Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for March 9, 2007

This week: WebCards and StatusBars

March 9th, 2007 at 4:00am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Fireday

WebCards

Rating: 3/5

Microformats seem to be the big rage lately. Microformats provide a quick and easy way for someone to view and optionally extract data from a site to include into an external application such as Outlook or a calendar application.

WebCards is the latest extension added to the Microformats list. After reviewing Operator+ a while back, it seems that Microformat extensions seem to be whetting the appetite of Firefox users before (we hope!) it's integrated into version 3, which is to be released later this year.

WebCards didn't install as easy as I thought it would. You need to download the extension and then add it manually.

After restarting Firefox, I was ready to start testing out the extension and writing about it, but before I did that, I wanted to grab my Fireday template and start writing a draft in my Google Notebook. I headed over to Google Notebook and noticed no entries. Hmmm...maybe this was Google's way of telling everyone that they were doing maintenance on the site. I figured I'd come back later.

I went over to 103 Bees to check my site stats. The format was a little weird. I started to notice a little trend. I uninstalled the WebCards extension and went back to Google Notebook and 103 Bees. Everything was back to normal. It was the WebCards extension that was causing the problems. After further investigation, the problem stems from a hidden DIV that is added to the webpage when loaded. It must conflict with some of the CSS IDs on the page?

After installing the extension again, the signature for the extension is the Microformats icon in the bottom right hand corner of the status bar. It's temporarily grayed out until it detects a microformat on a page. I went to the Microformats.org web site and, sure enough, WebCards detected a microformat and the microformat icon lit up. Mouse over the icon and you'll be presented with a list of the formats detected on the page. Click on one  to explore the details of that entry.

WebCards has a snazzy interface when it finds a Microformat on a site. It is definitely "web 2.0"-styled and provides an easy way for you to view the details of microformats on a web page.

I think the idea of a CSS DIV attached to a web page needs re-evaluated. This is the only drawback to this extension. Modifying a web page to accommodate an extension isn't quite the way I like to browse.

However, if a solution is found soon, WebCards will give everyone a slick intro into the way microformats will be used in the future.

StatusBars

Rating: 4/5

Anybody who deals with Firefox extensions on a daily basis know that if they add additional extensions, they risk losing valuable real estate on their status bar. I'm guilty of this as well. I even wrote about an excellent extension called Statusable which solved my problem.

Well, I uninstalled that extension and upgraded to the StatusBars extension. The StatusBars extension creates as many status bars as you need to view different...well..statuses.

Installing the actual extension was easy enough, and afterwards, creating an additional status bar was just as easy. Right-click on the colored statusbar icon in the bottom left-hand corner and select Customize. You can create any number of statusbars for Firefox. Only one can be shown at a time, though, which is still great. Gotta watch that real estate!

The one problem that I was wrestling with was the ability to customize the panels. When I first noticed the screenshots on the site, I thought the list of statusbar panels was a list of panels to choose from. Mmmmm...no. It was a text box for entering panel IDs. In programming terms, I thought the proper control for this type of interface would be a listbox instead of a text edit box.

On the main dialog box with the list of status bars displayed in Firefox, I thought clicking on a status bar panel and dragging it to another status bar would work. It moved it, as expected, but when clicking OK to return to Firefox, it didn't save my changes. UPDATE: After I completely wrote this review, version .98 was released and the click-and-drag/saving issue was fixed. Kudos to the author for a quick update and release!

It seems the only way to move panels from one status bar to another was to select the Default status bar and click Edit. Click Advanced to display the status bar panel IDs and try to locate the extension panel ID that you want to move and copy and paste it into the destination status bar. For example, I have ForecastFox Enhanced on my status bar and I wanted to created a brand new Weather status bar. I didn't know the name of the panel was called "ff_box." After cutting and pasting this id from the Default status bar to the Weather status bar, everything worked.

The user interface needs a better way of streamlining this process. The process of moving and typing panel IDs is too cumbersome and may intimidate some novice users.

With some additional work to the user interface, I really think this extension has potential. Once this extension fixes some additional user interface shortcomings, the extension would easily receive a seal of approval.

Hope everyone liked this weeks reviews. I'll see ya soon.

If anyone has questions, please post them below or Contact me directly.