Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for April 13, 2007

Friday, April 13, 2007 2:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 0 | View blog reactions

This week: Tab Catalog and Paragrasp

Ughh! Friday the 13th!

Ahem...well...moving right along.

Tab Catalog

Rating: 4/5

When the Extend Firefox contest started, there was an entry called Reveal. Reveal had a unique way of displaying all of your tabs using a thumbnail-style window. I thought it was pretty cool. As a matter of fact, it won the grand prize of an Alienware Firefox PC.

Then they started cropping up. Firefox Showcase was another entry in the contest. Another extension was foXpose. And now, Tab Catalog.

The Tab Catalog extension provides users with another way of displaying their tabs in a thumbnail fashion. After installation, I played with Tab Catalog for a week and the extension functions just like the other thumbnail extensions except for one feature...a thorough configuration screen.

The configuration screen has three push buttons (similar to tabs) named catalog, appearance, and auto popup. The catalog dialog allows you to change your shortcut key, allow a scroll bar to show, a panning scroll feature, and other general options for the extension exist in this section.

The appearance dialog allows you to customize your thumbnails displayed. Additional options include adjusting the thumbnail size, whether to show a title bar for each thumbnail, or how you want to render your results.

This next dialog, the Auto Popup, is a feature that I think may need to be disabled on startup. I've had times where I've brushed my mouse across the icon in the toolbar and the extension was accidentally activated. Setting the "show catalog" milliseconds option or disabling the auto popup would be the best course of action to rid yourself of this issue.

There are six methods of activating the extension. Two are keyboard commands and four are mouse actions. F8 is the default function key to activate Tab Catalog, but as I've mentioned before, you can change the hot key through the configuration dialog.  The other keyboard command is the CTRL-Tab shortcut (command-Tab on Mac).  The mouse actions include:

  • both left and right buttons are clicked together
  • mouseover on the toolbar button
  • mouseover on the tab bar
  • switching tabs by wheel scrolling

Tab Catalog adds a couple of customizations to the thumbnail-style viewing of tabs, but still doesn't have enough to replace some of the veterans of the thumbnail extension world.

I have no complaints regarding this extension except for the mouseover functionality on the toolbar that is set as a default. Tab Catalog seemed stable enough over the course of this past week to achieve a rating of 4 but falls short in the category of additional features.


Paragrasp

Rating: 4/5

Everyone reads blogs nowadays and everyone is looking for a quick way to scan through each blog postings.  If you are like that, then this extension is not for you.  Personally, I pick select blog postings, push them into tabs, and read them later.

Paragrasp is an extension that highlights a paragraph you're reading.  With a single keystroke, it will automatically scroll the page and highlight the next paragraph for you.

According to the website, the newest version fixes a couple bugs and improves paragraph finding on certain webpages.

After installation of the extension, I visited a couple web sites containing lengthy blog posts.  I gave Paragrasp a runthrough.  After using the extension for two days, I found myself using the mouse to scroll instead of the default CTRL-Down Arrow or CTRL-Up Arrow.

The complete list of shortcut keys are listed below:

  • Ctrl+down to move down one paragraph
  • Automatically scroll the page for you Ctrl+up to move up one paragraph
  • Use the mouse wheel to move as well.
  • Ctrl+middle-click to jump to a paragraph
  • Right-click, "Paragrasp Here!" to jump to a paragraph
  • Ctrl+Shift+S to jump to where the mouse is
  • Ctrl+Shift+C to clear the highlight
  • Ctrl+Shift+A to move with only arrows

Overall, I found the extension to be helpful.  It provides a way for users who are reading long blog posts to not lose their place in the article while keeping the current paragraph always highlighted and centered.

Is Paragrasp the equivalent to a larger print version of Reader's Digest? :-)

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