A week or so ago, a new bunch of icons were included in one of the nightly Minefield builds. These are more than likely going to be the same, or very similar to the buttons that will be part of Firefox 3.0. They have changed a little, and the first thing you will notice is that they are shiny. The back and forward buttons are closer together and take up less room on the Navigation Toolbar, the drop down arrow buttons have merged into one and feature both previous pages and pages you have went back from, and the refresh button and the cross on the stop button have lost a bit of weight.

The home button has been moved off the Navigation Toolbar and has moved down below to the Bookmarks Toolbar. It also features a shiny new icon. I think it is nice that they have relocated that button because personally, I never use that button. All my homepage tabs open up on startup and I don’t end up closing them, or my last session loads up. Having it down there shows that it is a secondary function and is less important that the forward, back, refresh and stop buttons.

These new spunky icons should be included in Firefox 3 Beta 3 which will be released sometime in the next fortnight.

SugarSync (formerly known as Hummingbird) is a service from Sharpcast that allows you to sync and access your files and media from anywhere” on different computers, on the web, even on your mobile phone. SugarSync securely backs up all your computers online and synchronizes them automatically so you always have access to your files. Best of all, SugarSync takes care of everything automatically in the background, so you never have to make backups or email files to yourself. Say goodbye to CD burning and emailing files to yourself; say hello to SugarSync.

I have been using SugarSync for a few weeks now. You install a program to your computer and it will automatically backup everything in your user folder, or folders of your choosing. I found it useful to backup a few important folders, but I did find the software to be a little restrictive. First off, you are limited to 1GB (but you get 10GB more for the beta) which is hardly enough space to backup much. You also cannot pick which files not to backup, which means it is all or nothing.

I did have a problem with accidentally deleting a folder that was backing up. What I thought it would do is delete the folder from the backup, but what it really did was delete the folder from my computer. Then after I managed to restore the files, it went and deleted them again. I don’t think it is right to let a piece of backup software do that. That is probably the killing point in this software for me.

If you want to try out this software, the first 7 people to comment below will get an invitation to this service.

As you all know, I have been using Minefield, also known as Firefox 3.0 Alpha/Beta. This has become my primary browser and I have had to live with the bugs and the lack of extensions. I know there is a way, and an extension, tomake incompatable extensions compatible and I have used them. The only problem is, with all the under the hood changes that are happening, some of the extensions don’t work properly, others that work but cause problems and even some which don’t work fullstop.

I eventually came to the point where I have disabled every extension, that is except one that I really need for productivity reasons. That extension is FaviconizeTab. I open a lot of tabs up. At start up, I have 20 tabs, which then expands as I open and close other tabs but I always have those 20 main tabs open. Without FaviconizeTab, my tab bar would be completely full and I would have to scroll to switch from tab to tab. With this extension, it gives me a lot more room on my tab bar. To be honest, the favicon is enough for me to identify most of my tabs anyway. I do not need the full name because I already know it. Also for the sites and pages with no favicon, I get use to their position on the tab bar that I can remember its location.

All the other extensions I use, well use to use, are just handy things to make things easier and give me extra functionality. They are more luxuries than necessities. Like FoxyTunes. I love that extension. It allows me to control and see what iTunes is doing and give me a lot of functionality in the browser so I don’t have to leave it. My remote is right there in my browser. Greasemonkey is another nice extension that uses scripts it improve or add functionality to specific webpages. Its nice to have because it makes things easier. IE Tab is another extension that allows me to use sites designed specifically for IE inside of Firefox so I don’t have to have two separate browsers open. Again, its nice to have but having them both open can be lived with.And the extension I miss the most, Tab Mix Plus. This adds heaps of extra functionality to tabs in Firefox. It does a lot for me and really helps me managing all the tabs I have open at a time.

Another this I have gone without is Ad Block Plus. This is an extension a lot of people would use. Why? Because they don’t like advertisements. I don’t really like they either but since I have had to live without an ad blocker, the ads don’t really bug me anymore. The good sites have them positioned in a non intrusive place anywhay where it doesn’t affect the user ability to browse the website efficiently. I’m starting to think that I can live on the internet with ads. Some of the ads even attract my attention because they are on things that are interesting. I click ads on some sites, because they interest me and also because I know that it is helping out the site a little bit. If I love the site, I should support it by checking out their sponsors and this isn’t possible if my browser is set to block them out. I don’t think that I will totally remove ad blocking software but I will have one that blocks only certain sites, ones with ads that are annoying andruin the experience on the site.

All of these extensions aren’t really necessary. You don’t have to have them. You can live without them, as I have seen with using test versions of Firefox where the extensions aren’t compatible. When you are limited to what you can have, the challenge can really show you what you can do without. For me, it is going to cut down the number of extensions I use when Firefox 3.0 is officially released. I remember when I was using Firefox 1.5 and I had 20 plus extensions. I cannot believe I had so many. How could I live with that. Its like a house full of clutter. I don’t know how my computer survived, it must have used a hell of a lot of memory. In Firefox 2.0, that dropped down to around 10 extensions and I can see it drop even further in 3.0. Maybe one day, I won’t have any extensions because everything is either built into Firefox or comes bundled with it. That is going to be an interesting time indeed.

I have been using computers for a a few years now. I generally have been fine with how the keyboard except for the frequent typing errors I make. But there is one thing about the keyboard that really irritates me, that is the Caps Lock key. I’m sure everyone has accidentally hit that key many times which can get irritating if done frequently. But quickly on a more positive note about the key before I start my rant, I do like how it makes an LED light up when it is on. Sounds simple and stupid but in my opinion, that is the only good thing it does, no matter how useless it is.

