Now that Firefox 3 has fixed the majority of the problems that Firefox 2 had,  I’ve decided to go back to it.  The only problem with Firefox for me now is that I’ve gotten so use to some of the features in Safari I simply can’t live without them.  So I went on a hunt around the firefox add-on site to try and find some add-ons that will get me some of Safari’s functionality in Firefox.

GrApple Theme

http://www.takebacktheweb.org/

First thing I wanted was the look of Safari because quite frankly the new Firefox Mac theme is appalling, so I installed the awesome GrApple theme.

Quartz PDF Plugin

http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/

This add-on will allow you to open PDF’s in firefox.  It’s still in early development from what I can gather but it hasn’t failed on me yet.

The Fission progress bar

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1951

Fission adds a progress bar behind the address bar like in Safari.

Smart Stop/Reload

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7401
(Experimental requires login)

This add-on merges the Stop and Reload button into one.

URL Link

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/403

The feature I liked most in Safari was being able to highlight a text URL link and open it up in a new tab without having to copy and paste it into the address bar.  This add-on lets you do that in Firefox.

Open With QuickTime

Open the movie with QuickTime Player.  If the movie is on two seperate files go ahead and open the second file so both parts of the movie
are now open in QuickTime Player.

Skip To The End

Now what you need to do is skip to the end of the first part of the movie in QuickTime Player.

Select All

Next, go to the second part of the movie thats open in QuickTime Player and choose Edit > Select All.

Copy The Movie

Now choose Edit > Copy to copy all of the second part of the movie.

Paste Onto The End

Now go back to the first part of the movie and choose Edit > Paste from the menu so that we now have both parts of the film together.

Save Movie

Staying with the full movie we now made choose File > Save As from the menu.  Give the movie whatever name you want and then choose “Save as a reference movie” from the two options at the bottom of the window, then click Save.

Import The Movie

Now we need to import the newly made film into iTunes, to do this simply drag the (the-name-you-saved-the-film-as).mov file onto “Movies” in the iTunes sidebar.  You should then see iTunes say its importing it and once thats finished the movie should be in iTunes, HOORAY!

You Might Want To…

What you might want to do now is edit the movies tags so it has all the correct information and artwork to go with the movie.  To do this right click the movie in the list and choose “Get Info”.

Add Info

Select “Info” from the tabs and then put in all the details about the film you want (you can find all this information by searching http://www.imdb.com).

Add Artwork

To add the artwork click the “Artwork” tab and simply drag the image you want to use onto the window and then click “OK” and your finished.  For movie posters I use http://www.impawards.com/.

Download MiddleClickClose here.

Firstly the site has had a facelift  courtesy of me and a few hours of work Secondly I’ve ditched the blog I made using Ruby on Rails and instead am using Wordpress.

Hope you like the changes,
b0bd0gz

1. Download and install CocoaThumbX
2. Load it up and check “Remove Thumbnail”
3. Drag the files that are blurry in Coverflow onto CocoaThumbX
4. Wait a second or two for Coverflow to reload the thumbnail, and hey presto you should have lovely crisp thumbnails.

Useful Mac Sites

• UsingMac.com
• OS X Daily
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• LifeHacker Mac Tip Articles

Mac Customization

• IconFactory
• MacThemes 2.0
• Leopard Docks

Mac Icons/Wallpaper

• MacThemes 2.0 Releases and Updates Forum
• McDo Design
• Pixel Resort
• Jonas Rak Design
• Louie Mantia

Quicklook Plugins

• QuickLook Plugins List
• hrmpf.com QuickLook Plugin List

How on earth do you type #?

I do some CSS and the # symbol is kinda vital so when I looked down and searched my new keyboard for this symbol it shocked me somewhat to find it not there. After looking around I found it was there, it was just hiding. To get him to appear simply press the option + 3 and # should appear on your screen, YAY!.

Growl not working

Growl was one of the things I was looking forward to using when I switched to Mac, so I was quite annoyed when it didn’t work. After looking around I found out that it was the Logitech drivers for my Mouse, that for some unknown reason stopped growl from display notifications.

So next I hunted around for an alternative to the Logitech drivers and found SteerMouse which is an “Advanced driver for USB and Bluetooth mouse.”

After uninstalling the Logitech drivers and installing SteerMouse Growl started working and had an added bonus of Leopard booting a bit faster, WOOPEY!

MainMenu

Last thing I want to share is this brilliant bit of software MainMenu which does lots of neat things (e.g. Repair Disk Permissions, Clear User/System cahce) all from the menu bar. Go check it out.

So far our view code for generating the links to different pages looks like this

<%= paginating_links(@posts) %>

To add the next and and previous page links we need to add these lines

Previous page link

<%= link_to 'previous page', :action => 'index', :page => @posts.previous_page %>

Next page link

<%= link_to 'next page', :action => 'index', :page => @posts.next_page %>

Now that will work but when we are on the first page the “previous page” link will still be there, and when we are on the last page the “next page” link will be there, which we don’t want for obvious reasons. So how do we solve that problem?

Well we use the next_page? or previous_page? method to find out if a next or previous page exists, if it does then display the relevant link otherwise don’t display it, EASY!

Previous page link

<% if @posts.previous_page? %>
	<%= link_to 'previous page', :action => 'index', :page => @posts.previous_page %>
<% end %>

Next page link

<% if @posts.next_page? %>
	<%= link_to 'previous page', :action => 'index', :page => @posts.next_page %>
<% end %>

So after trying to find a simple solution to my problem I came across the pagination_find plug-in, which I found very easy to get working and produces page numbers that allow you to skip to specific pages.

Here’s how I used it on this website.

First I installed the plug-in, by opening a ruby console window, going to the rails apps I wanted to install the plug-in on and running this command.

ruby script/plugin install http://svn.cardboardrocket.com/paginating_find

Then I went to the blog controller (app/controller/blog.rb) and replaced the old pagination code in the index action with the new pagination code.

def index
  @post_pages, @posts = paginate :posts, :order => "created_at DESC", :per_page => 4
end

def index
  @posts = Post.find(:all, :order, => "created_at DESC", :page => {:size => 5, :current => params[:page]})

end

Next thing was to change my index.rhtml view (app/views/blog/index.rhtml) to display the pages with the pagination links.

<% @posts.each do |post| %>
  #Code for displaying posts
<% end %>

<%= paginating_links(@posts) %>

And thats all there is to it, for more options go to the pagination_find website.

One more thing, if you get a “Unknown key(s): page” error,it’s because you haven’t restarted your server after installing the plug-in.