Are there any other site’s you’d like to see load in Firefox’s sidebar?

Todo is a $10 application that specializes in creating task lists on your iPod Touch or iPhone.  It’s pretty basic in use, but does allow for multiple task lists, priorities, due dates, notes and more.  You can even customize the line that crosses out a completed item.

All of that is good, but one feature took it to the next level; synchronization.  Todo will synchronize your tasks with Remember the Milk (pro account) or Toodledo (free).  This is the money feature for me.  I wanted to be able to put in tasks on a computer yet sync them to my iPod, and the other way around too.  I didn’t want my data stuck online or just on my iPod.

With Todo for $10, and a free Toodleo account, I have exactly what I’ve been looking for!

As a plus, Toodleo comes with many additional features including Twitter integration, Firefox extension, Adobe Air application, Netvibes & iGoogle widgets, Google & iCal subscriptions and so much more.

Screenshots!

I was excited to see iTunes 7.7 this morning and then TUAW tipped us off as to how to get into the App Store.

Excited to check it out, I found a few free applications and downloaded them. Nothing to exciting but the Remote application does let me control iTunes or Apple TV (if I had one) from my iPod.

I did see some nice checklist applications too, which I do want, but I’m waiting for one from Remember the Milk or some other system that can sync online.

It seems a bit empty right now, but exciting none the less!

Now, if I could only get the iPod Touch 2.0 software update so I can use the applications.

Here are a few reasons why I like Plurk better than Twitter:

1. Inline Replies - Keeping conversations together.  This really makes it feel like a community of users and not just a string posts.  In Twitter, when someone replied to a Tweet I put up yesterday, it was hard to follow the conversation.  Plurk however, keeps everything together.
2. Cliques - For sending messages to specific groups of contacts.  I can put all my Minnesota friends or work buddies in one group and send private messages just to them.
3. Built in search. - I can instantly search for other Plurk users or topics from the timeline.  With Twitter, I have to use a separate service.
4. Stars & Karma - I think these are two items that make you want to interact with the Plurk community.  The more posts you make, and the more you interact with Plurk, the more karma, and other goodies, you get.  Post way to often, not often at all, or spam people and your karma goes down.  You can also refer people to get stars on your profile.  Not killer features, but smart ones that keeps users coming back and engaged.
5. Edit Plurks - When you create a Plurk post, publish it and then realize something is wrong, you can edit or delete it.  Yea!!!
6. Friend - Fan Notifications in Plurk - Get notified of new friends or fans within the application.  You can get email alerts too, but it’s nice to see them integrated.
7. Auto Update - The Plurk timeline automatically updates with new posts or replies.  No having to refresh the website.

These are just a few reasons why I like Plurk over Twitter.  There are some downsides too though as with any application.

Since Plurk is newer, it doesn’t yet have an official API and cool desktop applications.  Plurk will get there, but they are the new kid on the block who is focusing on creating a stable application so they don’t follow in Twitter’s recent footsteps with a large amount of downtime.

I do continue to read articles on how Plurk is not as good as Twitter.  But what bugs me is I don’t think those comparing the two are really comparing apples to apples.

When comparing Plurk and Twitter, you must not include Twhirl or Twitteriffic or one one of the many other Twitter apps that were not built by Twitter.  They are third party tools that Twitter fans built.  When Plurk comes out with an official API, they too will be able to have cool third party tools built.

Then there is the timeline.  Yes, the timeline takes time, for some, use to, but it really is easy and fun.  When something new comes along, you really should learn to use it before judging it.  And for those that don’t like it, they can always switch to the mobile version of Plurk.

Plurk really is a great social community tool.  Unlike some of the others out there, it’s taking micro-blogging to the next level and fixing some of the issues that plague other offerings.

Are you on Plurk?  What do you think?

Additional Plurk Resources:

• Plurk - My profile on Plurk.
• Plurkerati - Tracking Plurkers and a nice Plurk search.
• Plurkable - Plurk news & tips.
• Plurktionary - All things Plurk.
• Plurkular - Plurk news, apps, plurkers and more.

Check it out: http://twistermc.com/s

What’s cool about this is you can use it in a few different ways.

1 - Use it without Adobe Air.

2 - Load it in Firefox’s sidebar.  Just visit the URL above, bookmark the page and be sure to check the ‘Load in Sidebar’ box.  Now whenever you click on the bookmark, it’ll pop-open.

If you don’t see the ‘Load in Sidebar’ box, go to Bookmarks - Organize Bookmarks and edit the bookmark.  In Firefox 3 you’ll need to hit the ‘More’ button, Firefox 2 I think it’s the ‘Properties’.

