Maximize iGoogle Screen Estate with Super iGoogle Greasemonkey Script!

Hope you're still enjoying Firefox 3, I know I am. So much so that for the past few days I've gone on a browser tweaking RAMPAGE. This latest release really just reignited my passion for making the most of my regular browsing experience.*



First and foremost, I've finally began understanding what the big deal is with Greasemonkey, the Firefox extension that allows you to modify and customize the appearance and function of specific websites. I'd showcased only one Greasemonkey script before, for Google Analytics, but never really paid too much attention past that.



Well, today I'm showcasing Super iGoogle, a Greasemonkey script written by stinkinrich88, showcased on Greasemonkey script repository userscripts.org. What does it do? Well, take a look for yourself. The left is the old iGoogle, second is Super iGoogle:







Wow! I've always HATED how a full quarter of the top screen real estate of iGoogle is taken up by the Google search header. As a person who's obsessive about maximizing screen real estate, and someone who uses search keywords in his address bar, that search bar and header's just about the most wasteful thing out there.



Super iGoogle features, as ripped off directly from the userscripts site:

Summary:

• Header removed


• "Toggle Header" button added to top-right link-bar


• Footer removed


• Mini search form added to right-hand side of tab bar


• "Add stuff" link moved to top-right link-bar


• "@googlemail.com" removed from your e-mail address


• Your e-mail address is made a hyperlink to compose a new e-mail


• All tab corners are rounded


• You'll get all the girls

You hear that? GIRLS!



If you don't have Greasemonkey yet, you can get it from here, and once it's installed, you can click on the "Install This Script" button at the Userscripts site, and it'll be pretty straightforward from there. Note that if your iGoogle page requires using a secure protocol (https:// as opposed to http://), change the sites affected by the Greasemonkey script accordingly.



*and that really is the point of tweaking stuff out, making the most of the experiences that you go through daily (or even more frequently), like checking email, reading news, and just browsing in general. It isn't as practical to obsessively tweak out programs and tasks you don't use very often.

Learnit Lists Updated With Audio!

Learnit Lists, which I'd originally reviewed (and praised) as a good way to get a daily dose of foreign language vocabulary words. They even commented on my review. Well, Learnit has been updated with some extra features which increase its value, but it doesn't do it all seamlessly.



First of all, I had to remove the old gadget and install the new one, when it really should've just updated itself automatically. I was hounded by a notification that my original version was old, but never really explained how I was to get the new version. You can get the new version here.



Past that, the biggest new feature is the listen and speak mode. Working off of a credits system, you can listen to the proper pronunciation of a word for one credit, and you can earn credits by recording words in your own native language. This is a novel way to expand the system's vocabulary very quickly, and the extra interactivity is pretty awesome.



My main complaint is the gadget's screen size. I had complained before that the original version took up way too much space on my iGoogle page, and in their response to my review, Learnit said they would look into the matter. Well, in this new version, the gadget itself takes up less room indeed, but the actual frame that carries it seems EVEN BIGGER. It's still easily the biggest gadget on my already cramped page, and with a layout and design that doesn't really match any other, it sticks out like a sore thumb. I once again call for a more compact, elegant solution that incorporates the other features as well.



Overall, it's still a good gadget, and with this latest version in beta, more features are forthcoming. Far from perfect, it's still recommended (and recommended over the older version).

Added: iGoogle Gadget Label to Blog

This coming holiday weekend, I just wanted to direct everybody towards the newly added iGoogle label in the tag cloud to the right which should specifically highlight the various iGoogle gadgets, themes, and tweaks we have featured here in the past.

And of course, don't forget to drop a note in the comments for other gadgets you think are especially useful, and stay tuned for more gadget reviews coming your way!

Rotten Tomatoes iGoogle Gadget Review

If you're a movie buff at all, you know that Rotten Tomatoes consolidates as many reviews for a particular movie as possible, and gives it a grade based on what percentage of the reviews were positive versus what percentage were negative. For the obsessive out there, it's a good site to give you a glimpse of what movie this weekend to go and see.



