Without letting any of my excitement down, I am going to tell you the amazing things that I found in Firefox 3. First of all the startup time of Firefox 3 is much quicker than Firefox 2. The next things which strikes as it starts is its appearance. I have fallen in love with the two little glowy buttons for back and forward browsing.

Now We Have The Awesomebar!

The show stealer of the entire futuristic parade of Firefox 3 is its address bar or awesomebar. Its awesome in its true sense. You wouldn’t even have imagined that the lame old address bar can sometimes mean so much than just typing in URL’s. With this revolutionary address bar in Firefox 3 you would soon forget having to remember URL’s.

Yes, you don’t have to remember those lengthy creepy URL’s once you have Firefox 3 in your control. The address bar is so smart it can detect  the correct URL when you just type in the actual keywords which had made you open that page. For example, if you had opened a page which contained some information on “Firefox” and later on forgot which URL you had opened, just type in “Firefox” and the page URL would prompt up the list with “Firefox” highlighted. Incredible I must say.

You may be guessing already what makes it so smart?  Well, from the past, Firefox has been keeping a store of the web page titles by caching in the URL’s you were opening up. But until the launch of Firefox 3, it was never used to good effect. Now in the new version, it makes a really good use of these title’s. Its a high probability that you would remember something in the page titles if you want to get back to the page you had visited earlier. So, its likely that instead of putting in the actual URL you would be putting the right keywords, and the right keywords are always present in? You guessed it right, in the page title of the page. This trick, has really transformed the address bar into Awesomebar.

The Amazing Download Manager

It was a lenghty wait and now the wait has been sweetly fulfilled by the Firefox 3 team. The much needed pause and resume feature of the download bar actually works in Firefox 3. Earlier, even though this feature was present, it lacked proper functioning and so you couldn’t rely on your resuming the downloads. But this time works. Yeehaa! With the amazing Download Manager you can again visit the page from where you had downloaded the file and also if you haven’t cleared the list you can search for the downloads.

I would expect the next version to have multiple simultaneous connections so that I would not have to use Flashget.

The Amazing Addon Manager

This is another show stealer after the Awesomebar. Remember those good old times when you wanted to add you favorite addons, you first searched Google or the addon’s page of Mozilla. Then you used to go to the page to read about the addon, see the ratings and then actually download the addon. Zip forward to Firefox 3, the good old days will become more better with the new addon manager. It’s got an inbuilt search engine which displays not only the relevant addon’s based on the search criteria but also the description which you would have seen on the actual addon page and it also shows you the rating! It was unbelievable for me when I saw this in action.

To be true the when I said that my behavior has changed from the instance I downloaded Firefox 3, the feature which made it happen, was the Addon Manager. I have stopped being lazy in searching addons, and since I have an embedded search option, I have started to download addons like crazy. Its driving me mad. In just a day I have found so many amazing addon’s that had made my web browsing experience much much richer. I would put up a post soon for telling you about the addons which are my favorites.

Firefox 3 is a browser that you must not wait for downloading. The record of 8 million Firefox 3 downloads in just 24 hours is enough to prove this. The world is waiting for more. So without wasting much time, grab it here fast!

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Enter Web 2.0, and you do not have to ponder much over lost time for waiting to get hold of a tool. In this era, whatever you think of is already available online. So without fretting just google up your requirement and you would be amazed by what kind of power the internet can provide you. Coming back to the question, I responded him coolly, to use an online photo editor! He was totally baffled at the thought. If you are too, then I might as well introduce to you the best tools for photo editing online.

Online Photo Editors

The most important thing for a photo editor is to provide the features such as, cropping, editing brightness and contrast, sharpening and blurring, resize, effects and saving in multiple file formats. In a standalone editor you are most likely to find these features. But in an online environment the features will be severely limited with regards to flexibility of usage, since they are entirely web based which make them complicated to implement. I will suggest you some nifty tools which would actually make your work easier and lot more fun. Browsing across several editors I would recommend you 3 of the most liked online photo editors.

