Willing to risk browser stability at work, I’ve installed Firefox 2.0 Beta, just for giggles. It seems to be working smoothly. The huge downer is of the twelve extensions (now called Add-ons) that I use daily, only three made the transition while the rest are in limbo till updated versions are released. No big deal, this is a beta product anyway and I should have all of them back by the final release as they are all popular extensions.

As I type this post, I realize that I’m immediately sold on Firefox 2.0’s built-in spell-check. It fucking rules! All misspelled or questioned words are automatically underlined in red as I type. I have waited so fucking long and meddled with so many damn alternative extensions to manage my inability to type like a competent person. It’s great.

RSS feeds are better supported with most of the features of the LiveLines extension being integrated. When I click the feed icon on a website, I’m prompted to choose how I want to handle feeds such as staying with the old Live Bookmarks, which i never liked or adding to Bloglines, which I’m currently using as well as some support for other readers. It’s a small improvement—really I’d rather have the answer to all my RSS gripes, but at least I have spell-checking.

I also notice that accidentally closed tabs can now be recovered, and crashed sessions can now be restored. All good things, I guess. Anti-phishing measures have been built in and the close button for tabs are now placed individually for each tab—something I was handling with an extension previously. However, to be picky, I dislike the left-side placement for the close button on each tab. I’d prefer it on the right. As far as bloat goes, on OSX, it seems to be running pretty damn fast.

I’m not going to bother trying it on Linux until the final version comes out. All in all I’m happy, but perhaps a little underwhelmed. I guess with the big jump to 2.0, I was hoping for everything to be turned upside down, which is definitely not the case. It’s nicer, but still the same browser.

Whatever, I have spell-check now!

****Addendum****
The Nightly Tester Tools extension forces Firefox extensions to work with whatever version your currently testing/abusing. With this installed, I now have all my usual extensions running as normal. It’s great.

On any given day, I might bounce around three different computers and use usually two to three operating systems. One thing that drives me crazy about this is managing my RSS feed subscriptions&8212;of which I have quite a few. I’ve tried various readers like Sage, Bloglines, Firefox’s live bookmarks and my personal favorite, KDE’s Akregator. It’s always the case that while one RSS feed has one necessary feature, it lacks another. So, I keep trying new aggregators. Enter Newshutch.

Right now, my biggest peeve is keeping my feeds synced with where I happen to be, so that news I’ve read on one computer with one aggregator won’t show as unread on another machine. I really hate it. As I mentioned above, I’ve played with Bloglines, which is web-based and was about to give it another try when I heard about Newshutch. In all honesty, it’s really no different from Bloglines in functionality except for some fancy Ajax action. I like the look of it and appreciate the 21st century feel Ajax brings. There’s no notifier apps/extensions to use, which is a downer and feeds update every thirty minutes. I uploaded my OPML file, importing my feed list and am willing to give it a try for a couple weeks.

Someday, someone will make the better aggregator. One that’s either web-based or synchronizable between computers, has a decent notification system where the user can tweak individual feed update schedules and delivers feeds attractively or at least lets you edit a CSS file to display them with. Someday.

Addendum
After using Newshutch for a couple hours, I’ve left it behind and am now back using Bloglines. Newshutch is too damn clunky and slow for any real usage, unfortunately.

This morning I felt like I wanted to try something new, so I installed Flock, the plugged-in, oh-so-social spin-off of the Firefox browser. Flock is basically the same as Firefox, but with integrated support for Flickr, Photobucket, del.icio.us, Shadows and most popular blogging software. Lotsa whiz-bang fancy shit going on.

After installing, I went through the setup and hooked Flock into my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts as well as this blog (typing that word makes me feel dirty… go figure). Currently, I’m typing this post using Flock’s built-in editor. I write the post, click publish and the post should go live, I guess, we’ll see.

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Jesus bleedin’ nuts! I’ve got reader-submitted questions coming out of my ears. I’ve had to backlog a few, so don’t worry, I’ll get to you. This next question is right up my alley.

Clutch wrote:
Q:

Here’s a question that may actually be within your realm of experience; I have a bunch of images I’d like to resize, smaller, for uploading. Is there an easy way to do this to many images at once, say, in photoshop? Or perhaps another, preferably free application I could get my grubby little hands on? Thank you, oh wise and gratuitous davebgimp!

A: Easy as your mom! I’m going to answer this a bit backwards by first addressing the issue of software. Yes, you can do this in PhotoShop or the slightly neutered and cheaper PhotoShop Elements. PhotoShop’s a great program. I use it daily at work, but it costs an ass-load so most people end up pimping out Grandma to buy it or they steal it. Personally, I think that for most users, especially those who are working primarily in an RGB (red, green and blue) color space — web publishing for example, it’s not necessary.

Another option is to take the free route. There’s a few more steps involved but it costs several hundred dollars less… actually it costs nothing. There’s an Open Source, free image editing alternative called GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s available cross platform, so is accessible to anyone. I use it at home on Linux and having used PhotoShop professionally and otherwise for the past six or so years, I find it meets and exceeds all my home-use needs. Experienced PhotoShop users making the switch might get a bit annoyed at first, as I did, at the learning curve involved. I chalk it up to the fact of using one program exclusively for so long and getting used to the tricks and shortcuts and then trying out a new application with different tools, names and ways to get things done. But once I got past this (it was a quick transition), I found myself impressed and not missing much. If you’re new to either program, I highly doubt you will share this temporary and arguably unnecessary frustration.

The GIMP does have limitations in it’s lack of CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black - a color space normally used with professional printing and presses) support and a rather huge learning curve if you want to install some plug-ins and know nothing about compiling from source code. Unless, you’re designing for print on a professional scale, you won’t be missing the CMYK support though. I have heard that there’s a CMYK plug-in available, but as of the latest version, the color space is not natively supported. No biggie for me or you other average home users. As far as having to compile programs for GIMP plug-ins, if you’re using Linux, you either know how to do this, or could stand to learn for your own good.

You should at least check out the GIMP. Since it’s free, you don’t have the problem of shelling out for a program that updated with a new version almost yearly (which means more $$$ or more pirating if you want to keep up with the latest). GIMP will always be free of charge and there’s plenty of documentation, tutorials and communities to help you get the hang of it, or you can always ask daveb.

Now, on to the first half of your question. I’ll explain how to do batch resizing with both PhotoShop and the the no-cost method. Let’s start with PhotoShop.

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