Fireday - Firefox extensions for June 16, 2006

Friday, June 16, 2006 4:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 2 | View blog reactions

This week includes the TableTools full review, Joga Soccer Companion, and the Web Marker extension.

With the first day of Summer closing in (on Wednesday, even), how many people are actually going to be indoors using PCs? Anybody? First, read my reviews of Firefox extensions, then get out there and enjoy the sun. But not too much. Don't want you to burn.

Ok, let's get started on this weeks' extensions.

TableTools 0.11

Last week, the TableTools Firefox extension was brand new and I looked at it as a patch. I was wrong. This week, I will do a full review of the extension in lieu of what happened last week.

The author, Mingyi Lui, has done a great job with this extension. Install the extension and find a site that has a table to test drive this puppy. Mingyi has a test table in the demo area, but I prefer to use a real world table. Let's hit the Fortune 500 list.

The TableTools Firefox extension use the following keyboard shortcuts to accomplish certain tasks dealing with tables.

Keyboard Shortcut Task
CTRL-ALT-left mouse click Sorts the table column you clicked.
CTRL-SHIFT-left mouse click Performs an "AutoFilter", similar to Excel
CTRL-Z-left mouse click Copy the table as left-justified tab-delimited text (for copying over to Excel)
CTRL-Q-left mouse click Same as above, only the text is not left-justified.
CTRL-E-left mouse click Copy the HTML of the table content.

As you can see, the TableTools Firefox extension has quite a lot of flexibility and I'm sure that this extension will become helpful to data miners, accountants, and possibly bloggers for sorting their profit columns.

The extension is pretty solid and I haven't had any problems with it since installation. It performs as expected and is definitely better than a patch. :-)

Rating: 5/5

 

Joga.com Soccer Companion

The Joga companion Firefox extension is a collaborative effort between Google and NikeFootball for those die-hard soccer fans who want to know what's going on with the World Cup.

When you install the extension, it provides a sidebar of three tabs at the top: Main, Video, and Community. The main window shows all of the activity and detail of the games and where they placed. Double-click on one of the games to display a pop-up showing the details of the game. Below the scores are the news headings/press releases from the games.

The Video tab, naturally, uses Google video, but to show footage of Joga commercials instead of game footage. The video I was impressed with was the Ronaldo vs. Zlatan. :-)

The Community tab involves users forming teams and discussing certain aspects of the game or how their team is or isn't winning.

As I said above, soccer fans will love this extension. If you are a soccer fan and use this extension, drop me a line telling me if you like it or not. I was hoping to see some excellent footage of some games, but just found soccer commercials from Joga.

Rating: 4/5

Web Marker

Web Marker Firefox extension is used in a collaborative effort. It allows you to mark (highlight) a web page or certain sections of web pages and get a link to those pages so you can share your highlights with other users.

This Firefox extension is good for having a copy editor mark up a web page and send the link back to the writer, telling them to fix their changes. "The highlighted part in blue needs re-worded. Send it over to me again when your done."

In order for both users to view the changes, both users should have the Web Marker Firefox extension installed.

Rating: 4/5

That's all of the reviews for this week. If someone has any comments or questions about the reviews, please let me know.

Until next week.

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Chatterbox - 2 Comments

1.  Mingyi Liu on Thursday, June 22, 2006 12:39 AM said:

Thanks for the rating on Web-Marker. Apart from using web-marker to show people stuff, it can also be used directly as link in a HTML page to take people directly to "the location of contextual content". Suppose you are mentioning a person in your blog and you want to quote him, a web-marker link will be quite useful.

2.  jdanylko on Thursday, June 22, 2006 3:02 AM said:

I didn't know that.

Thanks for the tip, Toufeeq. :-)

 

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