Category: Software


One week with Chrome

Filed Under: Productivity, Software by Debbie — Leave a comment
November 13, 2011

It’s been about a week since I decided to switch to Chrome. I’ve been very good about not automatically launching FF, though I noticed I still have it as the default browser. Here are my impressions so far.

The good:

  • It’s really fast. So much faster, it’s a pleasure to use – I’m not sitting here waiting on everything.
The not-so-good-but-I-found-a-way-around-it:
  • Searching in the address bar seems weird, so I got the Search Box extension that gives me a little box for searching on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Ebay and Amazon.
Still not-so-good-but-improving:
  • I find the built-in developer tools to be a little awkward but I’m getting used to it – I like the ability to look back through the cascade and see what CSS rules are impacting the element I’m looking at, but it’s not intuitive yet. The Web Developer Toolbar for Chrome is missing a couple of the tools it has in FF, and a few times this week I’ve found myself opening FF so I could quickly see what was happening with a site.

There isn’t really anything I don’t like about Chrome – it’s just a matter of getting used to it. I do miss FF but the speed difference is huge and has made work a lot easier this week.

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Moving from Firefox to Chrome

Filed Under: Software by Debbie — Leave a comment
November 6, 2011

I love Firefox. I’ve been using it as my primary browser for years – but FF7 is just too slow.  I run the minimum number of extensions that I need as a web developer: Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug, Measureit, Colorzilla and a couple of others, that’s about it. It’s just gotten way too slow.

So today I started looking around for similar extensions for Chrome, my second-favorite browser. I found a good set that will take care of most of the things I was doing in FF plus a few other things I wasn’t doing in the browser, like screenshots. It’s definitely going to take some getting used to, but the speed difference is huge even with more extensions. Here are the web design-related ones I picked:

  • Chrome Sniffer – see what CMS or Javascript libraries are being used on a website
  • Eye Dropper – a nice color picker
  • Firebug Lite – a lightweight version of Firebug designed to be used with Chrome Developer Tools
  • MeasureIt! – an invaluable ruler tool to get pixel dimensions of any web page element
  • Web Developer – the Chrome version of my go-to FF extension. Not sure if I’ll need it with Developer Tools, but it’s familiar and easy to use
  • YSlow – Yahoo’s page loading speed tool

I wasn’t thrilled with the native bookmarks so I installed Neat Bookmarks, a popup bookmark navigator. I also got TabJump which provides a popup list of recent tabs and most-used tabs, and Chrome Toolbox that has a lot of quick-access functions (like opening all the tabs in one bookmarks folder on an Alt click).

Here are some other collections of web designer/developer Chrome addons:

It feels weird (see! I’m typing this post in FF because I just open it without thinking). But I’m going to try to get used to it and see if it will work for me.

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WordPress for Blackberry!

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Software, WordPress by Debbie — Leave a comment
June 24, 2010

Yesterday I cleaned up my Blackberry curve to get rid of the ‘insufficient memory’ error and moved all my images and videos to a new 16gb media card. It’s running much faster today and I installed the WordPress app.

This is being posted from my BB using WordPress. What a great app – even better than I expected.

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Windows 7 problems seem to be resolved

Filed Under: Software by Debbie — Leave a comment
January 17, 2010

After a good solid week of headaches related to Win 7, system restore, and corrupted USB port drivers, after completing a repair install yesterday all seems to be back to normal.

This morning when I turned on the machine I found four restore points – the test one I made late last night and three others that were created during the repair install. So… it seems like the problems are gone… Fingers still crossed, but for now, okay.

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My Windows 7 repair install: light at the end of the tunnel?

Filed Under: Botheration, Software by Debbie — 1 Comment
January 16, 2010

My Windows 7 saga may be coming to a close.

During last night’s tech support call with Microsoft, I was instructed to do a repair install, an in-place upgrade of Windows 7 using the Win7 DVD. I didn’t even know I could do this.

I tried this four times. The first two times, it got halfway through (that’s about an hour) and never rebooted as it was supposed to. I rebooted it manually; that did not work and it took a while to get back into Win7.

The third time, I thought to turn off the firewall because it was giving me permissions messages when the install started. The tech support person neglected to mention this to me). This time, when it got to the point where it was hanging, it actually did reboot – but not all the way. It took me into the boot menu among other places and again failed to restart where it left off.

Then I found this excellent Windows 7 repair install tutorial on the Windows 7 forums.  I tried it the process once more with both the firewall and antivirus turned off. Same thing – it rebooted, but not all the way.  Frustrated (to say the least) I gave up and turned off the machine.

So this morning, when I turned it on, right after the ‘Starting Windows’ screen I see an ‘Upgrading Windows’ screen. 10 seconds later I’m back where it left off last night. I have no idea why it worked, but I’m certainly not complaining.

Once it finished up, I went back to the tutorial and followed the steps listed. Everything appeared to be fine, I just had to redo my settings for monitors, type, etc., nothing major.

And then the first big test – did the external hard drive, which Win7 has failed to recognize since last Sunday, actually work?

It DID! So something good is definitely happening.

I’m imaging the main internal drive right now before I do step 18 in the tutorial – disk cleanup. Hopefully that will go fine, and then perhaps I will peek at System Restore (the cause of all this trouble) to see if it’s working. I’m not quite mentally ready to do that yet, and I have a lot of work to do this weekend after missing a few days due to the Windows issues. But I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospect.

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Microsoft tech support experience… not bad

Filed Under: Software by Debbie — Leave a comment
January 11, 2010

Last Friday I discovered that Windows 7 was deleting all my system restore points on every reboot.

Since then I’ll bet I’ve spent 8 hours researching the problem and trying the most commonly reported fixes (this appears to be a surprisingly common problem in Win 7 – there were 43 posts about it on MS’s system protection and recovery forum at last count), and none of them have worked.

Today at 12:30 I found that I did have access to free support, created a ticket and called the number they gave me.

I was on the phone with two tech support people (one in the research department) for 3 hours and 42 minutes. The battery died in one of my phones and I had to switch in the middle.

My problem wasn’t solved – they’re calling me back at 2:00 tomorrow hoping to have a fix for me so I don’t have to do another install, which I definitely don’t have time for. And I don’t want to do a clean install without knowing what caused this, since it seems to be a Windows 7 bug that’s affected a lot of machines.

However, I was very pleased with MS tech support. They were extremely thorough, extremely polite, and although non-native English speakers were for the most part easy to understand.

I’m praying that I get an effective fix tomorrow and don’t have to reinstall, or sit through another 3-hour call. But if I do wind up reinstalling, I can feel confident that everything possible had been tried.

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