WindowBlinds

I remember years ago, when I was using Windows 95, I tried out a little program called WindowBlinds that claimed to make Windows skinnable. It was rickety and unstable, crashed constantly, and had compatibility problems galore. So it was with some trepidation that I decided to give it another shot, and I downloaded and installed the trial version.

I loved it so much, I bought it.

It's turned into an amazing product. I've been using it for several weeks now without so much as a single glitch. Its resource footprint is small, because it inserts itself into Windows' own GUI libraries, so there's no external process, and much of the graphics are hardware-accelerated, which means in some cases, it's actually faster than Windows' standard skinning engine. When Windows first boots, there is no point before which WB has yet to be loaded, and the standard Windows look shows through: WB is part of Windows, and it's loaded with the rest of Windows GUI-drawing routines, at boot up. It's compatibility is amazing: it skins the programs it can, and ignores the programs it can't (mostly programs that do their own skinning, such as iTunes). It doesn't even cause an performance hit when playing high-end games.

And best of all, it looks great. There are many wonderful skins out there, and it has all kinds of great features, such as transparency, and animations where you wouldn't expect them (some skins will indicate the default button in a dialog box by fading the colour of the button in and out slowly and smoothly; my current skin has a highlighting effect on progress bars, where a gleam of brighter colour runs down the length of the bar every so often).

Keep in mind, I use Windows XP. The current version of WindowBlinds does not work for Win9x, so users of that version of Windows will be missing many of the features contained in the latest version of WB. However, especially for Win2K and XP users, I highly, highly recommend it. It's turned into a wonderful product. It's definitely the best $20 I've spent recently.

Check it out here: http://www.windowblinds.net.

Edit: There are many sites around where you can download skins for WB, but one of the best I've found is WinCustomize.

Firefly Season 2

I dunno how much of a chance it has, but www.FireflySeason2.com has a survey to fill out. They want to gauge interest in a pay-per-view model for a second season of Firefly. Fox probably won't release the rights to the show, but one can always hope! :)

If you're at all interested in seeing this excellent show continued in some form, head over there and take the survey.

Firefox Extensions

Yesterday, I went on a hunt for some good FireFox extensions. Here's what I came up with:

• Aardvark - Allows you to select individual elements in a webpage, and delete or reformat them. Extremely useful for when you want to print a webpage, but don't want ads or navigation bars taking up space on the page.
• Adblock Plus - Allows you to block ads on webpages. Blocks anything whose source matches the list of wildcarded expressions or regular expressions. I actually don't know much about regular expressions, I really should learn that sometime... Note: Combine with Adblock Filterset.G Updater for an always up-to-date list of filters.
• BugMeNot - A simple plugin that adds an entry to the right-click context menu when you click on a log in form. Pulls a username/password pair from www.bugmenot.com. For those annoying websites that require free registration to enter.
• Fasterfox - A plugin that purports to speed up your webbrowsing via pre-caching links and other various means. I have no idea if it actually works or not, I just like the timer it puts in the status bar, telling me how long each page load took.
• FireFTP - An FTP client that operates within a tab in FireFox. Very handy.
• Gmail Notifier - Duh. The plugin everyone should have. Allows you to check your GMail account status right from FireFox's status bar. Note: If you don't have a GMail account yet, what's wrong with you? Seriously, if anyone needs a GMail invite, just say so in a comment. I have 100 invites kicking around. Don't forget to leave an e-mail address to which I can send the invite.
  
• Google Safe Browsing - Blocks FF from loading known or suspected phishing scam sites. For those who don't know, phishing is when a website looks like and claims to be an official site (e.g. a banking site, etc.), in the hopes that you will provide them with personal information (passwords, credit card numbers...) Very nasty, and pretty easy to get caught if you don't know what to watch out for. This plugin obviously can't be foolproof, but any protection is better than none.
• IE Tab - Holy cow. This plugin is amazing. It literally runs Internet Explorer from within a FireFox tab! It's not perfect, and has a few limitations, but the ability to finally be able to run Windows Update from within FireFox is worth a little hassle. :D
• Sort Extensions and Themes - A deceptively simple, yet very useful little plugin. Adds a "Sort" link to the bottom of the Themes and Extensions windows. All it does, is sort the lists alphabetically. Makes it much easier to find things, when you have many plugins installed.
• Stealther - Temporarily disables any kind of hard drive caching: History, web cache, everything. For those times when you don't want to leave any trace whatsoever on your computer. >_>
• Tab Mix Plus - Tons, and I mean tons, of options for improving the tab interface. Singularily the best plugin I have installed. Among other things, it provides session saving, so that if FF crashes, or if you just want to quit or reboot your computer without losing everything, you can restart FF to exactly where you left it: windows, tabs, even how far down you were scrolled in each individual webpage. The only thing it doesn't save is display options such as View->Text Size. Other than that, works beautifully.

Well, there you have it. I'm sure there are tons of other useful extensions out there. If you know of some, please, write a comment. I'd love to hear about them.

And if you aren't using Firefox, shame on you. :)



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