Best Firefox Addon For More Productivity

The basic speed dial window all browsers have.

I usually don’t like to post stubs or preliminary articles like this, but I went all reviewer on Mozilla.org this morning and, of course, ended up writing a review of my favorite Firefox add-on of all time, Speed Dial. As that review got longer I felt myself wanting to show people how to really maximize productivity with this Firefox plug-in by configuring Speed Dial the way I have ended up tweaking it and setting it up. Don’t get me wrong, my why isn’t the only way, but when you see the power and customization of the Firefox Speed Dial plug-in in use in my setup, you can see why I think that Speed Dial is the most important Firefox add-on anyone can have. In fact, it’s the one real drawback to Google Chrome for me right now.

There is a Speed Dial extension for Google Chrome on the Google extensions website, but it is a pale imitation of this powerful Firefox add-on. It doesn’t have dial groups which is the main powerful feature of the Speed Dial plugin.

Anyway, it would be irresponsible of me to get into posting my Speed Dial Firefox extension review right now when I have deadlines barreling down on my like runaway trucks with no brakes on the side of a steep mountain. However, I don’t want anyone following the link I threw onto my review at mozilla.org to arrive and wonder where in the heck the review I promised is. Therefore, I’m going to post a couple of screen shots that I think will help any user with even a little bit of power browsing experience to understand the kind of productivity gains that are possible with this plugin.

If that is you, either install the plugin and start messing around with it. Just got to Tools -> Add-ons -> Options and start customizing away. (I recommend setting up either a Speed Dial icon on your toolbars, or doing like I did and setting the right click on a page to include the context menu option to Add to Speed Dial. You can make that work by right-clicking on the tab if you prefer, but I’m used to right-clicking on the page itself when I want to do something. One of the best things about this add-on is how much it can be customized to work exactly the way you need it to in order to help out with your own time management by making browsing faster and easier.)

The quick, quick, version of how to use Speed Dial to speed up your Internet browsing and boost your online power goes like this:

  1. Use Dial Groups – Every web browser offers some sort of dial based start up screen. Opera was first, but Google Chrome has one now too. IE has a similar concept although it is done via text links instead of actual configurable dials. What makes Speed Dial great is the ability to have MORE THAN ONE page of dials.
  2. Set Speed Dial to show up in new tabs instead of waiting to click something. Every time you press CTL-T you’ll get a list of your speed dials to use. Just make your current homepage the first dial on the first dial group to keep instant access to it.
  3. Customize the dial group tabs – You can change the colors to make tabs easier to find. Just don’t go crazy or you’ll hate it.
  4. Customize the dial groups – Need more than 9 websites for one dial group? No problem. One of the configurations is how many sites to show on a speed dial group. You can change both the default, and even better change on a per group basis. You can have 12 dials under Work and 6 dials under Facebook Games or vice versa, depending on your lifestyle :) – If you have a widescreen monitor take advantage of that width by setting your default dial group configuration to 3 rows and 4 columns.

Lastly, if you are a power user looking for maximum time savings, you’ll end up with a lot of dials that link to a lot of webpages. By default, the speed dial thumbnails refresh frequently which means you could end up with a slow running Firefox when running Speed Dial and switching through several dials because thumbnails are being generated for each site no matter how fast you click. (See the link for details.)

There is lots more power. Read the docs or poke around the settings to see what else you can do to improve online productivity with Speed Dial. Or, come back here in the next day or two when I get time to go on full tilt. Even easier, grab the Best Hubris RSS Feed to make sure you get the updated Firefox plugin reviews as soon as they come online.

Then you can check out my post about Firefox personas if you need to read more about the Mozilla web browser.

Categories: Software
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Best Way Find Good Utilities Programs and Software Online Fast

find-good-software-graphic Regular readers know that I am a professional writer. One of the things that I write on constantly for several different clients is computers and technology. Writing about technology means writing about the Internet, websites, and programs. Writing articles about computer technology that are not boring means writing about new and useful programs, whether online services, or locally installed utilities.

In addition to writing about new utilities, I also am constantly looking for new computer tools that will make me more efficient, more productive, and therefore, more successful, all while earning more money. That, my friends, is a tall order.

The key to finding new software is to keep up on technology by reading several of the numerous resources and websites out there that publish Internet news, computer tips, and review new software programs. This works great for finding new things to write about. However, it isn’t so great for finding a specific new utility or program to do something right now. You either have to remember what was already written about and go looking for it, or you have to wait for someone to hit your particular need on the head.

Like Inigo Mantoya, I hate waiting.

Search for Free Computer Programs and Utilities Effectively

Unfortunately, searching for new software isn’t as easy as just typing what you are looking for into Google. For starters, if you are looking for something that is new to you, or that you are not all that familiar with, you might be searching for all the wrong keywords.  This happened to me last year when I wanted a utility to make may Windows XP computer boot up in a certain order so that I didn’t get error messages about there being no network connection from programs that booted up before the wireless network was ready.

