New Safari 5 Google Reader Extensions

Google Reader Tools is an excellent extension which allows users to alter the appearance of Google Reader in Safari 5 in a number of Significant ways.  It allows you to manually set the update time interval for Google Reader.  It shows the number of unread feeds in the toolbar icon.  You can choose between 1) all unread articles, 2) articles in your feeds, 3) You can either view the feed in Safari or google reader.  Most importantly you can change the appearance of Google Reader from the rather ugly appearance (in my opinion) that Google provides to a more Mac like user interface.

The extension offer different styles plus you have the option of adding additional choices.  This extension, letting you view your Google Reader feeds in a Safari like interface, in large part obviates the need for an external RSS software reader program like the excellent NetNewsWire.

 

Another Google Reader extension is Google Reader™ Mac OS X Snow Leopard + Delicious.  This extension has an even more attractive user interface but it is not as customizable as Google Reader Tools. On the other hand it provides you with a very useful tool bar in the browser window which appears when you load the Google Reader website.  The only downside of this extension for me is that it does provide a toolbar icon.Safari 5 extensions are appearing on a daily basis.  You may find collections of them on the Safari Extensions and  PimpMySafari.Comwebsites.

John H. Armwood



Apple Updates MobileMe, Releases Find My IPhone App - PCWorld

Apple Updates MobileMe, Releases Find My IPhone App - PCWorld

Early Friday morning, Apple released an anticipated update to its MobileMe Web apps, as well as a new Find My iPhone app. The MobileMe Mail beta that we took a first look at last month is now available to all members, and Apple even added some surprises.

Mac OS X 10.6.4 includes 'secret' malware protection update | MacNN

Mac OS X 10.6.4 includes 'secret' malware protection update | MacNN

Apple has very quietly improved malware protection with Tuesday's Mac OS X 10.6.4 update, says a senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos. Examining an updated XProtect.plist file, the consultant notes that the code detects "HellRTS," a Trojan threat also known as OSX/Pinhead-B. The malware masquerades as a copy of iPhoto, and can potentially be used to force a Mac to send spam, take screenshots or share files. More...

Office Web Apps Versus Google Docs: Does Either Shine? - Forward Thinking by Michael J. Miller

Office Web Apps Versus Google Docs: Does Either Shine? - Forward Thinking by Michael J. Miller

Thursday June 17, 2010

A number of people have asked me what I think of Office Web Apps and how it compares with Google Docs. In some respects, the real question is whether the glass is half full or half empty.

Both of these online application suites, and other tools such as Zoho or Glide, work well enough for basic work and provide a convenient way of sharing data so you can collaborate with someone in another location. But I find both to have notable limitations. A switch to either as a primary tool would be a big step backward for me. Of course, I'm a "power user" of office applications, and that does skew my perspective.

You'll find some examples of typical jobs in each suite--and my evaluation of them--after the jump. (Just click to enlarge each of the embedded documents.) More...

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I have evaluated both Google Docs and Microsoft's Web Apps. I agree with Michael Miller's conclusions that neither web based word processing software is sufficiently robust enough to replace either Microsoft Word or my favorite general use word processor Apple iWork's, Pages. I have used all of these programs and I have found that even when I upload Microsoft Word formatted documents to their online Word web application some of my document formatting is altered. The same happens with Google docs but I would have expected that Microsoft's own Word Web application would accurately display documents formatted in Microsoft Word. Unfortunately this is not the case. In a pinch, if I needed to use a web based word processor, I would use Google Docs. Last year, while working at a radio station in Busan, South Korea, I often used Google Docs. I found it to be a satisfactory if not perfect solution to my need for an English language word processor.

John H. Armwood

Supreme Court Ruling Lets Employers View Worker Text Messages With Reason - PCWorld

Supreme Court Ruling Lets Employers View Worker Text Messages With Reason - PCWorld

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that employers have the right to search through text messages, including personal ones, sent by workers if they have reason to believe that workplace rules are being violated.

The ruling ( download PDF ) overturns an earlier decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a case involving a California police officer who had claimed his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated when supervisors conducted a search of his text messages. More...

Apple Opens Safari Extension Program to Submissions - PCWorld

Apple Opens Safari Extension Program to Submissions - PCWorld

Safari 5 gained official support for extensions just last week, and developers wasted no time in releasing all manner of enhancements. Apple announced at Safari's release that it would open a Safari Extensions Gallery later this summer, and the doors are now open for submissions.

Apple's Safari Developer Program site is to place to go to submit your extensions. As we've mentioned before, developers can apply to this program for free (no $99-per-year fee like for the App Store), though they must register for a digital certificate from Apple to distribute with their extensions. The certificate serves as a failsafe Apple can in theory use to disable an extension in the eventuality that it violates Apple's terms and conditions. More...

