The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

Do you wish you could see thumbnail previews of all the tabs you have open in Firefox?  Well now you can with the great Firefox Showcase add-on.

This add-on allows you to display thumbnails of all open tabs in a variety of ways: single window, tab or in a sidebar.

To choose a tab just click on the preview image.  To access the preview thumbnails click on the tab drop-down on the far right of the tab bar.

Try it – you’ll love it!

If you’d like to keep one particular website separate, in it’s own window and in effect turn it into a mini application then take a look at a free program called Fluid.

Simple to set-up, all that’s required is the web address and you can then create a site specific browser:

Save it on your desktop (or wherever you wish) and you’ve now got an icon for the web site of your choice.

Sometimes is useful to keep sites in their place and locked to one window rather than loosing them in amongst many tabs.  For example, keep eBay, Facebook, or the BBC News web site in their own window allowing them to be located quickly, easily and efficiently.

Perhaps a niche application but a useful one nonetheless.

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If you are looking for a great download manager, or a tool that improves your download speeds then take a look at iGetter (available for both Windows and Macs). iGetter integrates with your chosen web browser and takes over the handling of the download task(s).

iGetter allows you to queue up downloads, have multiple downloads running, schedule timed downloads (for example when your ISP has less traffic), resume interrupted/broken downloads (this depends on the website you are downloading from as it’s protocol dependent), and perhaps one of the most important features is iGetter can open many connections to one site, each connection or stream will download a different section of the same file, in most cases this allows for blazingly fast downloads (bandwidth allowing). Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s Safari web browser is built around the open source web engine called Web Kit. This is developed by the open source community and updated each and every day (and is recompiled nightly).

This ensures that the browser’s ‘engine’ is the most up to date possible, supporting emerging standards and compatibility. Additionally you benefit from faster rendering of pages and their content.

Web kit is available for both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems so the vast majority or users are covered (sorry Linux users!). The Web Kit runs Safari as the front-end application but with Web Kit as the rendering engine running “under the hood”.

To quote the Web Kit site:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60′s S60 WebKit development.

The Web Kit open source home is at webkit.org to download either the Mac OS X or Windows version click on the nightly builds button:

To test your current browser you can run Acid3 Test <- note: this link runs the test. The Acid3 test puts the Read the rest of this entry »

[ Please ensure you have the Firmware Restoration CD 1.6 available BEFORE attempting any firmware operations. This is best practice and a very sensible precaution ]

Apple have released new firmware for their MacBook and iMac computers, I had quite a few problems with the firmware upgrade this morning so thought a brief summary of my fix may be helpful to others:

I went through the process as advised and applied the firmware upgrade. As instructed I shutdown and then held the power button down on my (mid-2007) iMac until the long beep. Each time I tried this the iMac just booted normally and did not enter the updating procedure.

Now, I have an EFI firmware password set so just in case this was preventing the upgrade I booted from my install DVD and cleared the password. I then re-ran the firmware update and following the ‘long beep reboot’ everything went as it should and I saw the progress bar etc.

After all had completed successfully I then booted from my install DVD again and re-applied the EFI firmware password.

A bit of a pain but security comes first, at least for me it does.

If you use Flickr and like to geotag your photos, storing map location info along with each shot then a great little utility to help you achieve this can be found at sumaato blog.

Simply drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark bar (most major browsers are supported), then when you are viewing one of your Flickr photos click the bookmarklet and Google Maps appears and off you go. A great time-saving tool that adds a feature lacking in Flickr (who sadly use Yahoo Maps) .

Thanks to my good friend Ian for this tip. His Flickr photos can be found here and mine can be found here.

By default Firefox only opens one connection at a time when loading a web page.

On fast broadband connections this isn’t usually too much of a problem but should your speed drop at busy times, or if pages seems to load slowly there’s a great little tweak you can implement called “Pipelining”.

It’s also beneficial to fast connections as speed increases can still be seen.

Once ‘pipelining’ is set-up Firefox, will (by default) open many connections simultaneously to the website and retrieve the all the page’s elements in one go. Even on my fast broadband connection this has made a huge difference to my browsing page load times.

To enable Pipelining follow the simple steps below (it looks harder than it really is, in fact it’s fairly simple):

1. In the Firefox address bar enter: about:config and press return/enter
   This displays the internal configuration and system settings of Firefox
2. If prompted, accept the warning message that cautions against modifying the system settings:

   

3. In the filter/search field enter: network.http
4. This restricts the list to the entries for the HTTP protocol

   Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note regarding web browsers (aimed mostly at new Mac users). When I used to/had to use Windows I used Internet Explorer (IE) and then progressed to Firefox. On Apple Macs IE is not available (hurrah!) so what are your choices?

My 3 main browsers of choice are:

Firefox – Available at getfirefox.com

Camino – Available at caminobrowser.org

Safari – Available at www.apple.com/safari

Depending on the website you visit you may find one of the above browsers more suited than others (for example, Camino for Wordprss blog editing).