1. Phixr

Phixr is an interesting tool which does not use Flash. It is completely Ajax based and has got the potential to give the user a complete satisfaction. The most likable feature I found in this was the ability to convert your photograph into an artistic polaroid snapshot, comment bubbles and effects. It gives you the facility of direct upload of the edited photo to numerous photo sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, Picasaweb and so on. Moreover, its free to use.

Its not a compulsion for registering for using the tool. You can try out the demo from the photo shown on the front page itself and check the features for yourselfs. Look what I could come up in a few minutes of playing with this tool.

2. SplashUp

If you are a Photoshop addict and cannot think of any other tool besides it, then you are in for a real surprise. SplashUp, earlier called Fauxto is a very well designed application which closely resembles Photoshop. It has the same look and feel and is completely made in Flash. The bonus of using SplashUp is that you can actually save your work in its own file format so that you can continue working on it later. It is the first online tool, to give a layered editing environment and work on multiple images at the same time without your browser getting hanged up. Doesn’t that sound exciting enough?

3. Picnik

Picnik one is one of my favorites and one of the most used tools while editing photos online. This is because, Flick has recently bought it, and it has been directly integrated into flickr. This makes editing your online flickr photos even more simpler. Just go to a flickr photo and choose the Edit Photo button, which opens up in a picnik editor mode. Check out for the humorous load messages it shows. The only thing I dislike about it is it takes a lot of time to load the photo which is not the case in SplashUp.

Picnik has a lot of amazing features to offer but they all do not come for free. Yet you are free to use some commonly used features with ease. Check out for fancy text effects and custom shapes. They are surely fantastic. With a tool like Picnik you wouldn’t need Photoshop around for common usages.

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uCertify SCWCD PrepKit comes forward as a breath of fresh air to break away the eeriness which comes to people while facing a exam. The look of the PrepKit is unique and new such that it compels us to explore more than the PrepKit itself. The practice exams are of course are the major highlights as it should be, but the features complimenting them come with a surprisingly elegant experience.

uCertify PrepKit Features

uCertify has done a commendable effort in putting together a product in making the user to develop a liking for the exam experience. The PrepKit acts like a tutor in cases you have a difficulty in answering. After using uCertify PrepKit you would feel as you have got more than what you were expecting. These reactions are not only mine but also of those people whom I have shown this PrepKit.

The features of uCertify include:

1. 4 practice exams
2. One final exam (which might be saved for the D day)
3. Adaptive tests
4. Customized tests (These are of great use)
5. Test History
6. Readiness Reports

Mock Exams

Each of the practice tests contains a number of 45 questions. I am not quite sure why they chose 45 questions when the exam should contain a set of 60 questions. The final exam consists of 40 questions. The difficulty level of the questions is somewhat easier than other simulators such as Whiz labs or JWeb Plus. They very well cover the basic aspects of all the topics. If I compare them to the exam questions, they are almost of same nature.

I have contacted uCertify myself to check on the issue of 45 questions and they did reply to me saying that the PrepKit was just in the preliminary stages. If that’s the case then you should watch out for the future releases.

Readiness Reports

The reports show the percentages you have scored in each of the tests including the custom tests. The likeable feature in this is that the reports allow you to get a retest done based on the categories. The categories include:

• Answered wrong
• Answered right
• Un attempted
• All questions

User Interface

When I opened the PrepKit the UI impressed me the most. It has a special feel of user friendliness. It is great in usability perspective and I would attribute another adjective to its aspect, which is “helpful”. This means that the PrepKit at all times keeps you aware of where you might have gone wrong and to where you should correct yourself.

Apart from the above features, uCertify comes packed with a bunch of nice features. I am separating out these features from the above ones because I have not found such features in other PrepKits. These are:

1. Study Articles
2. Tagging, Book marking, Rating
3. Interactive Quiz
4. Flash Cards

Special Features

The PrepKit has some special features such as tagging, rating of questions and book marking which can prove to be very effective. These 3 features appear in all places such as while giving the test or while going through the flash cards. So when you tag or rate a particular topic you would become more confident when you witness it again in a test or while revising.

