Firefox 3 Coming Soon

I’ve been using Firefox 3 since Beta 1. After 5 betas, it is now at RC 2 3, which is going to be the version that “ships” sometime this month on Tuesday, June 17th. (Mozilla hopes to set a world record for the most downloads ever in a 24 hour period.)

There’s no point in waiting to update to version 3, except perhaps for add-on support. About half of my add-ons aren’t working yet. But the improved functionality of Firefox 3 makes the temporary loss of a few add-ons worth it.

Here are some of the things I like:

1. The smart location bar makes navigating the web very efficient. As you type it pulls up matches in your web history and your bookmarks. Like Outlook does with email addresses, Firefox 3 learns from your habits and prioritizes results so the most likely are on the top.
2. Bookmarking is as simple as clicking the star on the right of the smart location bar. By default the page goes into an unsorted bookmarks folder. Thanks to the smart location bar, I think I’ll be doing a lot less organizing and categorizing of my bookmarks and just leave them there. Finding them by typing is much easier than by navigating through a hierarchy of folders.¹ You can add tags as well, which make finding what you’re looking for even easier. Just type a tag or two in the smart location bar to pull up that bookmark.
3. The speed of loading webpages is noticeably faster than previous versions.
4. Other noteworthy improvements include a true zoom, which enlarges the whole page proportionately, not just the text, and better download management.

Here’s Mozilla’s own list of what’s new.

Watch this great screencast to see some of these features in action.

If you’re a Firefox user, head on over and download it.

1. I’m finding this to be the case with Vista as well. I don’t need to have as carefully organized folder structuring since I can quickly find what I’m looking for with Vista’s built-in search capabilities. [↩ Back]

Xobni for Outlook

I recently downloaded and installed a cool new plug-in for Microsoft Outlook called Xobni (inbox spelled backwards). It’s a collapsible sidebar that instantly provides lots of helpful data.

There are two main features:

Search: Find contacts, emails (organized by conversations!), related people, and shared files in an instant—all organized nicely in a sleek sidebar. Since Outlook 2007 has a built-in search for email messages, I wasn’t sure how helpful this aspect of Xobni would be. However, the ability to see not only emails but also contact info (which is even extracted from email messages!), file attachments, and related contacts makes it very handy.

Continue reading ‘Xobni for Outlook’

Interview with N. T. Wright

Said at Southern points to a video interview with N. T. Wright that took place at Asbury Seminary in November of 2007. (Here’s the announcement about Wright’s visit.) Several minutes in Wright shares some brief thoughts on Piper’s book The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright.

The audio from Wright’s chapel talks is also available:

• Nov. 13 | “Use of Scripture in Contemporary Political Discourse” [ Hi :: Low ]
• Nov. 14 | “God in Public? Biblical Faith in Tomorrow’s World” [ Hi :: Low ]
• Nov. 14 | “Acts and the Contemporary Challenge of the Gospel” [ Hi :: Low ]

RefTagger from Logos

This week Logos launched a very nice tool for making the Bible references on your website much more useful to your readers by converting them to hyperlinks to the version of your choice at BibleGateway and giving you the option of adding a small Libronix icon linked to the version of your choice in the Libronix Digital Library System (or the user’s default version). Continue reading ‘RefTagger from Logos’

Essential Tools for Syncing Multiple Computers

If you use multiple computers (e.g., a desktop and a laptop or a home computer and a work computer), from time to time you probably find yourself in need of something from your other computer when it’s not easily accessible. The solution for most people is to use a USB flash drive or perhaps email the files to yourself using Gmail or another online email service. But neither of these are ideal solutions.

Moving to entirely web-based applications is one solution for always having all of your data available from any computer connected to the internet, but in my opinion the cons outweigh the pros—at least for now. A hybrid model is the best solution, taking advantage of the power of the desktop and the accessibility of the web. In this post, I’d like to recommend a few free tools that I rely on to help keep my computers in sync.

Continue reading ‘Essential Tools for Syncing Multiple Computers’