Fireday - Firefox extensions for September 1, 2006

Friday, September 01, 2006 4:00 AM

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

This Week: Daily Dilbert, Exch, and the Aardvark.

Daily Dilbert

Let's get started with a simple one for a Friday. If you've worked in the corporate world, then obviously you love Dilbert.

The Daily Dilbert extension installs easily on your status bar and displays a little icon to click on. Click on the icon and presto! You get a Dilbert cartoon every day.

This very simple extension is great for your Dilbert fix. One feature I would recommend to the author is providing a mechanism to move back a day or two, kind of like a "< Previous" and "Next >" link. When I miss a couple of days of Dilbert, I get cranky. :-)

Rating: 4/5

Exch

For those who travel out of the country, this extension is a great assistant with a Portable Firefox on a thumbdrive or laptop.

The Exch extension uses Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/currency) for its data and the extension is always up-to-date with currency exchanges. The extension (as does Yahoo!) supports over 150 countries for currency conversions.

Exch uses the sidebar to compute its values and gives and immediate response back, so it is quick.

The extension is very handy when you want to do a conversion, but again, if you don't travel, this extension may not be beckoning you to install it.

Rating: 4/5

Aardvark

Now here is a great extension for web designers and developers.

After installing the Aardvark extension, load a web page, right-click on the page, and click "Start Aardvark." As you mouse over elements on the page, you'll notice they have a red outline with a small tag and a class or id attached to it.

The following keys are active when Aardvark is running:

W Wider Select a wider area. For instance, if you have selected a table cell, pressing W will select the table row
N Narrower Undo the last "Wider" command
Q Quit Quit Aardvark (that is, stop selecting elements), until you restart it from the menu
U Undo Undo the last "remove" or "isolate" command.
R Remove Delete the selected element
I Isolate Delete everything surrounding the selected element
E Erase Clear the element of all content, while fixing its dimensions
B Black on white Set the element (and all contained elements) to be black text on white background
C Colorize Sets the element's background to a random color
V View Source Shows the source code of the element (with indenting and color highlighting)
D "De-widthify" Removes any fixed width values from the element (and any contained elements)

As you can see, the Aardvark is a web designers dream come true. After somone creates a prototype of a web page, you can delete certain items on the page to get a feel for what looks good and what doesn't. But don't worry. If you made a mistake, just refresh the page. You can also view the source of which class the designer used for that type of font.

I like this extension. I like it a lot. Designers and Developers can almost use the Aardvark as a primitive editing tool for web page design modifications. The Aardvark is one extension thats been in my arsenal for a week now and I don't think I want to part with it anytime soon.

Rating: 5/5

Everyone have a great weekend! Oh, and let me know if you have any comments. If you do, jot them down in the Chatterbox below, or contact me directly.

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