Mac and PC Guy Talk to Each Other in Ads

I remember Apple doing this on Yahoo! before, but this ad campaign today on Yahoo! Tech tickled me. Even without the sound on, you still get the gist of the ad.

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weezer + audience sing-a-long = win

What a sweet way for weezer to reward some long-time fans! They brought 250 people in along with their instruments to play along with them. Here’s the blog post about it on Yahoo! Music.  From the Pork and Beans video to the dancejam contest to this, weezer sure isn’t growing stale :D

Love that they did some old songs too.

More songs here: http://new.music.yahoo.com/nissanlivesets/

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Yahoo! Stencil Kit - Out Now!

Some great designers at Yahoo! have publicly released a Stencil Kit!  It was released internally a few weeks ago and has made it much easier for me to wireframe.  The designs are very clean and crisp.  Go ahead and check it out - it’s available for OmniGraffle, Visio, Illustrator, and Photoshop!

Here are some examples in OmniGraffle:

Posted in design, internet | 5 Comments »

Yahoo! Glue Beta Debuts in India

Yahoo! has launched Glue Beta in India, a new contextual module search result page.  It’s exciting to see it in action!  I did some searches (artists, actors, cities, political leaders, companies, etc.) and here are some modules that appeared.  Along with Yahoo! modules, there are third-party integrations such as Youtube, Wikipedia, and howstuffworks.  Pretty cool stuff - check it out at in.yahoo.com.

Also - first time using the gallery and I didn’t upload in the right order…here’s a whole page overview.

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Keeping Your Extensions (err, Addons) with Firefox 3

One of the biggest things keeping me from trying out Firefox 3 Beta was the lack of support by my addons…but I bit the bullet and did it anyways. I heard about this LifeHacker article today and this Nightly Tester Tools addon that lets you make (most of) your extensions compatible with Firefox 3. Basically it adds a “Make all compatible” button to your addons window:

Look at all those sad exclamation points! :( Just click on “Make all compatible” and say OK to this message:

Then restart Firefox and it’ll bring you back to the Addons window where you can see your updated extensions:

Oh snap! Look at all those happy extensions! So of course, do this at your own risk, it could mess up Firefox, etc. etc. I’ve found it to be well worth it though! A word to the wise though: you should probably wait to make your old Themes compatible…trust me, it’s not pretty.

So, what extensions do I use, you ask? Let me list a few of my favorites…

• Adblock Plus - if you haven’t heard of this before, ouch.
• BugMeNot - puts a BugMeNot option in the menu when you right-click on a username/password field which populates them with any available u/p combinations
• del.icio.us - puts a button in the browser menu so you can quickly add a page to del.icio.us
• Download Statusbar - shows progress of your downloads
• Firebug - must have for web design!
• Greasemonkey - customize sites/pages with js scripts
• Link Alert - shows small icon on link hover to show the type of link it is (new window, pdf, js, ppt, etc)
• MeasureIt - lets you draw a rectangle overlay in the browser and says how many pixels wide/high it is (handy for web design)
• Stylish - customize sites/pages with css scripts
• View Source Chart - boxed, color-coded version of a page’s source code

What are you favorite addons? :

Update: I forgot about the awesome PicLens because I just have it on my work computer.  But it’ll change how you view pictures online!

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Praise the Lord! Firefox 3’s Bookmark Drag-and-Drop Works!

One of my biggest Firefox pet peeves over the years has been how it handles dragging a boomark to the Bookmarks Toolbar on a Mac (apparently this doesn’t happen on Windows).  Here’s a screenshot of how it’s been up through FF2.0:

This tooltip that shows up when you drag the favicon down to the toolbar could be helpful I guess…the first time.  But the problem is that tooltip blocks all the space under it on the toolbar, so you can’t actually add the bookmark to any folders you have underneath it.  Unless you’re super quick and get to it before the tooltip comes up.  There are ways around it (put the bookmark somewhere else and move it afterwards), but it’s still really annoying.  I looked into how to fix it a while ago and found this work-around, but it removes ALL tooltips in your browser.

Anyways, it’s something I’ve begrudgingly learned to live with.  Until now!  The beta version of Firefox 3 (3.0b5) finally lets you add a bookmark to the middle of your Bookmarks Toolbar!  So instead of instructing people how to add a bookmark, it has a new tooltip about the current webpage’s identity information, but you can still add a bookmark under it:

After a second of hovering over the tooltip, the folder the favicon is over will expand so you can drop the favicon into the folder.  And after 6 or 7 seconds the tooltip disappears altogether.  AND sometimes when you drag it doesn’t even show the tooltip at all.  Thank goodness!

So what’s that identity information message?  A webpage’s favicon is more separate from the web address as a button (in FF2 it’s in the URL box)…and if you click on the favicon it will open a box telling more about the “identity information”:

If you’re on a secure website (starting with “https”), that’s where it will give the identity information:

The “More Information” takes you to the Security tab of the Page Info box.  I guess that’s a nice feature, but I doubt I’ll use it.

So color me excited about this in Firefox 3.  Yeah, it’s probably the least exciting new feature about FF3 but this has been too annoying for too long.  Any other FF3ers out there?  What’s your favorite part about it?

Posted in internet, software | 2 Comments »