Agriya Loves FireShot For Firefox
When you are outsourcing PHP projects like our clientèle does then the distance can have an adverse effect on the final outcome – there is nothing quite like being in the same office as your web developer and showing them exactly how you want each part of your site to function.
Side Note: We would be delighted and actively encourage our clients to come to India to meet the developers and spend a few days working with them. We usually have several clients visiting us at any one time so you could get to meet up with other people from around the world too!
Agriya tries to handle this problem via regular Skype chats and more recently through WebEx which allows the client to share their desktop and we can see exactly what they are seeing. However, with so many other commitments our clients sometimes find that they don’t have an hour to spare to walk through the site at a time that is convenient to them.
We have recently come across a brand new Firefox plugin called FireShot which allows you to take a screen capture of the website and then annotate it with comments, arrows and boxes. After playing around with it for a few days we have decided that we will start recommending it to our clients so that they can make quick annotations to the website and visually give all their feedback.
The plugin works flawlessly, simply install it (a couple of button clicks) and you are given an icon in the Firefox browser. Click the icon and it opens a new window with the website screenshot and gives a variety of tools for you to start annotating. The working area looks like this below:
The Fireshot Plugin Interface
We took a screenshot of our iSongs.fm site which uses the Volume software with a customized design (and a beautiful customized design if we do say so ourselves) and proceeded to annotate it as if we were giving proper client feedback, you can see the result below:
iSongs Annotated Feedback
There are two ways we can see this excellent screen capture software being used:
- Annotating the screenshot with the comments within the image
- Annotating the screenshot with numbers and referencing them in a Word or Excel document
The visual nature of an annotated screenshot makes it much easier for developers to work with rather than going by page after page of written feedback, which can be misunderstood or not be clear enough on what part of the site it is referring to.
Agriya highly recommends that all our clients and potential clients install this Firefox screen capture plugin as it will help tremendously when it comes to giving feedback.
Why does Chrome give you an AdSense Blocking Add-on?
Google certainly believes that a rising tide lifts all boats up -Google follows an explicit policy of transparency and open industry standards to this end. However, Google’s upstanding principles may be getting it in trouble. Users who browse through Google’s own browser, Chrome, will soon be able to turn off ads: the very source that keeps the entire company afloat. This might seem like professional suicide – or it might seem like Google is showing remarkable restraint, and is sharing its good fortune around. Take for example, the new Extensions scheme in Chrome – their version of Firefox’s Add-ons. Firefox has ad-blocking add-ons, that are widely popular – like Add block Plus. This plug-in,blocks Google-supplied AdSense ads. Independent programmers have been working together on a rudimentary ad-blocker for Chrome too. And Chrome doesn’t seem to be trying remove it from its add-ons page.The Google browser has nearly fifty million users; and that is only a fraction of all Google users on the Internet the world over. Google loses only a small portion of its potential Chrome advertising income, if people download an ad-blocking application. Firefox today has 7 million installations of its ad blocking software. It is not really that likely that ad-blocking will get so popular, that the Internet ad-serving industry should just go bankrupt. Google’s sentiment is that to live in fear of being shut out of its market, is kind of a primitive; to embrace the whole dynamic of the market, is more appropriate of a responsible Internet citizen. Perhaps this will foster creativity, and make people put up more creative, and watchable advertising.
The Competition Keeps Firefox on its Toes
Mozilla has issued a couple of major updates in quick succession; the first one, an incremental update, came in the last week of October, and it was called version 3.5.4. This one was only a bug fix update, aimed at smoothing the user experience, and not a feature update. Some of those bug fixes would only be of interest to anyone who was technically inclined; bugs that deal with arcane things like download filename spoofing, memory safety flaws in media libraries, cross-origin data theft with document.getSelection(), and heap buffer overflow, have been addressed. And there are a few serious security problems sorted out as well, like the ability of outside agents to run arbitrary code and install viruses on your computer, or the hanging pointer vulnerability issue.But perhaps of real interest to mainstream users is the most recent update, still in Beta, the update release 3.6. This is quite a major update with lots of interesting new features for the power user. With Google’s Chrome snapping at Firefox’s heels, it is clear that Firefox is trying to address some of Chrome’s main competitive advantages: its overall speed, especially at startup. Version 3.6 does away with a few other recognized problems, such as JavaScript performance. For new users, Firefox introduces built-in support for the browsers seem system, Personas, the ability to view fullscreen movies with no add-ons, a scanning feature that will look through all the plug-ins installed on Firefox and check for updates for them to automatically, support for CSS, HTML 5 and other under the hood features. To bloggers, the new drag-and-drop feature can be particularly useful too. Firefox’s main advantage today is its vast installed base against Google’s Chrome’s. That browser may have a tiny installed base today but is expected to grow soon, especially with the release of Google’s Chrome operating system for netbooks. Competition always works in the consumer’s favour.
A Cross Browser Twitter Extension for Firefox with a Cheerful Name
Lu.ly ….. now that’s a funny random sound; but it is also a really great idea that all Facebook and Twitter devotees need to know about. Lu.ly basically, is a toolbar for all the major browsers that allows you to watch a crawl of all the relevant tweets and Facebook notifications out there, in real time, right there on your Lu.ly browser toolbar. There might be some people who might not find this useful, but to watch a crawl of all your chosen tweets like it was a news channel or something has to be fun.Twitter add-ons for Firefox are nothing new; but this one takes the idea a step along, and makes it possible on all major browsers, and lets you watch your Facebook and Twitter updates in the same place. The design of the toolbar is tasteful and restrained, you can even hit pause if you want to concentrate on something else.
What does feel like to use Lu.ly then? New status messages constantly crawl into view; you can travel back and forth with the messages of the tweeter of your choice, right from within the toolbar too. There is a search bar on the toolbar in addition, that allows you to search within Twitter. The functionality offered by Lu.ly is right at par with the ones offered in competing Firefox extensions, like TwitterNotifier or Tweetbar; the implementation and the cross-platform compatibility is what sets Lu.ly apart. Of course, Lu.ly is now one more competitor for your already crowded toolbar space. Perhaps things could go the Ludicrous way; the Ludicrous Firefox add-on allows you to work in Twitter from your Firefox browser window using no other interface for its purposes other than Firefox’s own search box. Mac users should be able to use Lu.ly presently: a version is in the works.
Firefox fluxes Wolfram Alpha with the search engine giant Google
Wolfram Alpha, a computational engine offers a single search result instead of thousands of web pages as offered by Google. If Alpha offers the right answer, then it will be the best way to gather data on the net. If it is not the right answer, then the search may end up in vain and user will have to go for another search engine which most commonly is Google.
Even with Google, people might not get desired results on the first page; they have to explore the thousands of search results to get the answer. Both have pros and corns, so Firefox has come up with the brilliant idea of blending Google and Wolfram Alpha, through its new add-on “Wolfram Alpha Google”. Just imagine how useful it will be for surfers to have both kinds of search results on the same page.
The downside of the add-on is that it can clip off the bottom of the Wolfram Alpha results when the search result of Alpha is longer. This can be overcome by setting Google to show 20 or more search results per page. Also the add-on comes with a quick link called ‘Open Wolfram Alpha in New tab’ which allows surfers to view the Alpha results in a different browser tab so that they don’t miss out on any important information.
This plug-in facilitates Google surfers to get the best of both worlds. It is also an ideal solution for comparing the results between these two engines. This add-on is still experimental; you need to be registered with Mozilla’s add-on to be able to instal it in your browser.
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