Microsoft Office 2010 Review | Business Computing World

Microsoft Office 2010 Review | Business Computing World

irtually synonymous with desktop productivity tools, Microsoft Office is not just the market leader, it’s the one product that nearly every user has on their PC. Not content with that situation, however, Microsoft continues to develop the product, with Office 2010 the latest implementation of its number one desktop best seller. More...

Does Firefox Have Cooties? - PCWorld

Does Firefox Have Cooties? - PCWorld

Lately, it seems, there's been a small movement amongst key projects in the open source community to move away from stalwart open source browser Firefox to up-and-coming newbie browser Chromium.

Earlier this month, news came out that in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 Chromium would be the default browser (though Firefox will still be the default for the other *buntu 10.10 flavors). No official reason was given since several people found this news in some of the 10.10 blueprints.

Speed seems to be the reason why Flock CEO Shawn Hardin blogged yesterday that the new Flock 3 browser would be "the first major browser other than Google Chrome to be built on the Chromium platform." Previous editions of Flock were based on--you guessed it--Firefox.

What's the deal? Is Firefox just not good enough any more? Not hardly. Firefox is still hanging around 31 percent of market share (from Wikimedia), compared to Chrome's almost seven percent. More...

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I believe, as a former six year FireFox user, that the Chrome browser is simply better. It is lighter, faster and customizable. There are more themes and extensions for FireFox but the Chrome browser gallery has more than enough extensions for the average user. The bottom line however is the difference in speed. FireFox 3.6 for Mac seems like a slow dump truck in comparison while Chrome seems like a sleek sports car. I really like FireFox. I am thankful for its shaking up the browser market six years ago and giving use an alternative to I.E. and Safari. Presently Safari 5, with its newly introduced extensions, is my second browser of choice.

John H. Armwood

Your Browser in Five Years - PCWorld

Your Browser in Five Years - PCWorld

An interesting article about web browsers in the year 2015.

John H. Armwood

Apple releases iTunes 9.2 | Multimedia | Playlist | Macworld

Apple releases iTunes 9.2 | Multimedia | Playlist | Macworld

Apple on Wednesday released iTunes 9.2, an update to its media and syncing software for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. More...

Putting a Private Detective in Your Laptop - NYTimes.com

Putting a Private Detective in Your Laptop - NYTimes.com

Baruch Sienna figured his teenage son’s laptop was gone forever. During a party in Arad, Israel, a thief had taken off with his MacBook, and there were no witnesses.

“The police were very unhelpful,” Mr. Sienna said, speaking from Jerusalem. “They said, ‘You’ll never see your laptop again.’ ”

But the son was fortunate that his father had installed Undercover, an antitheft program, on his computer. He remotely activated the software, which grabbed screen shots of the thief’s online activities on Facebook, while the Mac’s built-in camera shot pictures of the illegal user. After eight months of on- and offline activity on the Mac, the software had given police enough information to identify the thief and put the MacBook back in Mr. Sienna’s hands.

For the very reason you like to carry laptops, iPads, e-book readers and smartphones — they are lightweight and portable — they are easy to steal. The 2009 Computer Security Institute Computer Crime and Security Survey found that 42 percent of respondents had lost a laptop or other portable device to a thief in the last year. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, a research center, 17,000 laptops are lost each week in American airports. Most people assume they are gone for good; only a third of those turned in to the airports’ lost-and-found departments are ever reclaimed.

You can keep an eye on your devices and not leave them visible and unattended, but they might best be protected with the installation of some software. A number of good programs are available for laptops, phones and tablets. Many will try to locate the computer when it is connected to the Internet by recording the user’s I.P. address and triangulating the physical location of the device. Others log keystrokes, take snapshots of Web pages visited, monitor e-mail being written and even take a picture of the user with the device’s built-in Webcam. More...

Twitter Warns Even More Downtime To Come - PCWorld

Twitter Warns Even More Downtime To Come - PCWorld

Following two rough weeks of buggy service, Twitter warned its users that more downtime should be expected over the next two weeks. The outages affecting Twitter have been the worst since last October, said Sean Garett, the company's head of communications.

So far this month, Twitter has been down for 5 hours and 22 minutes, a total uptime of 98.54 percent, according to Pingdom, a Web performance monitoring company. In October 2009 Twitter had 1 hour and 10 minutes of downtime (99.84 percent), according to the same statistics.

The notorious Twitter "fail whale" has affected both the service's Web site and third-party desktop and mobile applications, and the company said on its official blog that it is making adjustments to avoid outages during the World Cup.

Twitter says the problem behind the outages lies with record traffic experienced during the World Cup, and also with maintenance work to its network gone wrong, which it has detailed last week on its Engineering Blog. More...

