Fireday - Firefox extensions for June 23, 2006

Friday, June 23, 2006 4:15 AM

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

This week: Jybe, Peekko, and ScreenGrab.

First week of Summer (started Wednesday) and boy, did it get hot and humid! Wow!

Now for some Firefox extensions...

Jybe

The Jybe extension is a neat collaboration extension for a web site. For you freelancers out there, this may be what your looking for when showing your web site to a client and they get lost with a page element or section.

This extension uses a central server in conjunction with the extension in either Firefox or IE and runs off of a "session" concept. The sessions are password-protected, the ability to pass control to another presenter, and you can have collaborative scrolling and text entry.

There are some problems with the extension. The extension always connects to a public server. If that server isn't up and running, the extension will fail, rendering it useless.

Another downside to this extension is that they need to update it. It only works on Firefox 0.7 to 1.0. They don't even have a version for 1.5 or higher. Bummer.

If you are doing remote demonstrations with a client, this extension will be valuable to you, uses IE or Firefox, and comes at a great price (free), so long as you have the right version. :-\

Rating: 3/5

 

Peekko

Speaking of collaboration, the Peekko Firefox extension allows users to visit a web page and make a chat room out of it.

When the extension is installed, go to a web site and click on the 'P'. At the bottom of the web site, a framed window is displayed and you can start chatting with users who visit that same page.

Using Jybe with Peekko, this can prove to be an excellent team if you allow your client to install both of them. However, since Jybe won't work on newer versions of Firefox, Peekko could be considered an alternative to Jybe instead of working with Jybe.

I found no problems with the extension.

Rating: 5/5

ScreenGrab 0.8

We have all wondered how the designers take those screen shots of web pages and post them on their sites to show a usability issue. Now, we know.

The ScreenGrab Firefox extension takes a snapshot of a web page and makes an image out of it. Simple and it does the job.

I am, however, wondering why the extension needs Java to run. Personally, its been a long time since I've used Java on my machine (Yes, I've used it a little), but lately I haven't seen my little coffee cup show up in the system tray at all.

There is another extension I will be reviewing next week that doesn't use a JVM at all to take screen shots of web pages.

If you already have the JVM or are a Java Developer, then this extension shouldn't be a problem for you. One drawback to the extension is that you will not be able to capture obscenely large HTML pages. Some tweaking in the JVM is necessary to perform the operation successfully...or maybe another gig stick for your machine to help. ;-)

Apart from needing a JVM to make this extension run properly, I think the extension is worth a look for a designers portfolio for interviews.

Rating: 4/5

If anybody has any comments, jot them down in the Chatterbox, or contact me directly.

Until next week.

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