I could turn it into a full blown extension, but I’ll wait and see if people want that.

3 - Load on mobile devices.  It seems to work great on my iPod Touch.  Let me know if it works on your mobile device.

Also, SocialAddict 1.1 is available for Adobe Air users.  Basically it replaces the BrightKite iPhone URL with the generic mobile URL as it didn’t work as nice as it should have.

Hope you enjoy it.

What SocialAddict does is loads the mobile or iPhone version of each site for easy access.  Again, I didn’t tie into any APIs or do massive re-construction.  These are all previously available applications that have been tied together to make it quick and easy to go from one to the next.

Within SocialAddict you’ll find:

• BrightKite
• Facebook
• FriendFeed To Go
• Hellotxt
• Jaiku
• MySpace
• Ping.fm
• Plurk
• Pownce
• SocialThing
• and Twitter

Download SocialAddict 1.1

Requirements: Adobe Air & a social media account or five. All Free.

Have suggestions for other sites?  Let me know the iPhone/mobile version of the site and I’ll add it in.

Ok, I’ll be the first to admit, this is not as good as something like Twhirl. However, it is my first attempt at anything in Adobe Air so I’m pretty happy.

I didn’t use the Plurk API and do a lot of crazy coding.  All I did was take the mobile version of Plurk and embed it into an Adobe Air application.  And voila; Plurkit!

I thought some might find this a bit enjoyable and I do have more ideas for it.  Actually, some crazy ones are going though my head this moment!

Give it a spin and see how it goes.

Download Plurkit 0.5

Requirements: Adobe Air & a Plurk account. Both Free.

Lets set a record today for the most times a piece of software was downloaded in 24 hours!

Needless to say, you also get Firefox 3 and all the good features that come with it!  Click on the badge above an be a part of history.

GA? now checks the entire HTML page to see if it contains Google Analytics code.  Prior to 1.0, it only checked for analytics code within the body of a page.

GA? is a Firefox extension that automatically detects if Google Analytics is installed on a web page and displays the result in your status bar.  For more details see the GA? - Is Google Analytics Installed page.

GA? is also ready for Firefox 3.

Tuesday June 17th is the release date for Firefox 3! We (Firefox fans) are hoping to set a Guinness world record for the most times a piece of software is downloaded in the first 24 hours! If you could download Firefox 3 on Tuesday, that’d be a great help!

So what’s new in Firefox 3? Lots of stuff. Here are a few high points.

• A browser interface that look and acts more like your opperating system. Including native Mac checkboxes, buttons and scrollbars!
• Smart bookmarks, aka Places. The browser will automatically remember your ‘most visited’ and ‘recently visited’ sites via a quick bookmark in your bookmarks bar.
• Increased security. If you visit a site that may harm your computer, a warning message become very obvious!
• Increased JavaScript performance. Sites like Gmail, Zoho and many other Ajax heavy sites should perform better and faster.
• Smarter ‘Remember Password’ alert boxes. They’ll no longer take up precious surfing time.
• Smarter address bar so you can better see your auto complete matches and bookmark sites without leaving the address bar.
• Much better memory footprint on your computer! Leaving even more memory for other applications.

So what do you think? Can you download Firefox 3 on Tuesday June 17th??

Ever want to search Plurk.com for topics or friends?  Well there isn’t a formal search yet, however you can search with Plurk Lurker, a customized Google search just for Plurk.com.

Plurk Lurker makes it quick and simple to find information on Plurk.  It is limited to what Google can see, but it’s better than nothing.  You can find posts or users as long as their information is public.

Granted, it’s pretty basic but it’s better than none; which is what I’ve found otherwise.  I’m sure as soon as an API opens up, someone will create a better Plurk search.

Give Plurk Lurker a whirl.

Idea! Plurk timelines are not indexable, however the XML feeds are and they contain all the individual links to your Plurk post pages. So, if you drop your Plurk feed into this page, we may be able to get more of your posts indexed faster in Google and into the Plurk Lurker.

I recently discovered Plurk.  A micro-blogging site much like Twitter, only with more features, a cool layout and that headless thing!

I’m a fan of the interactive and innovative timeline of posts.  However some people feel the timeline is a bit busy and go for the simplified mobile version.  So I decided to take a bit of code and put the mobile version in Firefox’s sidebar for easy access.

The Plurk Mobile Sidebar comes complete with Firefox 2 & 3 support, a headless thing button for your toolbar and a keyboard shortcut.  The actual features of the Plurk sidebar application are under Plurks control.

Download the Plurk Mobile Sidebar extension.

