Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for June 8, 2007

Friday, June 08, 2007 3:00 AM

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

This week: Better GMail and Google Gears

Let's continue with more Google add-ons this week.

Better GMail

Rating: 5/5

I've always loved Greasemonkey even though some people thought it was unsecure at one point. I continued to use it, and yes, I had a lot of GMail extension scripts installed in Greasemonkey. One of the best things that could've been done is include all of the scripts into one extension. Hmmmm....

It seems Mrs. Gina Trapani already thought of this. If that name sounds familiar, she is your blog host over at LifeHacker.com. Anyway, the Better GMail Firefox addons was created by Mrs. Trapani and combines all of the popular Greasemonkey GMail scripts into one extension.

After installing the addon, I restarted Firefox and headed over to GMail to give the addon a test run. All I can say is that based on everything I've seen, this add-on packs quite a wallop. Kudos to all of the designers/developers that added their Greasemonkey scripts to the extension as well.

The Greasemonkey scripts included in the add-on are:

The more I start using the macros, the more I'm liking it and I immediately switched over to the SuperClean skin (very cool...oh..and clean).

I think Gina may have started something that more designers/developers should work towards. Creative individuals could examine a web site of their choice and start building an add-on that incorporates their own combination of scripts/add-ons to completely reshape a web site until it's just the way they like it, similar to the CSS Zen Garden. This would show an exceptional showmanship by a developer or designer bottled in an add-on. I understand thats the whole idea behind Greasemonkey, but take it up a notch.

Designers/developers would start combining forces to create Site Extensions like the Better Gmail add-on.

Overall, I love the Better GMail add-on. It adds a lot of additional features that should be in a future version of GMail (wink wink, nudge nudge), but until then, I'll rate the extension a 5 out of 5 and keep using it.

Excellent work, Mrs. Trapani.

Google Gears

Rating: 5/5

Being on the road and having a virtual office is a great benefit. There are times when I just feel like disconnecting from the world and just sit and relax...and read some RSS feeds. :-) Google Gears takes certain Google applications to a new level: offline status. When installed, the open source add-on integrates the following into your Firefox browser:

  • LocalServer - Caches and serves application resources like HTML, JavaScript, images and other media locally.
  • Database - A fully-searchable relational database stored locally.
  • WorkerPool - Makes your web application more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously.

Once I installed the add-on and being a programmer, I immediately went to the samples page to see how this puppy worked. I was really impressed with the results.

Again, I wanted more, so I looked around for the API to see how hard it was to code something. Based on this tutorial, it's very easy to include offline functionality in your web apps (and Yes, at this point, for those who know me, I was starting to geek out). I actually can't wait to start using the API.

How easy of a deployment would that be for a web application? A existing Firefox browser and an add-on. Application installed? Check!

Ok, definitely a great add-on and I can't wait to start working with it. Actually, I'm going to start right now...oh..by the way, definitely a rating of 5/5.

Gotta program!

Bye :-)

UPDATE: Ajaxian just posted an interview with Mike Tsao of the Google Gears team.

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

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

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