, right click menu, and tab menus. Never use that “Send Image…” function? Nope! Then why do you need it cluttering your context menu? I got rid of my ‘edit’ and ‘history’ menus because I never use them. Be warned that it’s a little wonky with a Mac, which treats its main categories a little differently. But I highly recommend you download it and organize your options in ways that make sense to you!
I am also really into interface configuration, even changing my PCs shell from explorer just to have more flexibility.
Anyways, maybe you would like an extension like Compact Menu or Tiny Menu (there are a few of those). What they do is allow you to eliminate the File, Edit, History, etc menus, and add an extra button to your toolbar containing those items.
Keep up the nice job on the blog.
I actually tried Compact Menu and it’s a good recommendation if you’re even more pressed for space. I have a large monitor for my desktop PC, so space isn’t as much an issue to me as clutter (I have my bookmark toolbar icon links in the same toolbar as file/edit/etc and then a toolbar for navigation/address bar and search). Since my laptop is a Mac, the program menus are pulled out of the window anyway. But you’re right to recommend it to someone with a Windows laptop who values their space.
About time you made the switch to a Mac! :D