I searched in vain for boot order utilities and various other keywords. The problem was that there are plenty of good, well-known utilities, that REMOVE programs from your startup. I didn’t want to remove these programs, I wanted them to start at boot-time, I just wanted them to do so in an order that made sense.

Finally, a colleague pointed me to a program called Startup Delayer. Then, the light bulb came on. There are plenty of utilities out there that affect how your programs boot by delaying, or otherwise stalling certain ones. This has the effect of altering the boot-up order, but they don’t describe their features as “Change Windows XP boot order.”

Once I had the right keywords, I was set. As it turns out, you can substantially speed up Windows boot time by using a startup delayer. Just like if you double-clicked a dozen program icons at the same time, Windows would try and run them all at once making every program take longer to start up, when Windows boots, it tries running all those programs at the same time. By delaying the programs that don’t affect your routine or the user interface (like those that run in the background) just a few seconds, your computer comes online and is functional faster. You just don’t notice the other processes are still starting up in the background because you can already start typing, or whatever.

The other, more annoying, problem is that there are too many websites out there that do nothing but catalog EVERY program that comes along. That isn’t very helpful when you don’t want to try out 10 utilities, you just want to pick and choose from the best.

Even trying to search for reviews or descriptions is useless because tons of websites don’t do anything other than copy and paste in the software description right from the developer’s webpage. That is hardly objective. There are plenty of other lazy, sneaky, tricky, or downright unethical websites clogging up search results for computer software as well.

So, how to find useful new software fast and easy?

Use the site operator for your searches.

The site operator works by typing site: into your search query followed by the domain name of the website you want to search. This limits your search to only a single domain. Find a handful of trustworthy sites that feature the kind of software you like and you can use those to find your new utility. Then, click near the top left of the results screen where it says More Options. Click on Past Year. That will help limit your searches to the current crop of software and utilities and make sure that rave reviews you are reading are about the current version AND that they are comparing to the most recent versions of competing utilities.

There are plenty of good sites out there. Currently, I use (in no particular order): makeuseof.com, lifehacker.com, and downloadsquad.com. If I would rather browse, I head over to filehippo.com.

Today I need a new replacement clipboard utility. The one I have isn’t very easy to use and hogs a lot of memory, so it is never running when I need it. I want one that keeps more than one entry on the clipboard, though I don’t need it to keep 100, and it I want it to run in a very small amount of memory. Preferably, I want one that doesn’t require the super resource hogging .NET.

So, I’m off to search: clipboard utility site:makeuseof.com then clipboard enhanced site:downloadsquad.com, and so on.

Wish me luck.

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Technorati Tags: ,Effective Google Searches,,,,

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Categories: Personal
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Bigger Monitors More Productive?

I keep reading that people with bigger monitors are more productive than those without.  Recently, I went from a 15″ LCD to a 22″ Widescreen LCD.  I have to admit, when I first put it up on my desk it seemed HUGE.  I mean, ridiculous, as in, “What did I just waste my money on?”  But, I’ve learned how to work with it, and I can say that it definitely provides a huge productivity boost.

Take Full Advantage of Bigger Monitor

The only way a bigger monitor is going to increase your productivity is if you use it differently than you used your old smaller monitor.  It takes a few days to get used to all the real estate and what you can do with it, but once you do, there is no stopping you.

To help cut down on how long it takes you to start maximizing your usage, here are some tips.

Re-visit Your Application Settings

When you first started running your applications, you combed through the settings and moved the toolbars and windows around to suit your old monitor.  It’s time to do that again.  The file folder view that you squished to make more room for the main window can now be widened to actually be useful.  This will be especially useful for those development, imaging, and desktop publishing apps that come with so many features that they can’t all be displayed at once.  They probably still can’t, but you can display a lot more of them.

Double Your Windows

Ok, with a small monitor, you got used to working in a full screen window and then switching to another window when you needed to.  With a 22″ widescreen monitor, a full screen window almost never makes sense unless you are in one of those feature heavy apps above.  In fact, you’ll notice yourself moving your head around in a cartoon like way as you end a line on the right side of the screen and go all the way back to the left edge of the screen.  At 22″ a half-half isn’t usually optimal, but I find that setting  two windows at 2/3 (more like 5/8) of the width means that I can switch back and forth super fast.  Sometimes I don’t even need to switch because I can get enough of the picture from the rest of the window I can see behind my main window.  This is awesome for when I am referencing information in one window and typing or coding based on that info in another.  If I need to see it all a lot, then I go to 1/2 and 1/2 and it is awesome.

Categories: Personal
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