Freelancer's Office » Freelancer Tools

Firefox App Tabs

FreelancersOffice.com — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:07:59 +0000

I found a new best friend last night. I was working on the bazillion web pages I keep open, no, bazillion is not an exaggeration – I currently have 12 Firefox windows running a total of 29 tabs open on my computer. And that is just on the main computer, my research computer beside me has a few more web pages and tabs open on it as well. (and people wonder why I want an 8 screen system.)

Anyway, I was working on the multiple pages and tabs and went to undo having closed a tab I had accidentally closed before I was finished with it, and I noticed “Pin as App Tab” in the drop down menu. That sounded interesting, so being the curious person I am, I clocked on it to try it out.

Today I decided I needed to know what it is I am playing with, so I went looking and found information on it.

App Tabs are tiny tabs that you can set to stay on your Firefox 4 window. They condense down to just the size of the website’s icon (making it vital for webmasters to learn the value of those little address bar pictures!), and move to the far left side of the other tabs. You can still easily see what each one is by hovering over it. It can not be closed on accident, because there is no close button on the tab – only the site icon. To close an App Tab you either right click on it and select “close tab” from the menu, or you unpin it and close as normal.

Additional features of the App Tabs that I have not played with yet are very promising for how handy they really are -

Say you have a GMail account and set up an App Tab to keep your GMail open in a tab. When you get new e-mail to your GMail account, the App Tab will change color to blue to alert you that the web page has changed.

App Tabs are permanent until you tell them not to be. I have spent many hours setting and resetting my startup pages based on what I need to be working on in any given week. With the App Tabs, once they are set, they stay in place. Opening again each time you start up Firefox until you tell them to stop being App Tabs. For me, this means I can open several research pages, set them as App Tabs, then shut the computer down if I need to and get back to work the next day with the same resources I had been using the night before.

And the App Tab is a permanent little fellow, links clicked on in an App Tab will open in a new tab rather than in the same tab – even if the website’s links does not normally open in new tabs. That means you never need to worry about losing the base resource when doing extensive research online. I can not count how many times I have followed a link away from a site with great information and then could not find my way back to it because I had got to skipping back and forth on sites. Now a great resource can be set as an App Tab and there is no dear of losing it until I am finished with it.

So, how do you use the App Tab? Well, first, of course, you need Firefox 4.

At the top of the screen is the tabs for all the tabs you have open in your window… hover your mouse over one of those tabs and press the right side mouse button (right click on it) it brings up a menu:

Reload Tab
—————
Pin as App Tab
Move to New Window
—————
Reload All Tabs
Bookmark All Tabs
Close Other Tabs
—————
Undo Close Tab
Close Tab

Click the left mouse button on “Pin as App Tab” and it moves the tab to the left and shrinks the tab to the size of the site icon.
To return the tab to being a normal tab, right click on it as above and in a menu that looks very similar select “unpin tab”. That’s all there is to it.

Worlds Beyond Our Own

FreelancersOffice.com — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 09:29:41 +0000

Over at LiveJournal there is a prompt in their writing blocks asking “If you could design your own planet, what would it look like and who would live there? Describe the colors, the creatures, and the culture.”

As an Urban Fantasy writer, I think the person who asked this question might not have known just what goes into making a planet. I’ve made a few planets and let me tell you, planet creation is a bit more complicated than you might expect it to be.

You can, of course offer up a vague broad generalization, but there is a lot more to making a planet than following a makeshift “Toss this in…” recipe. Like any recipe there are certain elements that are required. I won’t go into details, but I will tell you that if you ever do want to build a world of your own you really need to check out World Building (Science Fiction Writing) and Aliens and Alien Societies (Science Fiction Writing Series), two of the best books I know on how to make a world of your own. Rather you want to create a world for a SciFi novel or a really unique setting for your fantasy series.

Testing Posting Using Motorola Milestone

FreelancersOffice.com — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:43:33 +0000

This is a test to see how it works to post to my blog using my new Motorola Milestone Smartphone. With this I will be able to keep the site updated on the go. So far I love my new Smartphone.

Who knew video conversion could be so hard?

FreelancersOffice.com — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:20:35 +0000

I’ve been trying to convert a .mov file from my dad’s HD camcorder to a format that I can edit using Windows Movie Maker. This is a very complicated process that has seen me working for two solid days now downloading and installing a converter program, testing it, uninstalling and searching for another one. Each time I went through that it was several HOURS of my computer being tied up to the point I could not do any other work with it.

So, what did I discover to be unsuitable for one reason or another? A small sampling of the failed converters:

CraziVideo
Media Coder
Screen Edit 1080
Handbrake

And the one that finally succeeded? Any Video Converter. YAY! It worked beautifully for me! I just finished conversion of the first video in a series I am making for a painting I am working on. I’ll get it uploaded onto YouTube later.

Hostory Explorer – Backups of your save points

FreelancersOffice.com — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:51:22 +0000

Have you ever wanted to go back to a previous version of your work? Maybe you closed the program and now wish you could backup to a point you had saved when you worked on it a couple of days ago?