The Rotten Tomatoes gadget for iGoogle makes it easy to see the weekend's upcoming movies and what their "Tomato-meter" is, by having it displayed in your gadget. Like most of the best gadgets out there, it gives you the information you need without having to navigate to a different site or clicking on different links.



It installs just like all other gadgets, and requires no sign-in or login at all. You get only one setting to tweak the gadget, and that's to show a synopsis of the movie alongside the link to its page and its Tomatometer. Since there's no setting to choose how many movies are displayed, I choose to keep the descriptions hidden because the gadget can only fit three movies versus five without descriptions.



You can also choose between a list of the past weekend's top movies (it doesn't show how much money they made, it's just ranked by such), or of upcoming movies. I'd assume one would be more interested in viewing the upcoming movies. However, the screenshot I've got shows the past weekend tab.



That's because I've personally tried to not drown myself in movie reviews for movies I haven't seen yet but are very eager to go see. In this upcoming weekend's case, I don't want to spoil myself on Indiana Jones IV reviews. But if you DO want to know what the nation's critics feel about Indy IV or any other movies about to come up, this gadget lets you get your fix at a glance.



If you want to check out other great gadgets that I personally use in my iGoogle page, check out the google label for this site.

Check out Responses to Reviews by the Authors Themselves!

I love the idea that some of the authors and creators of the applications and programs I've featured on this site have taken the time to personally respond to my thoughts on the matter. It shows an active desire on their part to seek out opinions of their product, and strive to take those comments into consideration. What's great is I know that I already love these products (or else I wouldn't use them), but these guys are promising that they'll get even better.

Here are three comments I've received from the creators themselves in response to my reviews and feature articles:

Rentometer Lets You Compare Your Rent W/ Your Neighbors!

Arvin, thanks for covering the Rentometer!

A few things that I think you'll be happy to know.

First off, although we do save user-entered data for future use, we do not currently use it in our comparisons.

Because of that, we have the luxury of computing our statistics using recent rental listings, so our statistics are intended to provide an snapshot of the current market.

Thanks again for the coverage! Feel free to check out our FAQ or contact us if you have any other questions!

Take care,
Owen Johnson
President
Rentometer

To-Do-List iGoogle Gadget: The Only One I Use

Thanks for the review, Arvin!

I recently updated To-Do List to comply with Google's latest requirements. The gadget is now served from a different Google server than before, and it seems that Google isn't associating everyone's old data with the new To-Do List code. Some people have been able to retrieve their data with this workaround.

If that doesn't do the trick, please contact me. Google provides a contact link for each author if you visit the About page for the gadget, click the author's name, then click Contact on the next page.

I'm Trying to Learn Spanish with Learnit Lists

Hello, this is Nicola from Learnit.

I'm really glad you're using our widget, but it's a shame there's the problems with the Tagalog translations. I'm just going through the word list at the moment to remove any obvious errors - like where the word doesn't get translated.

Our strategy is that we will get each language translation checked by a professional, human translator as soon as we can. For now, we're reliant on users flagging up any mistranslation, but all the translations will be checked before it comes out of beta.

We are about to launch our next version of the widget, with some of the functions people have requested - like grammatical info, tests, sound, speech & context. You're very welcome to join the private beta test of this if you'd like to.

Your comment about the size of the widget has got me thinking... we could produce a learnit widget lite version for people who need the words only, and none of the additional functions. You will also be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for an ultra lite version.

I hope you'll like our new version,
Nicola

Thanks again everyone, I look forward to seeing the next step in all of your projects!

Google Analytics iGoogle Gadget: Currently Buggy, Still Good

I've blogged about my preferred iGoogle gadgets before, and as you may have read, I'm willing to give them a bit of leeway in terms of bugginess if they still serve a good purpose. That same mantra applies to today's gadget.

The Google Analytics gadget isn't an official Google gadget like you'd think; it was written by Chris McKeever and provides a simple, quick view of your Analytics stats right on your home page. For stats-whores like myself, adding this was pretty much a no-brainer.

Important heads-up about using this gadget, you need to be on a secure server to see the stats. If not, the gadget will tell you. That basically means that instead of going to http://igoogle.com, you just need to go to https://igoogle.com. I changed my homepage to go to the secure site, for this reason.