Why is the button right under the tab key and just above the shift key. Now I speak for myself here but those two keys are ones I use pretty frequently. I always end up accidentally hitting that key and start typing later on and realize that I have it on so my text is in caps. By the time I realize what I have done, I then have to erase the word and type it again which is annoying. Sometimes it even happens randomly in the middle of a word when my typing is sloppy and I miss the ‘a’ key. Half the word is in caps which then I can’t be bothered correcting it so I just let it slide (that is when chatting.)

I don’t see why they couldn’t have it with the keys I don’t use, like the home and insert and end keys. I never use them but I’m sure there are uses for them and that some people do use them. The good thing is with those keys, if I was to accidentally hit them, they probably wouldn’t do too much anyway, only scroll the page up or down or something else insignificant. Why don’t they put all the lock keys together in a out of the way part of the keyboard. The caps lock can spend its time right beside his cousins, the scroll and number lock.

Honestly, how often is it that you actually use that key? Why would you want to type a hole sentence or paragraph in caps? I’m sure there are instances but I really do think it needs to be moved out of the way. When I type out a word, or in a less likely case, a whole sentence, in caps, I hold down the shift key. Yes, it is a little discomforting to hold hown the shift key for that long but how often are you going to do it for it to be a concern, probably never.

Yes, I am aware there are ways to disable or change that button to do another function but why should I have to do something about it? I think it should be there responsibility to stop me, and other people, from accidentally hitting that key making me end up typing in full caps. Do you know what would be even better, removing that button completely from existence. Everyone has come across some twit on the internet that types in full caps. What an attention whore! Well removing that button would stop a lot of that, or at least slow it down. If I was one of those guys doing it, I wouldn’t bother holding the shift key to type out a paragraph in caps for attention. I think they should move, or kill that key. Do computer users, and the internet a favor!

Just a few days ago, a new Mozilla project came to my attention, Prism. Prism is an application that lets you take web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. You may wonder what is the point of running websites, or web applications if you rather, out of the web browser.  When using it, I mainly concentrated on the Google Suite of web applications, iGoogle, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook and Google reader. These ran exactly the same as they normally would in a browser environment.

My first impressions of this were that it is simple to set up and works just as I would have expected it. I eventually questioned the need for having this. I eventually worked out why this is something for me. When using the browser, I always have at least ten to fifteen tabs open at a time, right from when I start the browser, right to the moment I close the browser. My default tabs are always there displaying websites I commonly use. If I am connected to the internet, this application does seem somewhat useless but if you needed to say, view your email and/or calendar without opening a browser and loading a dozen or so tabs, it is much more efficient to just open up the desktop app.

Another thing that this will be aiming for is offline web applications. Using the same conditions as before, instead of opening your browser and having all you tabs come up with the “page not displayed” error or having to even have all your tabs open in your browser, it is easier to access offline capable apps using Prism. I feel that the two main reasons they are developing something like that it to combine those two aspects, having the web application in its own environment out of the browser and to enrich the offline aspect of future web applications.

I can see future potential in this application and can see it being greatly linked with Google’s web applications as well as their Gear’s Offline application. All three of these things linked can make functionality of web applications greatly improve and be more accessible and useful when disconnected from the internet. What I personally would like to see is Google embrace this application to create a Google Web Suite application using Prism with tabs with access, online and offline, to all its web applications in its own environment out of the clutter of the browser and other websites. I can’t wait to see Prism blossom into something great and very useful.

Last night I clocked 10,000,000 keys in the Whatpulse Project. For those who don’t know what Whatpulse is, it is a program that collect statistics about your computer usage, more specifically, the amount of keys you type on your keyboard, the amount of clicks you do on your mouse and also the distance your cursor has moved.

I have been part of Whatpulse for over 35 months. I started on the 30th of December, 2004 and in that time have accumulated ten million keys and just under four hundred thousand clicks. You can see my full Whatpulse stats on my Project Page located at http://whatpulse.org/stats/users/129910.

About two hours ago, Apple’s Presentation would have ended. I have just woken up and don’t know where to go. There is going to be Apple information from the presentation everywhere on the internet. But where sold I go first to get all the information and pictures in a single, easy location so I don’t have to muck around sifting through information to get everything I want to know.

Digg will definitely have this in the top 10 dugg stories. Digg is one of the many bases online for Apple Fanboys and any big technology news is on there. Apple + New Product + Hype = Top Story! My guess would be that the story either links to Engadget, Gizmodo or Mac Rumors or all. If this is the case why not go to the original source first because I’m sure the information is spread across multiple posts.

I could go possibly go to Twitter, Pownce or Tumblr. Someone on there would have definitely linked to a website with a lot of information on it. My guess would be that it would link to the same article(s) as seen on Digg. The only problem is that there will be quite a few people with different links and I wouldn’t want to go to all the sites to find the exact same information on it so this method of getting all the information quickly might not be the best solution.

I could try the my RSS feeds because I know for a fact that there will be at least 5 different sources with information on the new iPods. The only problem is that this information will be mixed with other stuff so I would have to siff through my feeds. Also if I wanted to see any extra content, for example photo galleries, I would end up going to the site anyway to see these so why not just go to one at the start.

I guess I will just go straight to a website and have a look at the news. Now I have the problem of deciding which one would have the best content, whether its Gizmodo or maybe Mac Rumors of possibly Engadget, now thats a big decision. Well off I go. *crosses fingers for new iPods* :p