That is what the current Giveaway of the Day program lets you do.

I was hesitant to download History Explorer at first, mainly because I am currently using my laptop and I did not want a lot of backup files cluttering my computer, however, I took a chance because I can see where the program could be very useful in my writing.

I was very happy to discover that the program lets me pick what I have it backup. When I first started it the program gave me the option to add my “My Documents” folder and I told it to “Skip” that step. I spent a few minutes familiarizing myself with the program after that, and it took a bit to figure out how to add folders (you click the Yellow Star with the green plus sign on it – you’ll see this between the yellow folder with the up arrow and the address of the folders when you do not have a folder you are viewing in your backups).

I also found where I can add what type of files I want the program to save:

Tools > Settings
Tab = Include File Types

Select “Other file types” and enter the one you want to add in the small box to the right. I entered .yw5 and clicked “add”, now my backup will backup all of my yWriter5 files as well.

You can see if the program already makes backups for your program by clicking “Show Me” beside the file types. This opens a small popup window that lets you scroll and see what file extensions are backed up.

Taking a brief tour of what I have discovered so far…

You can also set the maximum size of your database, the maximum size of files (files larger than you set will not be backed up), and calculate your current database size. You can clean it up, in which case History Explorer says it will automatically determine which files to delete and you can run cleanup multiple times to clean up more and more space.

Under the View tab you can choose to see only files that your backing up, or all of the files on your computer (great for locating the folders you want to backup when you are not having it auto backup them), you can also view deleted files and deleted version information.

Double clicking on the version or file name will open the project for you. And you can view your backed up files by the hour, 6 hours, day, week, month, 3 months, year, 4 years and even 10 years.

One complaint is that the program opens back up in MyDocuments rather than in the folder of your choice, I wish I could set it to open where I need it most, but that’s not too bad of a flaw.A guy at Giveaway of the Day had said that the program would not run in the background, that you had to have it open when using it, however, I tried closing it and opening my novel – I then closed the novel and reopened History Explorer. I did this a few times and each time it had saved another backup of my novel.

If you are a writer and might need to refer back to older versions of your articles or novels then this is a program you really should take a look at History Explorer, particularly since for about the next 12 hours from publication of this post the program is free to visitors of Giveaway of the Day.

PDF – Word Converter gone

FreelancersOffice.com — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 11:56:36 +0000

I’m not sure what the story behind it is, but the PDF to Word converter that had been on today’s Giveaway of the Day is no longer in the offering, my assumption is that the Giveaway of the Day folks swapped out what was supposed to be given away tomorrow for the PDF to Word Converter pending their being able to contact those guys and find out why the activation was not working right, but I’m not sure. I hope that it comes back up as a Giveaway of the Day, since I would love to get the chance to review that program for my writing blogs and websites. There is no way I could afford to buy it, but I think it would be a very good tool for writers – three pages of conversion does not give me enough to guage the program by, however, so I’ll have to wait and see if it is offered up tomorrow or maybe later in the week when they sort out why it was not working as a download today.

Very disappointed that it didn’t work today, but hopeful it’ll work out later on. Going to go take a closer look at the offering that have for today.

PDF to Word Converter at Giveaway of the Day today

FreelancersOffice.com — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:40:41 +0000

After my computer had massive failure and needed to be reset, I was forced to lose a lot of things, in particular the nifty programs that I had got from Giveaway Of The Day ::sigh:: I’ve been rebuilding, but it’s slow. I went with a Open Source version of the virtual desktop, but I am not as happy with it as I was with AltDesk so I will probably end up ditching it and buying a new copy of AltDesk from them guys. Thankfully many of the other programs are on my laptop, and the one I love the most, LeaderTask, was downloaded after I reset the desktop. I’m going to start offering up reviews of the programs, so I won’t get into too much detail now about them all, but they are nice programs and I miss several of the ones I had downloaded and intend to look into buying them from the companies at a later date if I can swing the finances.

For right now I am trying to download their latest offering, a PDF to Word converter. I downloaded it, and it works perfectly to convert the PDF file I had tested it on while retaining the formatting and everything, but alas, there is a problem with the file and although it shows it registered in the help info on the program, it is still acting like a trial and only converts the first three pages. ::whimper:: I’ll try again later today, see if they get a corrected version of the download up so I can download it properly. You have no idea how many wonderful uses I have for that program – well, maybe you can think of a few of them, but let me tell ya, I can think of all kinds of ways that thing can make my life easier. lol Now if I can just get a full working copy of it…

Printable Paper

FreelancersOffice.com — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:14:59 +0000

Hello, my name is Sandra and…. I am a paper addict. I love paper, the feel of it, the look of it, the way it folds and most of all the ability of it to be turned into books. When paper and writing come together I… am in heaven. So, given my love of all things paper, it is no wonder that I was immediately interested in finding out more about Printable Paper. This is a website that has printable sheets of paper that you can download as a PDF document for use in personal, organizational, or business applications. They have a few different designs, so take a look and see what kinds of paper they might have that would suit your needs.