Interactive Quiz

You don’t have to wait to finish with your preparation to give exams. This PrepKit comes with an interactive quiz feature. In this, all topics of the syllabus have a set of 12 questions each. You can choose combinations of the topics which you want the quiz to be based on. In this way, you can skip the topics you haven’t prepared and take a quiz. Based on the quiz results you can decide if you are well prepared in those chosen topics or not. You can also set a timer for each question. In my opinion this interactive quiz comes best when you don’t have the time to give a full length test.

Study Articles

You get Study articles as yet another feature. All the topics have been covered and there are in all 196 articles to read from. This feature serves the best as a last day preparation. The articles and very concise and provide many examples. They cover all those aspects which are very essential to remember.

Flash Cards

You must have seen flash cards. You may have used them to remember difficult words in English. But here you can find them in this PrepKit for remember the core concepts for SCWCD. The flash cards are based on the study articles so it might be helpful if you try to remember through flash cards after you have been through the Study articles.

Tagging / Rating / Bookmarking

The best part of tagging questions is that they can be used while creating a custom test too. Suppose you tag certain questions or topics as “difficult “ either while giving a quiz, reading flash cards or giving a test, then all these tagged questions can be clubbed together to form a new custom test. Doesn’t that sound interesting?

The same is the case for rating where you can rate any question from 1 to 5 stars. One single group can be then formed from the similar rated questions. You can also bookmark any question for further reference any time you need.

The all new ‘How To’ Feature

Hey you get a bonus too from the ‘How To’ feature. At present there is a single document which tells you how to go about using Tomcat. The document is very well illustrated. It is indeed impressive for an exam PrepKit for including practical know how’s. I hope they include more of such documents.

The current cost of the SCWCD PrepKit is USD 29.99. But you can test it with a demo version. To conclude, I will say that you should definitely give a try to the uCertify PrepKit and check it out for yourself. Even if you are willing to give any exam other than SCWCD, uCertify has a variety of simulators to choose from.

Finally, wishing you all the best from my side if you are going for SCWCD. If you have just started with your preparation then you might as well read my SCWCD preparation plan.

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The bookmarking sites are fast enough to load on entering its URL. But it is somewhat distracting to get to the required article or site by getting redirected from the bookmarking site. This is the time where the browsers URL history comes in to utmost important. And it is not a small feature to be missed out on. For me, it is THE most important feature.

An Example

For a small depiction, some URL’s like the admin interface of this site is not something I would like to bookmark nor the subscriber dashboard of feedburner and not even the statistics page from my webhost. I need them regularly and thats why I thank the browser implementation of caching recently accessed URL’s. I am a Firefox lover and here I would like to mention how Firefox scores over Internet Explorer (IE) when it comes to accessing your history URL’s with ease.

How Firefox Beats IE

It wasn’t until recently that I noticed the manner in which Firefox helps me access my history URL’s. When I type in the first letter of the site I want to visit it not only shows me list of links but the first link is always the one which I want to visit right now. I wondered to myself as to how Firefox understood where I wanted to go, at that particular moment of time. If there are 100 of sites starting with the letter “T” which I had visited in the past, sorting all these sites alphabetically, my site “TechTracer” would have ended up somewhere in the middle of the list of links. But Firefox always shows me the first link as “TechTracer”.

You would find this happening to you too but its so smalll and we are so busy that it might have gone unnoticed. However when I used IE, the thing always annoyed me that the link I was trying to reach from history always remained hidden in the list and is not shown as the first link as Firefox does. This is the point where FireFox makes a subtle yet amazing exploration at usability. And mind you, it is the most amazing yet simple concept.

The secret is simple. Firefox knows that if you have visited any URL more number of times than any other then it assumes that probably you would be visiting the same URL once again. Lo and behold! the next time you are in the thought of visiting the site then Firefox promptly displays you that URL as the first one in the list of links. It actually saves your precious time to browse through the long list. Similarly the other links in the list are also sorted according to their frequency of access.

