Fireday - Firefox add-on reviews for June 29, 2007

This week: FoxClocks and Mouse Gestures

June 29th, 2007 at 4:00am — Comments: (1) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Fireday

FoxClocks

Rating: 5/5

When people travel across the globe, you kind of lose track of time in other time zones. FoxClocks is definitely for the individual who travels, and I mean a lot.

FoxClocks allows you to setup a list of locations across the world to display in your status bar. You can have any number of locations and either countries or cities can be selected.

After installation, I started to play with FoxClocks. As I've said before many times, I only have so much space for additional components on my status bar. By default, FoxClocks displays four cities with the time displayed by each city. That takes WAY too much space. I immediately dove into the preferences by right-clicking on any time displayed on the status bar and selected Options to get the preferences.

Pay particular attention to the Position and Style tab. At the bottom, there is an option called Display as. Here you can select multiple docks or a FoxClocks icon. I selected the FoxClocks icon and it was exactly what I was looking for. Hover over the world icon and immediately see your list of times.

For any new Firefox add-on builder out there, listen up! Space is the name of the game. The less space you take up on the status bar, the more welcome the add-on will be on someone's status bar.

Personally, I don't have a need for the extension, but I'm very impressed with the way the add-on options are laid out in a very clean and easily understandable interface.

A great add-on for the world traveler and it also works with Sunbird (Calendar equivalent) and Thunderbird (email client) as well.

Mouse Gestures

Rating: 5/5

When I first heard about Mouse Gestures, I was skeptical about installing the add-on. Now, I can firmly say that using Mouse Gestures optimizes your browsing by a factor of at least 2x.

The idea behind Mouse Gestures is that when you hold down the mouse button, move in a direction, then let go of the mouse button, that particular motion performs a certain action. The action could be move forward a page, back up a page, or reload the page.

I guess it takes a while to get used to, but once you feel comfortable, it actually gives the user a quick way to move around web sites. This would be the mouse equivalent of the keyboard-jockeys who use only the keyboard in Firefox to get their work done because they think it's faster (That's another religious question, which will be discussed at a later time).

Mouse Gestures receives a 5/5.

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

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