Demo Girl

Readability is a bookmarklet that allows you to quickly remove distracting ads from a Website.  Just choose the text and margin size you prefer and drag the bookmarklet up to your bookmarks toolbar.  Whenever you’re on a site that is cluttered with too many distractions, click on the Readability bookmarklet and you’ll be presented with an ad-free environment to read your article.

Before:

SFWeekly article before the Readability Bookmarklet is enabled

…and after:

SFWeekly article after enabling Readability bookmarklet

To see Readability in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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PowerTwitter is a Firefox Add-on that provides you with some much needed features within your Twitter account.  It allows you to search Twitter right from your homepage, view media in-line, and expands links within Tweets so you know what you’re clicking on. I’ve been using PowerTwitter for a few months now (previously reviewed here), and so far I’ve been relatively happy with the feature list.  Last night I noticed that there was an updated version that had been released and after I installed it, I realized that even more features had been added.  Unfortunately, what I didn’t find was any sort of help or detailed list from PowerTwitter explaining just what I was looking at.  They do have a Get Satisfaction page where users can post questions and report any problems they might be having, but there is no real documentation of how to effectively use PowerTwitter.

Some of the notable new features are:

• Saved recent searches
• Post photos right from your Twitter account
• One-click ReTweet
• Shrink URLs quickly from your account
• PowerTwitter settings so you can choose what features of PowerTwitter you want to use

To see the updated PowerTwitter in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full-screen):

[wpvideo UlccSzbk]

Juice is a Firefox Extension that delivers relevant videos, photos, and news right to your sidebar.  Juice also allows you to store videos and photos in your sidebar to view later.

After you install Juice, just highlight any bit of text that you want to find more content on and drag it and drop it to the right.  Almost instantly your sidebar will pop open with related Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, and news stories.  You can watch videos right from the Juice sidebar and save them to view later.  You can also drag any images or videos into your sidebar to save for future reference.

To learn more, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 2m54s

KwiClick is a Firefox Add-on that allows you to perform searches and look up information without having to leave the page you’re on.  It’s currently an experimental Add-on, so keep that in mind if you’re planning on testing it out.

After you install it, you’ll see the KwiClick favicon in the lower right corner of your browser window.  When you click on it, it will pop open a window where you can perform searches on Google, Google Maps, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Technorati, Amazon, Delicious, and Friendfeed.

Besides doing searches, KwiClick will also come in handy when you’re on a site that contains Flickr photos or YouTube videos.  You’ll see a set of icons on top of the photo or video that allows you to view the contents in the KwiClick window.  You can also view related photos or video, view comments, and share the media via email or on various social networking sites.  All of this takes place in the pop out window so you never need to leave the site.

I would like to see some more features added like the ability to search for restaurant reviews on Yelp, listings on Craigslist, news stories, and the ability to do a Twitter search.  With that said, KwiClick is in the experimental stage and will most likely be releasing features I didn’t cover in this screencast.  To see KwiClick in action, watch the screencast below:

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[via Go2Web20 Blog]

The other day a friend of mine suddenly freaked out when he saw a long list of bookmarks drop down every time he started typing a URL into the address bar in Firefox.  I couldn’t understand the confusion because I thought everyone knew about “The Awesome Bar” in Firefox 3 and how to disable it.  Well, it turns out that he had just installed Firefox 3 and knew nothing about the “helpful” Awesome Bar.  It was very clear that he didn’t want any part of it so I sent him a link explaining how to disable it.  The response I got was, “That looks confusing, I’ll just install the old bar”.  I found that unacceptable and decided that if he didn’t know how to disable it, others may not either.  It’s a very quick fix and I think the screencast below should help anyone who would rather see how to disable it rather then read about how to disable it.  Oh, and I just noticed that it seems The Awesome Bar is now called the Smart Location Bar.  Whatever it’s called, if you want to learn how to make it stop, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 1m13s

Ubiquity is a new experiment from Mozilla Labs that allows you to take bits and pieces of the Web and make them work together just by typing in basic text.  It’s an Extension for Firefox that allows you, as the user, to decide what Ubiquity should do.  This happens by giving Ubiquity commands.  On the developer end, it allows you to create commands that other people can subscribe to and use.

I installed Ubiquity this morning and have, and can not, stop using it.  I also recommend checking out new commands that are being developed.  To see Ubiquity in action, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 3m55s

Remove It Permanently (RIP) is a Firefox Extension that allows you to remove images or text from a Web page with a simple right mouse click.

After you RIP something, it will be deleted until you choose to undo it in your RIP options.  Besides being able to remove annoying banner ads or Myspace graphics, you could also install RIP on a friends computer and RIP images from sites that they frequent.  Imagine their surprise when they go to facebook and there’s no more facebook login screen.  I don’t think that’s the purpose of RIP but I have a devious mind.  To see RIP in action, watch the screencast below:

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[via Download Squad]

With the newest version of Firefox up and running, and only crashing about 4 times a week, I thought I would show you some Add-ons that are compatible with my record breaking browser of choice.

