Last year shortly after Chrome was released I posted a quick tip on how to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome. This was a neccessity, as at that writing Chrome didn’t have a method to migrate the awesome Delicious-Firefox plugin. Well, it’s about 10 months later, and still no plugin support — though some exciting stuff seems just around the corner.

The downside to the bookmarklet method in our last tip is that it doesn’t offer a quick way to search all your bookmarks – tagging and adding bookmarks is essential, but finding them again is sort of the hallmark of a good bookmarking methadology, no?

Thanks to Tip Trick Mod reader MacAnthony here’s an interm solution for quickly searching Delicious bookmarks in Chrome.

1. In Chrome, right-click the browser’s address bar and select “Edit search engines…” (see right)
2. Click the “Add” button and fill in the three fields:
   • Name: ie. Delicious — this is just for organizational purposes.
   • Keyword: ie. delicious — this is the trigger that you’ll type in your address bar to tell Chrome to search your Delicious bookmarks.
   • URL: This should be http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s, where you replace your_delicious_username with, drumroll please, your Delicious username.
3. Click “OK” and then “Close” and give ‘er a whirl.

After you’ve created the new Delicious-Chrome search, try it out by clicking on your address bar and typing “delicious” followed by your search term — upon hitting enter you should be taken to a Delicious page displaying all your bookmarks related to your search.

Speed Tip: Instead of using the rather cumbersome “delicious” as your keyword for the new search engine, put in something shorter — ie the letter “b” for “bookmark”. Now instead of having to type out “delicious [search_term]” to trigger the search, you can simply type “b [search_term]” instead.

Speed Tip #2: To make things even faster for searching, try using some keyboard shortcuts to access the Chrome address bar.

• CTRL-T opens a new tab and highlights the contents of the address bar. As you’ll most likely want to create a new tab for your search results anyway, this is my recommended option.
• CTRL-L / ALT-D / F6 will all bring your cursor up to the address bar and highlight the contents — in case you don’t wish to leave the tab you’re on.

Final Note: I recommend using the Latest Beta Version of Chrome. At the time of writing, it contains a lot of usability fixes that the standard release does not contain, and while these will undoubtedly make their way into the stable release eventually, why wait? Despite its “beta” tag, the beta version in my experience is just as stable as the standard release.

UPDATE: Sept 13/09 – Since publishing this tip it appears Delicious has changed the formatting of their search URL. As such, I’ve updated the URL structure in #2 to the following: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s

Whereas the connotation initially was that open source projects were buggy and unstable (I mean, how could anything being worked on for free not be?), and commercial software was solid and trusted – over the last 10 years these ideas have changed – if not virtually reversed.

Though there is an “official definition” of what open source is; simply put, open source is any software or webware which has been released with its code available for review, modification, adaptation and improvement. Oh yeah, and it’s usually free.

Here is a list of what I feel to be the best or most notable open source applications:

Browsers / Mail / Office Suite

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser, which is the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer. Firefox is a standards-compliant browser which uses the Gecko layout engine. It includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system. Its strongest feature, however, is that it can be infinitely expanded through countless additional add-ons created by third-party developers.

OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages (as of v3, it can even read MS Office’s Docx format). It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Like it’s browser cousin, Firefox, Thunderbird is free and open source. A full featured e-mail client, it easily replaces Microsoft’s Outlook Express, and through the use of add-ons, is quickly gaining ground on the power of MS Office’s Outlook

(see how to add full appointment/calendar functions to Thunderbird).

Google Chrome: Though quite new, Google’s open source entrance into the Internet browser market shows quite a bit of potential. It is lacking some of the slick add-ons that Firefox features, but it’s isolated sandbox and ground-up modern build make it a fast and secure alternative that is destined for great things down the road.

Multimedia / Audio / Video

Miro: Miro is a free open source application for watching channels of internet video (aka video podcasts and video rss). Miro is easy to use and offers full-screen viewing abilities. You simply “subscribe” to the video (or audio) podcast you want to watch and Miro will then automatically download the latest videos for skipless and stutter-free viewing. You can tell Miro to automatically download the newest videos, only download the ones you wish, and if you’re short on hard drive space you can specify how long the downloaded videos stay on your system before being cleaned up.

VLC Media Player: VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols – basically it can pretty much play whatever you throw at it. Additionally, it is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS and Solaris, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads.

Audacity: Audacity is a free, easy-to-use cross-platform audio editor and recorder. You can use Audacity to record live audio; convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs; edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files; cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together; change the speed or pitch of a recording; and more. With the proliferation of home recording and podcasting, Audacity is a program that should be in everyone’s toolbox.

Songbird: Though still under “active” development, Songbird is a promising open source music player. Features included (or to be included) are library management, multi-language support, media importing, album art display, meta data management, customizable UI and automatic updates. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s a project to be watched.

MediaCoder: MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding.

HandBrake: HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter. Basically, it’ll rip any DVD (or DVD-like) source into an MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM. It also supports the ripping of subtitles (burned into the video).

Graphics / Design

GIMP: GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program that can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. Like it’s commercial counter-part, Photoshop, it is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.

Inkscape: An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.), and it’s streamlined interface makes it easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Paint.net: An alternative to GIMP – or commercial apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor – Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It offers support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Blender: Blender is a full-featured open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. I don’t know the first thing about 3D modeling, but one look at the Blender Gallery and it’s easy to tell this is an impressively powerful free program.

