status

Show the flag

Flagfox is what Firefox extensions are all about: ultracompact, free, open-source, and uniquely useful. When you visit a Web page in Firefox, Flagfox identifies the country hosting the site's server with a small national flag in the address bar. You can customize the information Flagfox retrieves and displays, too.

We installed Flagfox and restarted Firefox. The first thing we noticed was a small American flag in the Firefox address bar, just to the left of the Bookmark icon. Hovering the cursor over the flag icon produced a small pop-up listing the site's domain name, IP address, and server … Read more

Tip: Switch GPUs on MacBook Pros to save batteries

In the latest MacBook Pro systems from Apple (including some before the aluminum "Unibody" design), many models contain two GPUs: a discrete GPU and an "onboard GPU." The discrete GPU is a dedicated high-performance graphics chip for processing graphics data without impeding on the system's RAM and other resources. On the other hand the onboard GPU is an embedded graphics option that shares system RAM and other resources. As a result it is a slower graphics processing option, but when used the system can turn off the discrete GPU and thereby save more battery life.… Read more

Focused searches in Firefox

Here's a neat add-on for Firefox. Search Everywhere doesn't actually search everywhere; it only searches directly linked Web pages. This free extension creates a Google Custom Search Engine based on pages linked to the current page. When you enter a search term, Search Everywhere queries only those linked sites. This lets you quickly zero in on content, find hidden gems of information buried deep in large sites, and browse similar sites for related interests or content.

Search Everywhere placed its icon in the Firefox status bar in our browser window's lower right corner. Clicking this icon opened … Read more

Image links displayed

Picture hunters know that file names don't always indicate content, and it can be frustrating to click your way through a list of image files, one by one, opening and closing each, just to see what they are. Text to Image is a free Firefox add-on that displays image links as thumbnails that expand when you mouse over them.

We installed Text to Image and restarted Firefox. The program places a small hurricane-shaped icon in the Firefox status bar; clicking it toggles Text to Image on and off. Green indicates the program is active, while red means it's … Read more

Sobees: The iPad's ultimate Facebook app

Let's face it: the pixel-doubled version of the current Facebook app, well, bites. I'm sure the company will give us an iPad-optimized version at some point, but until then (and possibly even after then), I'm sticking with Sobees.

Sobees for Facebook turns your Facebook content into an attractive, neatly organized, newspaper-style page. Though it lacks many of the real Facebook app's capabilities (like chat and access to your in-box), for the moment it's my favorite way to share and browse updates on my iPad.

The "front page" consists of five handy sections: Breaking … Read more

Social updater qStatus comes to Windows

It's been a long, strange trip, but qStatus has finally come to Windows users. For those unaware, the status updating application for Facebook and Twitter began as a paid app for users with jailbroken iPhones. It later appeared on the App Store, albeit with fewer features than its jailbroken sibling (most notably a lack of being able to run in the background).

At $2.95, the new Windows app is a smidgen pricier than the iPhone version, but is packing some extra features. The nicest one being a keyboard shortcut (the Windows key + s) which brings up the app in widget form no matter what other app you're using. Here you can update your status, then dismiss it just as quickly.

As with other desktop Twitter apps, qStatus supports drag-and-drop file sharing; in our testing this worked great with photos and videos. The app lets you pick which hosting service you prefer, although it offers noticeably fewer options than rivals. You can, for instance, only choose between TwitPic and YFrog for photos, and TwitVid and YFrog for videos.

Just like the iPhone version, qStatus handles multiple accounts without a whole lot of effort on the user's part. It also adds in support for groups, which lets you select more than one account between Facebook and Twitter to update at the same time. This would be useful if you wanted to send the same message out to say three or four different Twitter accounts. Otherwise, it seems like a feature that's been built for the inevitable support for other services.

One of my favorite features is actually the status update shortener. This takes tweets that are too long and crunches them down, taking out letters where needed, and converting written numbers into digits. Normally you have to do this with a service like TweetShrink or 140it, so it's nice to simply have this built into the app instead.

Along with the paid version, which is currently on sale (as opposed to the normal price of $4.95), users can download a free version with all the features. This trial version is limited to 40 status updates before you have to upgrade. There is, however, an inventive option to include a "#qstatus" hashtag in 15 of your outgoing status updates, which provides for a year's worth of full use.

If there's anything to be said about this software, it's that it's useful--but not nearly as useful as services like TweetDeck (download), Seesmic Desktop (download), and Skimmer (download), which let you keep an eye on what your Twitter pals are up to in an organized stream. And all of those pieces of software are free of charge and cross-platform to boot. Still, if you're in the market for a very fast and lean Twitter and Facebook updater, this one's off to a promising start.

The company's demo video can be found after the break.… Read more

What to do when MobileMe is down

Occasionally Apple will need to perform system maintenance or have to deal with an unexpected service interruption. In these cases, there are some primary functions on MobileMe that will most likely be unavailable, as well as some that should still be operable.… Read more

Gmail runs into importing issues Thursday

Google encountered problems with Gmail Thursday morning for a "significant subset" of users using POP to get messages into Gmail.

The company posted a notice on its Apps Status Dashboard that was picked up by Techcrunch notifying Gmail users of "difficulties or delays receiving mail fetched via POP from external mail providers to Gmail." The problems began at some point this morning, and a more recent notice said that Google has fixed the problem for "a majority" of users.

Google said your e-mails that get imported from other accounts aren't lost; they're … Read more

Will people leave Facebook for Buzz? Fat chance

Let's say you'd constituted a drinking game for the aftermath of Tuesday's unveiling of Google Buzz, the odd new mishmash of status messages, geolocation, and social-media aggregation: Take a drink every time some pundit says Google is trying to "kill" Facebook, Twitter, or any number of the "geo" start-ups out there.

You'd have been totally blitzed.

The cries of "It's a Facebook killer!" and "It's going to kill Twitter!" are tedious, but completely understandable considering that this is one of the first big pushes from Google, … Read more