The GA gadget offers an hourly view and a daily view. Unfortunately, ever since GA's recent addition of the weekly/monthly/yearly view options, the gadget's hourly view has broken and only shows the total for the current day. The gadget's site seems to have made notice of this issue, and hopefully it'll get fixed soon.

The other, honestly bigger bug that this gadget has is that it honestly only shows the graph about half the time. The other half, the box for the gadget is there, but nothing appears. I haven't yet figured out why it does that, but for now I'm happy enough with its functionality that I'm willing to sacrifice home-page space for it. If/when these bugs are fixed though, BOOYAH!

iGoogle To-Do List Hack For New Entries

A few days ago I referred to a weird and almost crippling bug regarding Matt McCarthy's To-Do-List Gadget for iGoogle, in which it was suddenly impossible to add new entries or cross off/delete old ones (i.e. the list became read-only.)

I brought the issue up on the gadget's homepage, and saw that other people were having the same problems. Matt, the author, even left a comment on my original review to let me know that he's looking in on the problem.

Meanwhile, however, I've found a temporary fix to the problem. I don't know if you knew, but To-Do-List can actually handle multiple lists, potentially for different categories of to-do's. You can access these other lists by hitting the menu button and clicking "Edit Settings."

Now, if you were to switch to a different list from the one that's stuck, you should be able to add/remove entries as needed. This is slightly annoying for people who use multiple lists (I don't, but I might start a separate lists for blog entry ideas), but for those who don't, this is a perfectly working solution now to, again, an otherwise great application.

iGoogle To-Do-List Gadget Seems to be Presently Buggy

It's just ironic that as soon as I feature the simplistically satisfying To-Do-List iGoogle gadget, it starts acting up. Specifically, tasks that I'd already finished, crossed off, and altogether removed return when I come back to my iGoogle page. It's been like this at least since I blogged about it (my to-do-list is still populated with notes for myself to do a review of Foxit, for example).

The homepage of the gadget seems to point to server problems according to the author, and another user has made a comment regarding the same problem I'm having.

I don't think this will continue to be much of a bother, and I still recommend the gadget, but I do want to back up my promise of being totally honest about the things I feature on this site.

To-Do-List iGoogle Gadget: The Only One I Use

While I prefer to use a daily planner (in my case, Thunderbird's Lightning extension, more on that later) when it comes to appointments and intensive time management, on the days when I've just got too many little things to do (that don't need to be done in any particular order or in any amount of time), there's nothing better than having a to-do list to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. That's where Matt McCarthy's To-Do-List iGoogle gadget comes in.

The trick to to-do lists is that entering and crossing off tasks should take significantly less time than doing the task itself; if not, you're better off just doing the task right then and there. To-Do-List for your iGoogle homepage is perfect for that in that all you have to do is click on the gadget to add a new task. And then when you finish the task, you can either click on the task itself to cross it off, or click on the right end of that task's row to remove it from the list altogether.

Another touch that I really appreciated in this gadget is that you can specify how many rows high the gadget's window takes up. When you've got as many gadgets on your homepage as I do (currently 11, and I don't believe in using iGoogle's tabs... it's called a home page for a reason), being able to customize its size is really important.

And finally, because it's part of your iGoogle page, To-Do-List is accessible from any computer that has internet access as soon as you sign into your Google account. Perfect if you want to remind yourself in the morning to do something at the office.

Overall, To-Do-List is without a doubt the quickest, most convenient way to make sure all those tiny tasks get done!

I'm Trying to Learn Spanish with Learnit Lists

Learnit Lists is a widget that can be used in your iGoogle page that presents you with 10 new words every day translated into a language you want to learn. In my case, living in Los Angeles, I figured I might as well devote minutes of my day expanding my Spanish vocabulary.

You need to register with Learnit to be able to select the language you want to learn (if you don't, you can only get Czech translations). They offer 15 language pairs, from the usual suspects of languages one usually finds in these things.