OS / Utilities / Misc

Ubuntu: Deriving its name from the Zulu word for “humanity”, Ubuntu is a free, open source, operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. Generally considered the most popular Linux distribution, and there are a lot of them, Ubuntu does pretty much everything your OS should – what can we say, it’s an OS, not inherently interesting. It’s decently pretty, damn simple to install and use, and has an extremely active community of users/developers.

Pidgin: Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. It supports [deep breath]: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, and Zephyr. About the only big IM it doesn’t cover is Skype, because Skype’s protocol isn’t open.

Filezilla: If you have reason to connect to a server via FTP, FileZilla is the FTP program of choice. The FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. It also supports drag and drop transfers, resumption of upload/download, configurable speed limits, keep-alive scripting and automatic upgrades.

7zip: A fantastic replacement to Windows’ default ZIP archiver, 7-Zip is open source software that offers a 2-10% compression increase over PKZip or WinZip. It also packs and unpacks 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR files; while also supporting the ability to unpack RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS files. Additionally it fully integrates with Windows and offers localizations for 69 languages.

Know some great open source applications that haven’t been mentioned here? Please share them in the comments below.

On top of the organizational and customizational benefits, the Vista Start Menu’s developers have taken into account the human brain’s cognitive abilities and limitations – particularly that your brain is darn good at using visual memory to find stuff.

h/t to Tekzilla for the tip.

First, I should preface this with the tidbit that I spent a couple hours looking around the net for some way to hack my lousy Home Basic to enable the Aero theme (glass/transparent windows, thumbnail preview and Flip 3D task switching). Despite the claims of about a zillion Web sites all touting the same registry hack – it appears this isn’t possible. What follows is part one of my free “Aero alternatives”.

Shock Aero 3D

Shock Aero 3D is pretty damn close to the actual Flip 3D effect, and at this price (it’s freeware), we’re certainly willing to overlook any small discrepancies. The program allows you to choose between a flat “tile” display, or the cooler “flip” effect that stacks your open program windows on a 3D z-axis.

The utility also gives you quite a bit of control over animation effects and background styles, both so you’re able to customize things and so you’re able to disable more graphic-intensive processes should your system not be able to handle them.

You can grab Shock Aero 3D here, and be sure to check out the developer’s other cool apps for customizing your desktop experience.

Shock Aero works on XP/2000/2003/Vista systems with OpenGL support.

Madotate

I’ve no idea who comes up with these names, but considering this comes out of Japan, I guess we can allow for a bit of a tongue-twisting moniker. Madotate is similar to Shock Aero in the style of its effect (throwing your open apps onto a 3D axis), however where Shock Aero separates the application selection from your desktop, Madotate integrates right into it.

By a small button which the program adds to the top-right of your windows (beside the minimize, maximize, close buttons), you are able to instantly slide the open app into 3D-mode and out of your way. The windows automatically dock to the screen edge they are closest to.

Madotate comes with a rather comprehensive set of options to customize things. You can turn transparency of the 3D-ified windows on or off, tag the windows, change the angle and distance of the effect, set hot keys to effect both the active program and all programs, and a few more.

As mentioned, Mandotate is a Japanese program, but some kind folks went to the trouble of translating it into English. Grab the English version here, or if you’d rather, get the original from the site of the author, Takayuki Shinohara.

Madotate works on pretty much every version of Windows since Windows 95.

Both of the programs have their pluses. Shock Aero has a slightly simpler functionality about it, while Madotate has more organizational/workflow possibilities. When it comes to resources though, Madotate wins hands down, barely pushing the 6MB mark on memory resources.

Know of any other apps that add some pizazz to the otherwise rather mundane task-switching functionality? Leave us a comment.

Twhirl is a desktop Twitter client that runs under the rather clever Adobe AIR platform on both Mac and PC operating systems. At the forefront of it’s impressive feature list is the ability to quickly manage multiple Twitter accounts, and runs somewhat akin to an IM client (MSN Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, etc.) making the act of posting new tweets a breeze.

Despite the Twirl project still being in its infancy, its feature list is quite impressive (from the site):

Twirl Feature List (v0.7.3)

• remembering login credentials on user’s computer
• all-in-one timeline with tweets, replies and direct messages
• configurable auto-updates for the timeline
• displaying user’s latest 20 status updates and direct messages sent
• sending status updates
• sending replies to other users (with quick buttons on others’ statuses)
• sending direct messages to other users
• showing user’s friends and followers
• deleting own status updates and direct messages
• input area can be hidden (configurable auto-hiding)
• multi-account support
• keyboard shortcuts
• sys tray / dock icon support
• audible and visual notifications
• viewing and (un)setting favorites
• (un)following users
• auto-updating the program
• changeable color schemes
• searching for public tweets (powered by terraminds)
• filtering the timeline

All lists (statuses, direct messages, users) can be cleared and refreshed. To keep the user interface compact, the different lists are on seperate “layers”, of which only one is visible. You can change the visible layer using a combo box.

The free download installs quickly (despite requiring the Adobe AIR runtime – get it here) and its customizable interface is slick and easy to get the hang of. Twhirl is essential for anyone that likes the idea of Twitter, but finds the browser-bound interface cumbersome.

Oh, and be sure to follow the official Tip. Trick. Mod. Twitter for instant updates on what’s happening around here.