Avram Grumer’s Safari Extension list

Avram Grumer’s Safari Extension list

Avram Grumer’s Safari Extension list

JUNE 15, 2010

in FAVORITE EXTENSIONS

Rating: 10.0/10 (3 votes cast)

Avram Grumer over at the MakingLight blog has a great list of his favorite extensions.

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A another collection of Safari 5 extensions. Adblock is here.

John H. Armwood

Apple posts Mac OS X 10.6.4, Leopard security updates | MacNN

Apple posts Mac OS X 10.6.4, Leopard security updates | MacNN

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.6.4, an update long in development for Snow Leopard. The patch fixes several important problems; these include keyboards and trackpads becoming unresponsive, Creative Suite 3 programs failing to launch, and difficulty in copying, renaming or deleting files on SMB servers. Minor bugfixes target fullscreen editing in Aperture and iPhoto, and using Good Quality deinterlacing in DVD Player.

The code further closes some two dozen security holes, while also improving VPN reliability, and compatibility with braille displays. Several different editions of the update are available; these include ones for Mac OS X Server, correcting dozens of unique flaws such as ones in CalDAV, podcasting support and Software Update. Two other editions are directed at the new Mac mini, and address issues with graphics performance and compatibility, and compatibility in terms of SDXC cards. More...

BBC News - Wikipedia unlocks divisive pages for editing

BBC News - Wikipedia unlocks divisive pages for editing

By Jonathan Frewin

Technology reporter, BBC News

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia says it has taken an "important step" towards making it easier to edit some of its most controversial articles. Up to 2,000 articles, including a page about former US President George W Bush, will have their strict editing restrictions relaxed. Users will now be able to submit changes to the selected pages for review by senior editors. It is part of Wikipedia's ongoing efforts to curb vandalism of the site.

Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales told BBC News that the new system, called "pending changes" will allow the site "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years. More...

Twitter / Over capacity

Twitter / Over capacity: ""


This message has appeared all to often on the Twitter website.  I received this message a number of times during Monday evening Jun 14, 2010 continuing until a little after midnight.  i seem to receive error messages from my Twitter client Twitterrific off and on all day.  This has been going on for the last two weeks.

I hope Twitter resolves this problem in the near future.

John H. Armwood

Starbucks To Offer Unlimited Free Wi-Fi : NPR

Starbucks To Offer Unlimited Free Wi-Fi : NPR

Starbucks Corp. will begin offering unlimited free wireless Internet access at all company-operated U.S. locations starting July 1, part of an ongoing effort to bring more customers in the door.

The Wi-Fi access, which will eventually include a new network of news and entertainment content exclusively for customers, comes as Starbucks works to take business back from rivals like McDonald's Corp. and independent cafes that have long offered free Internet.

Twitter's Service Disruptions and Outages Persist - PCWorld

Twitter's Service Disruptions and Outages Persist - PCWorld

Twitter's persistent and disruptive service outages entered a second week, as the company scrambles to bring its site availability back to acceptable levels.

After multiple incidents brought Twitter.com and its platform for third-party applications down several times last week, the company said on Friday that it had identified the causes and had taken concrete steps to resolve the problem.

Specifically, Twitter blamed errors in planning, monitoring and configuring its internal network, and said that in response it had doubled the capacity of its internal network, sharpened its monitoring and improved its load balancing,

"By bringing the monitoring of our internal network in line with the rest of the systems at Twitter, we'll be able to grow our capacity well ahead of user growth. Furthermore, by doubling our internal network capacity and rebalancing load across the internal network, we're better prepared to serve today's tweets and beyond," wrote Jean-Paul Cozzatti from Twitter's engineering team on the company's official blog. More...

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These Twitter outages have been very annoying. I have been receiving server errors quite often while using the Twitterrific client on my MacBook.

John H. Armwood

'Lost' Apple Founder Has No Regrets : NPR

'Lost' Apple Founder Has No Regrets : NPR

This past week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the fourth-generation iPhone. It's just one more achievement for Apple, now the largest tech company in the world, worth well over $220 billion.

The story of Apple's founding is the stuff of legend in Silicon Valley. Two young programmers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created the company out of nothing.

But there was a third founder — Ron Wayne. On April Fools' Day 1976, he got together with Jobs and Wozniak to write Apple's incorporation document. He typed up the three pages himself, and even designed the company's first logo. More...

Chrome Shows Apple its Future - PCWorld

Chrome Shows Apple its Future - PCWorld

"The times they are a changing, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is," said Apple CEO, Steve Jobs.

He's right, of course. Apple's iOS 4 is part of the evolution of the new age.

In future, applications along with the majority of your computing experience will be hosted in the cloud and available to you across a plethora of devices.

This isn't new. Futurologists have predicted this for years. What's changed is that the future is already here.

This isn't just my notion. Look to the response to a recent Pew Research Center survey across 900 industry experts, 71 per cent of whom agreed with the following statement:

"By 2020, most people won't do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system." More...