To install: Download the extension to your desktop. Then go to Tools -> Add-ons and drag plurk1.0.xpi to your add-ons window. It’ll install and you’ll have to restart Firefox.

To use: Go to View -> Sidebar -> Plurk Mobile Sidebar, or hit control+alt+p, or customize your menu bar to add the Plurk button.

Enjoy

Also available are the Socialthing and Facebook sidebars.

With the Firefox 3 release upon us, a lot of people will be wondering about the status of my themes.

So what is the status?

Currently, I have started work on iPox.  It’s looking pretty nice and it has advanced a bit from the current Firefox 2 version.  However, it’s a complete re-write.  I started from scratch and have a lot of editing to do.

To help me prioritize the order of other theme updates, please vote for which theme you’d like to see updated sooner rather than later. I do have a vague idea for the order that I’m going to work on them, but the votes could sway my decision.

Notes: iPox is not in the poll as it’s going to be completed first.  You may also vote for up to two.

I don’t have a release date on iPox yet and the other themes are a ways off.  Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found an easy way to transfer a theme from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3.

I do plan on continuing to theme and getting everyone converted over.  It’s just a matter of time.

1. Always online and availabe to me.
2. Doesn’t take up space on my webserver.
3. The labeling system is fantastic.  I didn’t really know this until I really started using it.
4. Integrated nicely with Mail.app or other email applications like Thunderbird and Outlook.
5. I can send and receive email from multiple accounts via one Gmail account.
6. iPhone ready.
7. Email is up even if website is down.
8. Google has the best spam protection I’ve seen.

So how did I move years worth of email to Gmail?  

1 - The first thing I did was organize my inbox.  This step is optional, but it helped me to have things in order.

2 - You either need to setup a Gmail account or Google Apps for your domain.  I did the Google Apps part as I didn’t want an additional Gmail account and it was free.

If you are doing Google Apps for your domain, make sure to move all your email into local folders in your inbox.  This includes your inbox, drafts and sent if you want to keep them.  Get them off the server so you don’t loose them when the MX records are changed.  Then go ahead and follow Google’s instructions on getting things setup and work with your host to get the email records updated.  Once that’s in place, continue.

3 - Go into your Gmail account and enable the IMAP settings.  
Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Enable IMAP

4 - Follow Google’s configuration instructions on getting your account setup in your email client.

5 - Once that’s done, you should now have two separate email accounts in your email application.  One for your old email and one for Gmail. 

6 - Setup Gmail labels to match your folder structure that corresponds with your email.

7 - Copy all your email from your old account to your new Gmail account.  Since it’s setup via IMAP, all the email will be copied to Gmail and available online.  This step may take some time if you have a lot of email.  It isn’t hard, it’s just time consuming to upload all those emails.

Really that’s all there is to it.  It’s quite easy.  It took me some time to complete, but that was because of the large amount of email I had.  

This will work on Mac or Windows or Linux; Thunderbird, Mail.app or Outlook.  The only real requirements are a Gmail account and an email application capable of IMAP.

Since moving my email over to Gmail, I’ve moved over to using Gmail as my email application via Mailplane. Google’s labeling system is just so smart!

Unfortunately the theme is Windows only. However, with a bit of investigating, I was able to extract the jar file and install it on my Mac.

The theme is pretty good. WALL•E is a bit hard to see behind the address bar and I wish the bar was semi-transparent so that he was more visible. It’s also a bit hefty at over 3MB. Other than that, it looks pretty slick and works well. Nothing to extraordinary, but fun none the less. As it makes its way to 1.0, the theme has a lot of potential to grow into something spectacular.

To get WALL•E in Firefox 2, head over to the WALL•E Addon page, log into your Addon’s account and then download. Or you can click here to link directly to the theme file. If you’re on a Mac, you’ll want to choose the direct option.

Thanks Disney for embracing Firefox themes and I hope to see more!

Ohh and If you haven’t seen the WALL•E trailers, you should treat yourself.

It’s really simple to do too.  Here’s how.

1 - Grab a cool iPhone background.  Here is the blue iPhone background I’m using.

2 - Open Adium and go to the preferences and click on the messages area.

3 - See that area for a custom background?  Check the box and drag and drop your iPhone background in there.

Wa la.  You’re done!

There are a few things to keep in mind.  

First, the width of iPhone backgrounds are a bit limiting.  Your window will need to be a fixed width or your background will need to wrap nicely.  The window is not to skinny though.  Also, most iPhone backgrounds don’t repeat well vertically.  Some do though, so pick a nice one.

That’s it.  Enjoy!

So how’d I do it?  Here are my keys to success.

