Software – Page 3

Firefox 29

May 5, 2014May 8, 2014 Greg Leave a comment

[sc:software-category ]Mozilla has released Firefox 29, which looks a lot like Chrome, but is that a good thing?

I’m going to go with no.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Firefox for a long time. I often find myself using it as a secondary browser, especially now that Opera 12 is getting a bit long in the tooth without any updates.

On one hand I love the customization and plugins that are available for it. You can make it pretty much anything you want.

But on the other hand I hate the amount of customization you have to do to make it liveable.

The move to a simplified interface hits at the heart of this problem. Opera has done the same thing with recent releases and has an even worse result from it. The idea is that “most” users don’t use the advanced functionality of the browser so either get rid of it or at least hide it away from sight.

This may very well be a reasonable direction to take, but it does leave a certain segment of the user base feeling like they’re stuck with a lobotomized browser.

At a high level my problem with this kind of change is that it’s an all in scenario from the organizations. There’s no “advanced” switch to enable a default set of options that would provide a more traditional browsing experience. You have to manually enable each piece and some of it you simply can’t.

So now on to some specifics with Firefox 29:

The command menu: The idea is fine, but the implementation is kind of half-baked still. The biggest issue I have is that you can’t move it. The upper right hand location is fixed and for me doesn’t flow very well. I think it’s going to take a few more iterations to add some polish to it.
Invisible tab outlines: I understand the point of these, make the currently active tab more prominent, I just disagree with how they did it. Dropping the outline looks weird, they should have greyed them out or something instead.
On Windows, the most glaring part of the new UI is what didn’t change. The default Windows controls look very out-of-place with the redesign.

Not specific to 29, my biggest pet peeve with Firefox has been the Awesome Bar, its unified controls limit how much customization you can really do to your toolbar. The other item that I always scratch my head about is the fact you can have each command/feature in only one location. Want the download button on the command bar AND in the menu? Too bad, one or the other only.

Firefox probably needed to do the redesign as it was looking long in the tooth these days in comparison to IE and Chrome and it will likely get better over the next few releases.

More likely than not I’ll have to abandon Opera 12 soon enough and the new versions of Opera are just too far behind to take seriously now. Firefox will probably replace it.

JumbleCat WordPress Plugins: Update 6

February 24, 2014February 17, 2014 Greg

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is another post in an ongoing series of articles here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first four were:

It’s hasn’t been long but there have been a few changes worth mentioning.

Plugins Added:

Custom Windows Pinned Tiles

Plugin’s Description: With Custom Windows Pinned Tiles 2, you can set up your site to display beautiful live-updating tiles in a matter of seconds.

Windows 8 brought live tiles to Windows and websites can support them with a bit of HTML. This plugin adds the required HTML and even supports using your RSS feed to update the status of the live tile on a recurring basis.

Simple Feed Stats

Plugin’s Description: Tracks feeds, displays subscriber counts, custom feed content, and much more.

It’s a little simple and doesn’t exclude robots from the stats, but it does provide some useful view of how many subscribers you have to your blog through RSS.

Simple Local Avatars

Plugin’s Description: Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles. Generates requested sizes on demand, just like Gravatar! Simple and lightweight.

I have been using the “User Avatar” plugin since the start of my blog and it’s a good plugin, however it hasn’t been updated for WordPress 3.8 and it was getting kind of annoying. The issue is that it uses a floated “div” to display your profile picture in your profile page and with the new admin color scheme’s layout it obscured some of the color schemes.

Simple Local Avatars does everything that User Avatar did but uses the standard WordPress API to add a section to the profile page, avoiding any conflicts in the future as well.

WordPress phpinfo()

Plugin’s Description: This simple plugin adds an option to an adminstrator’s Tools menu which displays standard phpinfo() feedback details to the user.

I had been using a plugin to do this for a while but it added a top level menu item, which as it was only a once in a while thing was a little obtrusive. This plugin adds it’s menu item under tools, which seems more logical.

Plugins Removed:

User Avatar

Plugin’s Description: Allows users to associate photos with their accounts by accessing their “Your Profile” page.

I removed this plugin and replaced it with Simple Local Avatars as per above.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

Plugin’s Description: All admin links available in a neat horizontal drop down menu. Saves lots of screen real estate! For WordPress 3.5+

This has been a staple of my blogging life since I started with WordPress, the old menu system in pre 3.8 WordPress wasn’t very good and took up too much room. However with 3.8 this plugin doesn’t quite work as it did. The icons are missing and there doesn’t seem to be an update coming any time soon.

So while it surprised me, I found myself disabling it and finding the new WordPress admin screen much better than before and I didn’t miss it at all.

If your still interested in this kind of horizontal menu, you might want to check out “WP Top Navigation“, which look interesting but I’m not using at the moment.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

Plugin’s Description: Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots. WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.

This had been my go to plugin for avoiding spam user registrations, however the CAPTCHA is too simple and the bots have worked out how to get around it now.

Instead I’ve enabled re-CAPTCHA in Pie Register, which has gotten around a lot of the spam. I also enabled email verification in Pie Register which has caught most of the remaining ones.

Outlook 2013 and ActiveSync

December 23, 2013December 10, 2013 Greg

[sc:software-category ]I’ve been playing with Zarafa’s mail server for a few weeks and added the ActiveSync option to try and get Outlook 2013 to sync with it. Only one problem…

Microsoft has purposely broken Outlook to only sync to Outlook.com and a few other providers the ActiveSync.