I did notice, however, that when I selected the Tagalog (Filipino) translations, the translations were sometimes either incorrect or missing altogether (it would just repeat the English word). So I wouldn't necessarily suggest Learnit if you want to learn the less popular languages offered.

Learnit also doesn't conjugate verbs, and it doesn't even notify you of what type of word it is (you wouldn't know if it was the noun "watch" or the verb "to watch."). As such Learnit can only really expand your vocabulary, but not teach you any grammar at all.

Another feature that I wish Learnit offered was to recall the words I'd learned in previous days, to make sure that what I was learning stuck.

My final critique was that the widget itself, while simple looking, seemed to take up entirely too much space. I had to reorganize my entire iGoogle page to balance all my widgets out, and Learnit is the largest widget by far. For something that's essentially just a list of 10 word pairs, it can certainly be much more compact.

I may seem like I'm ripping into Learnit, but the truth is, it's still installed in my homepage, and I don't see myself uninstalling it. I do, however, look forward to it being updated and upgraded, and I'd love to learn of better alternatives that are as immediately convenient as Learnit was when I first got it. I highly suggest you try it yourself.

Thunderbird, Firefox, and Backups, October 10, 2007

Continuing from excerpts taken out of my "private journals" written back in October of 2007.

On the internet side of things, I've started taking advantage of Mozy, a free online backup tool that gives you 2 gigabytes and a program that automatically backs up certain file types and folders you specify. I'm not a huge fan of adding more background running programs, since I was already running google desktop, but I couldn't think of any other way to make sure the backups are made... I think I'd just forget. I might learn Windows Scheduler if I can use that somehow, but for the moment I need to start referring friends to it so I can get the free gig per referral.

With my being given a huge external hard drive for backups by [the production], hopefully the inevitable hard drive crash won't be nearly as overwhelming now, although there is a lot more data at stake the next time it happens.

On a related note, I researched remote desktop utilities on the hope that should I forget stuff at home, I can always connect to my home computer and look it up. Unfortunately for the moment I wasn't able to find a full featured freeware option that was also secure enough right out of the (digital) box. I'll have to shelf this idea for the moment until I can find the time to devote to it.

For Firefox, as with the others, it was all about tweaking the most performance out of it, uncluttering the desktop as much as possible, and using extensions that take those extra windows and mouseclicks down. I was also able to find a program that made backups of my extensions and tweaks, as by this point I'd made so many changes to the program that I wouldn't remember how to restore it in case I have to start over.

One extension [Searchwords] involved adding keyboard shortcuts as substitutes for using the search window. Now I can just install a search engine, give it a code letter like "g" for google or "y" for youtube, and just type "y jurassic park" into the address bar and it searches youtube for jurassic park clips. This took down the number of input bars on Firefox from 3 to 1, and gave it so much more room.

Online wise, I've started using iGoogle, which is a customizable home page portal where I was able to get notifications and previews of my email and yahoo mail, weather, and other gadgets like dontbreakthechain and a calendar.

(editor's note: Dontbreakthechain is the web application I used to keep track of my exercises and other daily routines, like making my bed)

Most importantly, though I was also about to put an RSS reader into the igoogle page, namely Google Reader. Now I'm able to keep up to date on all my favorite blogs in one place, saving me having to do a lot of typing and clicking. I'm excited whenever I get to bookmark yet another interesting blog, knowing that I'll never forget to check it in the future.

Thunderbird went through the same treatment of extensions and consolidation and purging of unnecessary buttons. Most importantly, though, I finally went super nuts on putting everything into categorized folders. I'd done this to my laptop back when I was in Jersey but importing the organization into my desktop did not handle very well. I still need to reinstitute all the filters I had to put them all in the right folders, along with probably having to create folders for the "Sent" folder as well.

Finally, I've started using Autohotkey, a batch process program to let me open and close multiple programs in one doubleclick. Eventually I'd like to learn to write batch programs myself, but for now this is an excellent choice.

The preceeding wasn't changed much from the original entry back in October, other than adding links to the respective applications. As such, many of these tweaks have become obsolete (upgraded or removed altogether).

Don't fret though, cause I plan on catching up real soon. I just wanted to really let you in on the process by which I got to my present configuration.