1. Create folders for topics that best match your email style.  Like Friends, Family, Shopping, Wife.  Think of who you get the most email from or what topics you get a lot of email on.  Then create folders to file all those emails into.
2. Search and delete.  Not all messages need to be saved.  iTunes Tuesday emails for the past six months, Amazon Newsletters, Target ads and so many more emails are just un-necessary.  Find them, and delete them.  Search by sender or by subject to find them all at once.
3. Search and file.  I searched for all the email from my Mom and filed that in my Mom folder.  All my email from my wife when into her folder.  Searched all messages for iTunes receipts and they went into my Shopping folder.  The key here is to search search for email from people, for emails with the same type of subject to get a lot of emails at once.  Filing your email away one at a time will take forever.  By selecting 25 or even 100 at once, you’ll be able to knock out a of of email quickly.  
4. Mark as read.  As you’re filing things away.  Start marking emails as read.  I had a lot of email from last year, or older, that was still marked unread.  Sorry, I’m no longer going to email you back if it was that long ago.
5. Once you start getting down fewer emails, you may find your folders need to become more generic.  I have one folder named Friends for those that send me an email every so often.  I don’t have enough to make an entire folder, so I just drop them all into Friends.
6. If you’re like me and have email from 2004, then create archive folders.  2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.  If you can’t figure out which folder to stick an email in, or you just want to make a lot of progress fast, then go ahead and just archive it by year.  At least it gets out of your inbox.

Eventually  you should have a clean inbox.  It took me an hour or so to get my inbox under control, but it’s much nicer now to see less than 20 messages in my inbox.  Even that number is starting to sound high.

Keep it under control!  This is just as important as cleaning out your inbox.  With new email, don’t file it later or leave it just sitting around, take the time to keep your inbox organized.  I find this extremely easy to do with a combination of labels and filters in Gmail.  The system is setup beautifully.  Heck, I don’t even go back to my desktop application any more.

I think the biggest thing I get out of a clean inbox is the sense of accomplishment.  There are no longer hundreds or thousands of emails sitting there.  There are only a few and they seem really easy to manage.

Take some time and get cleaning.  You’ll be happy you did.

Do you have other tips you’d like to share on how you organized your inbox?  Share in the comments below.

Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

Dromaeo JavaScript Testing

2173.00ms - Firefox 3b5
3499.60ms - Safari 1.3
8193.20 - Camino 1.5.5
10798.20 - SeaMonkey 1.1.8
10859.20 - Flock 1.1
12161.40ms - Firefox 2

Did you run your own tests?  What did you find?

There are so may things to talk about that I just don’t have time right now to go through them all. From the revamped admin menu to the simplified post screen it’s just so much cleaner. The ability to add media such as video and audio is also a great addition. I just love this!

All my plulgins seem to be working fine, however there are some other plugins with issues. The plugin compatibility list can be seen over at wordpress.org.

So much new to play with, to bad I don’t have the time to sit an play all day.  My one tip though, after upgrading, clear your browsers cache.  That’ll help avoid any odd issues like the ‘add link’ window not opening.

Introducing the iPhone Socialthing! sidebar for Firefox. It’s simply an extension that loads the iPhone version of Socialthing! in Firefox’s sidebar. All features are controlled by Socialthing!, I’m just bringing it into Firefox.

Download the iPhone Socialthing! Sidebar extension. (right click, save links as)

How it works.
1. Download the extension to your desktop. Then go to Tools -> Add-ons and drag ist.xpi to your add-ons window. It’ll install and you’ll have to restart Firefox.

2. Log into Socialthing.com via your main Firefox window. Doing this before hand will make things a lot easier. If you log in through the sidebar, it won’t redirect properly. (Socialthing! developers, please fix this.)

3. Once logged in go to View -> Sidebar -> iPhone Socialthing! Sidebar, or hit control+alt+s, or customize your menu bar to add the Socialthing! button.

4. Enjoy.

The SocialThing! sidebar works in Firefox 2 and 3. Again, all features and programming have all been done by Socialthing! people. I just added the duct tape that makes it load in Firefox.

This is an un-official extension and I provide no warranty or guarantees. But it works for me on my iMac.

If you don’t want to install the extension, then go to http://socialthing.com/iphone and bookmark that page in Firefox. Then go to Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks and get the properties of the iPhone Socialthing! bookmark. Then tell it to load in the sidebar. You won’t get a fancy button or keyboard shortcuts, but it works too.

I’ve also created an iPhone Facebook Sidebar for Firefox that does the same thing for Facebook fans. I almost created a Twitter one too, but then found out there are cooler Firefox Twitter extensions.