Try this out in Internet Explorer. And you would see that IE stores the URL history sorted alphabetically and leaves you at the peril of finding yourself the link that you were interested in. FireFox is currently light years ahead of IE in terms of usability and such simple features sometimes makes me wonder at the ability of the product development team to take care of the minimalist of the surfer’s behavior.

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But after getting an experience of Snapfish it feels good to know that such a service now does exist in India and moreover its got a branded name too which is, HP.

A quick search on Google reveals the news,

Snapfish, HP’s web photo service, has finally made its way to India as www.snapfish.co.in. With around 40 million members in 15 countries, around a quarter billion pictures are added to Snapfish every month.

I made an account with Snapfish to get an experience with it. The first thing that impressed me to open an account with Snapfish was the price. Rs. 2.95 for a 4×6 photo print and Rs. 399 for a printed T Shirt is quite reasonable. The printed mug which my friend purchased for a sum of Rs. 300 comes only in Rs. 195 at Snapfish. This smells like value for money.

To get a feel of what Snapfish account has in store for you after you register in it let me show you some snapshots. First impressions are a little pale in comparison to Flickr, the photo sharing site. Snapfish itself maneuvers too as one, but the looks won’t make me move to Snapfish unless I have an urge to get something printed for a gift. It has rather an amateurish look.

Uploading of Photos

Snapfish provides you option of uploading photos either through a installable downloader or through the site page itself. The loader is pale if, again, compared to Flickr.

Viewing and Sharing

You can make albums for categorizing your pictures and later on using the same for either sharing it, emailing it to your friends and viewing it in a slideshow format online.

Printing Options

There are many options available for making a choice of a print. They include Photo Prints, Poster prints, Calendar, T-Shirts, Mouse pads, Mug, Key ring. Once you select the required product you are taken to their designer. Their is a choice of editor is a nice little feature to have since you can view how the dimensions of the selected pictures would turn out to be in the end product.

You can crop, rotate, preview before selecting a perfect fit for the product to be printed. The approved print is then shown besides the product. This can be a less impressive experience since one would expect the picture to be shown on the product itself rather than besides it.

I particularly like this print option in their list. The Calender print makes for a nice gift which has a lasting impression for a year! It allows you to first make a calender pattern choice and then gives you the option for putting in different pictures from your albums for each month of the year. The cost is something around Rs 700.

HP Snapfish is a good service for the online buyers in India and with a reasonable pricing tag it can well be afforded by any one having a credit card in hand. The courier pricing however is excluded from the above mentioned prices. If you get registered now you will get an offer of 20 free prints. So I don’t see any reason which might stop you. Now at least, I have some advice at hand for someone who asks me for a choice of a gift.

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The features not found in its prior versions are:

• Shared Reviews – Reviews are stored on a central server, allowing all participants to see reviews in real time
• Commenting – The selected comments are highlighted for easier visibility when zoomed out
• Attachments – A PDF file can have other PDF’s attached to it, as a single file or a PDF package
• Booklet printing – Can print documents in booklet format i.e you can print on both side on the paper so that it is readable like a book
• Digital signatures- Enroll for a signing service where the server holds your private key. Authenticate to the server from Acrobat and allow the document to be signed with your credentials stored on the server
• Integration with Adobe Connect- One can access the real-time, web-based collaboration capabilities of Acrobat Connect by just click the Start Meeting button to escalate from a document review to real-time communication with others over the Internet.

The Pros

Completing and submitting online forms is the most fascinating feature in the latest version. This feature is called as Online Form. There is a utility PDF feature which can help generate an XML document of the submitted information while the Check Form feature helps to authenticate the custom data fields in the forms. It also provides a spell check to identify typos and data which is filled in the forms. A different use of it comes in as a RSS Reader too. Lifehacker has written about how to use it as an RSS Reader.