There is a workaround, when setting up the e-mail account in Outlook, an error will be displayed a “Server cannot be found” error, which is not correct. Instead of canceling the setup you have to force Outlook to close via task manager and then restart Outlook. The account will then be added.

Once restarted Outlook will sync correctly but the ActiveSync account cannot be your primary mail store so you get a local mail store as well as the remote ActiveSync account.

Clearly this is Microsoft protecting their Exchange server position in the enterprise and I don’t blame them for doing that, but its still kind of disappointing.

JumbleCat WordPress Plugins Update

November 25, 2013November 25, 2013 Greg

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is another post in an ongoing series of articles here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first four were:

It’s been a while so I thought it was time to update what I’ve added and removed.

Plugins Added:

Add Admin CSS

Plugin’s Description: Interface for easily defining additional CSS (inline and/or by URL) to be added to all administration pages.

In the previous list of addons I included Ozh’s Admin Menu settings which let’s you convert the left hand admin menu to a drop down menu style. I use the Add Admin CSS addon to add a bit of custom CSS to make the admin menu look flat, so from:

To:

Admin Post Navigation

Plugin’s Description: Adds links to navigate to the next and previous posts when editing a post in the WordPress admin.

This is handy if you want to move between posts without having to go back to the post list. Just one of those little plugins that are useful in certain circumstances and probably should be part of the core WordPress install.

BAW Post Views Count

Plugin’s Description: Count views for post and pages.

This is just a simple little page view counter, quite easy to use and adds a column to the posts list in the admin menu with the view count. It also can exclude views by logged in administrators.

Just Writing

Plugin’s Description: Adds buttons to the Distraction Free Writing Mode for all kinds of extra functions.

Distraction Free Writing Mode is nice, but really limited, this plugin gives it a bit more functionality.

Shutter Reloaded

Plugin’s Description: Darkens the current page and displays an image on top like Lightbox, Thickbox, etc. However this script is a lot smaller and faster.

A nice little plugin to make screen shots and other images pop up over the current page instead of a new window or replacing the existing one.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Plugin’s Description: See which plugins are slowing down your site. Create a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time.

This is a great performance tools, but I keep it disabled normally and just check the site every once in a while to make sure nothing is going wrong.

Pie Register

Plugin’s Description: Enhance your Registration form, Custom logo, Password field, Invitation codes, Paypal, Captcha validation, Email verification and more.

I don’t use even a fraction of the functionality of this plugin, but I do use it to put up a user notification during login that dormant accounts will be deleted after 60 days.

Schedule Posts Calendar

Plugin’s Description: Adds a javascript calendar to the schedule posts options.

Something that has always seemed missing from the WordPress admin interface for creating new posts was a way to schedule them with a popup calendar. This plugin lets you do that and also adds a quick link to the posts list so you can reschedule a post without opening it.

Shortcoder

Plugin’s Description: Shortcoder is a plugin which allows to create a custom shortcode and store HTML, Javascript and other snippets in it.

A while ago I decided to jazz up my posts with an image indicating the category they were in, but I didn’t want to hardcode the media so I use this plugin to insert the image in to the post. That way if I change a category image all I have to do is update the shortcode and all related posts will automatically be updated as well. There might be a better way to do this, but it seems to work well so I’m happy with it.

WordPress Statistics

Plugin’s Description: Website statistics tracking.

I’ve been using BAW Post Views Count for quite a while and it does provide a good view of what posts are being read, but that’s all it does. WordPress Statistics takes it a step farther and give a detailed view of all the hits on your site.

Plugins Removed:

Admin Customization

Plugin’s Description: Allows you to customize basic aspects of your WordPress backend This plugin simply adds several options that probably should be in the base WordPress control panel but aren’t.

I removed this plugin quite awhile ago and I can’t honestly remember if WordPress simply added the features I was look for or it fell out of support and stopped working. Either way it’s gone from JumbleCat now.

GTranslate

Plugin’s Description: Get translations with a single click between 58 languages (more than 98% of internet users) on your website!

This was a nice plugin, but Google broke it and I haven’t found a replacement yet.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

Plugin’s Description: The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.

I used this for a while but it had quite a few bugs and didn’t really provide a very good user interface. For my uses Schedule Posts Calendar replaced this.

IE11 in Windows 8.1

October 28, 2013October 24, 2013 Greg Leave a comment

[sc:windows-category ]IE 11 came with Windows 8.1 and being a major update (it’s not IE 10.1 after all) has a lot of changes. But they’re not for the better.

I’m not talking about the user interface here, it’s mostly unchanged from IE10, but at the low level Microsoft has made a major move towards standards compliance which hasn’t quite worked out as well as it might have.

In particular, as IE no longer sends a browser string that gets identified as IE, MANY web applications are now broken. Including some of Microsoft’s own like Outlook Web Access.

Many other like WordPress and many of Google’s apps are severely hampered as well.

Of course as the sites update this should go away and I suspect Microsoft didn’t have much choice at this point but to take this painful step, but perhaps they should have been yelling at the top of their lungs that the change was coming and to update your code appropriately.

At the moment, most of the major web apps I use are so broken that I have to use another browser to get to them.

I had to use FireFox to login to my work e-mail’s OWA the other day and I guess I will continue to have to until either Microsoft issues a patch for IE or Exchange to resolve the issue.