WikiLook is an Add-on that allows you to look up the definition of any word on a web page, without needing to open up new tabs or windows.  You don’t even need to click a button on your mouse because WikiLook knows what you want by the way you hover your cursor over words.

All you need to do is press the shift key and point your cursor over the word you want to look up.  WikiLook will wait a couple of seconds and then a window will pop open with a list of definitions from Wiktionary.  If at any time WikiLook gets in your way, you can easily toggle it off or on by pressing the “A” button in the lower right corner of your browser window.

ReminderFox is a really handy Add-on for anyone who is a fan of to-do lists and for those people who like to set reminders for everyday tasks.  It’s always there, in your browser, so if you spend a lot of time in front of your computer, ReminderFox isn’t going to let you forget about important tasks or appointments.

Once installed, you’ll see a little pink ribbon in the lower right corner of your browser window.  You can hover over that to see your most upcoming reminders and to-dos.  Double click on it to open up ReminderFox and set your reminders.  You can also add alarms to your reminders and to-dos which will pop open a window at the time you selected.  Your most important tasks will be kept visible in the lower right corner of your browser, so you’ll always see what needs immediate attention.

Panic is a Firefox Add-on that will help you get away with looking at naughty web pages while at work.  Naughty can be anything – YouTube videos, Craigslist, LOL cats, Twitter, or the more obvious, porn.

The way it works is simple – After you install Panic, you’ll want to go to the settings which is under “Tools” and “Add-ons”.  By default, when you enable Panic, it will close all of your naughty tabs and open up to a Google search about “increasing workplace productivity”.  You can change that to whatever you want though.  Then choose the key and modifier you want to use to enable Panic.  That’s pretty much it.  Whenever big bad boss-man sneaks up behind you, just hit the keys you chose and, almost instantly, all that will be on your screen is the website you chose in your Panic settings.  The only feature I’d like to see is a way to reopen your tabs that you closed.

If you’d like to see all of these Firefox Add-ons in action, check out the screencast below!

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 4m41s

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

Here are three sites that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, other than the fact that they all require you to type in some text in order to use them.  Happy Friday…

Soungle is a search engine for sound effects.  It’s pretty straightforward – Enter in the sound you want to hear, like a cat yell, and, if available, Soungle will give you a page of sound effects that you can download for free.  I’ve actually been looking for something like this for a while, so expect to hear some of Soungle’s effects in my screencasts in the future.  [via MakeUseOf]

Wordle allows you to make stunning word clouds out of any text you enter into the site or out of a del.icio.us users tags.  You can customize the font, layout, and colors and save it to the Wordle gallery.  Another idea I had was that you could make a word cloud out of a poem, print out the word cloud, and write the poem on the inside like a card.  Cheesy?  Probably.  I turned my word cloud into my desktop background and it looks pretty neat, if I do say so myself.  [via Lifehacker]

Tinypaste gives anyone a simple way to get around Twitter’s 140 character rule by shortening your text.  So, instead of creating a tinyURL to link to your blog post, I suppose you could write out a blog post on tinypaste and create a link that way.  Tinypaste doesn’t specify that its sole purpose is for Twitter so you can use it for anything you like.  The most useful part of tinypaste is the Firefox Extension that allows you to create a link to any text you select on a web page. [via Download Squad]

To see all of these awesome “word related” applications in action, watch the screencast below:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 4m46s

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

Yesterday, in my world, everyone seemed to be talking about Firefox 3 and whether or not they had downloaded it, how great it was, and the problems they were having.  But after I left my make-shift office to meet some friends to watch the AMAZING Celtics/Lakers game, I realized that not everyone was as pumped up about Firefox 3 as I was.  As we huddled around the table, one person said, “so, did everyone download Firefox 3 today?!” and the other 6 people sort of looked at each other and one even said, “oops!  I forgot”.  I then briefly mentioned how 90% of my bookmarks were lost and how one of my most needed features, that allows you to quit Firefox but save all of your tabs, didn’t even work.  So, even though Firefox seems to have broken a world record for most downloads in 24 hours, it doesn’t seem to be a priority for everyone, and I’m probably going to switch back to the previous version later today (thanks Paul!).  With that said, I still decided to create a screencast showing off some of the features you’ll see after you download it.

Let me start with the “awesome bar”, as Mozilla likes to call it.  The awesome bar is what is also known as the address bar in your browser, or what my Mom likes to call, the place where you type in “Google”.  It’s supposed to predict what you’re looking for by suggesting websites you frequent and bookmarked sites that you’ve tagged, right when you start typing.  So, if I simply type a “g”, Google would appear first, since that’s the site I frequent most that starts with the letter “g”.  At first I was really annoyed with the awesome bar because there’s no way to disable it and when I create screencasts, I don’t need a list of websites appearing when I’m typing in my address bar.  Thankfully, this morning I came accross a video showing how to turn it off!  I can see how it will be useful, but it’s not for me.  Firefox 3 has also made bookmarking and organizing sites easier and allows you to search for and install add-ons right from your “tools” add-ons menu.  There is increased security, quick zooming in and out, and a better way to manage your passwords.  If you’d like to see what else Firefox 3 has in store for you, watch the screencast below:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 4m18s

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!