Adding Attachments is another feature which throws open a new door for users in the PDF files. Imagine sending your resume in a PDF with your academic & sports certificates attachment in the same file along with comments about you from your professors, colleagues & seniors. Beyond Adobe Reader is one place which can act as reference for learning about using Adobe Reader as client for other Adobe products.

The cons

Now lets dig out to find the loose ends “Size does matter” and with approx 20 MB download size & 72 MB footprint on the OS many will feel its too much space for a PDF reader while other readers occupy only one fifth of its size. Also the software takes some time to start and open the PDF’s . At least on my system the app was slow which runs Windows XP Pro with a 256 MB SD RAM.

Conclusion

Overall the product is for sure power-packed with new features compared to its ancestors. Nonetheless, I was the most happy person using the product since it helped me in filing my IT returns online through a PDF form!

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The things to which I appreciate in the new Firefox is the session storage. It’s of a tremendous usage in daily works that if ever your browser were to close down somehow either due to an abnormal shutdown your session would be restored the next time you open your browser. It means that now, you dont have to bear the brunt if ever you forgot to bookmark a page if you have opened it and in case your system crashed or you wear typing out some details in a form when the firefox got restarted. The next time you open your browser all tabs with all the information filled in the forms would be restored.

The best thing of Firefox 2.0 is about Google Suggest being embedded into the small search bar at the top. It gives you a list of frequently searched keywords based on the keys you input into it. The search is done realtime as you type. This applies to other search engines as well as stated in their release notes. Feeds user’s like me have plenty of options in Firefox 2.0 as it gives you option to directly store the feed in Google Reader, My Yahoo or Bloglines in addition to the Live Bookmarks as in the earlier Firefox versions.

Firefox is now shipped with an inbuilt spell checker for forms. Whenever you type any kind of information in a form Firefox checks the spelling and underlines whenever it finds a wrong word. You don’t have to do the spell checking from the site’s spell checker or any of the tools. This utility saves a lot of your time while typing as you are alerted as you keep typing.

Firefox 2.0 supported all the extensions I already had in v 1.5 and now it has combined the earlier “Extensions” and “Themes” dialogs to a single dialog box called “Add-ons” which is more convenient to work with. The add-ons range is so very vaste that using Firefox 2.0 is like having the best time of your internet browsing experience. Ill be soon writing a post about my favorite add-ons sometimes later. Keep watching my space!!

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1. Introduction of tabs – The most irritating feature in the tabs is that if ther is a single tab the cross mark to close it is not visible (i.e you ougt to close the window!!). Mozilla handles this very well in a way that it shows tabs only when there is more than one tab which is more smarter. In IE7 you would definitely start searching for the close button when only one tab is present
2. Glossy interface (looks more like Opera to me) – not needed at all since it is the culprit for literally sucking memory from your RAM.
3. Anti phishing (not tried it out yet)
4. Improvised feed processing and access- Being a mozilla user and using its simplified feed access techniques I found this in IE7 out to be little more than useless. For reading a feed you have to click on the feed and then it loads up in a page. I use mozilla Firefox with Sage extension for reading feeds and I am more comfortable in it.
5. Tiled collection of open pages (not found in any other browsers) – this is definitely king size in memory consumption. I couldnt believe my eyes when I found my mouse pointer going in a frame by frame motion in the tiled mode and to talk about my system running on 1.5GHz with 384 MB DDR RAM !!

Memory Consumption – I tried single instance of browser with an empty page and made a comparison

• IE6 – 16 to 18 MB
• Mozilla Firefox 1.5 – 20 to 21 MB (even two tabs took 24 MB)
• IE7 RC1 – a whopping 40 MB and 47 MB for two tabs and 50 MB in tiled mode

The annoying thing about using IE 7 is there is no menu bar in the default view. People who have become used to the menu bar for common tasks would surely be left in wonderland !! For that you have to enable it appears beneath the address bar which is again a pain in the eye.

I guess only using only these features I feel like reverting back to Mozilla beacuse I am confident none can beat it be it in the number of extensions beign developed or the number of custom search engines. Mozilla Rulez!!

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