Fireday - Firefox extensions for November 3, 2006

Friday, November 03, 2006 4:00 AM

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

This week: Grocery List Generator, About This Site, and Flash Switcher.

Hey, Firefoxers! I hope everyone had a great Halloween!

Let's get started...

Grocery List Generator

Rating: 3/5

Every week, you have a list of foods you want to make for the week and you need to pull together all of the ingredients for the store. Sounds like a chore?

Here's a great extension to take all of your foods you prepare for the week and generate a list of groceries for the store. Enter the Grocery List Generator.

When you first install the extension and restart Firefox, you'll notice the dialog box at the beginning asking if you want to include your extension on the toolbar. After choosing yes (why not?), the icon will appear on the top far right by the search box. If you chose not to add the icon to the toolbar, you can still get to the extension through the Tools pulldown menu.

Grocery List Generator Screenshot

Click the shopping cart icon to start the extension. The main screen has two tabs at the top: Overview and Details. On the Overview tab, the extension is sectioned into two parts: the main dishes on the top and the ingredients on the bottom.

The pulldown menu at the top contains all you need to create your grocery list: Generate List; Add Dish or Item; Remove; and Options. A very simple menu for a simple application.

Once you enter your recipes into the Grocery List Generator, you simply click on the dishes you want for the week and the Generator selects your ingredients and creates your shopping list. Pretty slick.

If the interface was dressed up a bit, it would be a nice extension. Currently, it looks a little too VB-ish. But the Grocery List Generator still has some potential for a snazzy app.


About This Site

Rating: 5/5

Everything likes a quick glance of their stats in the blogosphere.

The About This Site Firefox extension is similar to SEOQuake, but with one exception. It displays the jumps to the web page that has statistics regarding your site.

 

The following sites you can visit for your site statistics are:

The extension is located in the context menu when you right-click on a web page. You can select one or you can select all of them. Of course, all of the sites will open in their own tab.

There are a couple more sites in the list as compared to SEOQuake, but if one extension doesn't cover a site, the other picks up the slack. I believe it's better to have more of something than not enough. :-)

FlashSwitcher

Rating: 4/5

If you code in the Adobe Flash environment, the Flash Switcher extension is absolutely the best bet for backward compatibility for your Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Installation was a little difficult. For novices, this may present a problem, because you need to download the extension and open it through Firefox. The installation isn't as easy as some.

When installed, the extension appears at the bottom of the Firefox in the status bar as the Flash logo. Click on the logo and it displays a list of Flash Player or Shockwave versions. Select the version you want to test your Flash or Shockwave RIA with and you are on your way.

When I started downloading the extension, I looked at the size. Woof! Every version of the Flash Player, from version 2.0 all the way up to version 9, is located in the Firefox extension. That's the whole reason the extension is 3 megs. I think it's worth it if you develop with Flash.

What's that? You can't find your version of Flash Player? Add it yourself. If you read the mini-faq on the site, you'll see how easy it is to add custom Flash Players or Shockwave Players to the list. I really like this feature. This extends the longevity of the FlashSwitcher extension.

There is also an option to remove the Flash Player entirely for testing purposes.

Aside from the installation issue, this extension is simple and provides a great solution to developers of RIA using Flash.

...Andddddd that's a wrap!

Have a great weekend everyone! If you have any comments, please post them below or Contact me directly.

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