browsers

Atom 1.0 vs. RSS 2.0

I’ve praised the RSS for a long time now, but I haven’t said anything about Atom along the road. In fact, I used RSS collectively to speak about both RSS and Atom. That’s not very right and here I am, correcting myself.

I was always aware that Atom and RSS are different. I knew that both of these formats were used for feeding information off the websites, but I never took the time to learn the precise differences. When subscribing to a feed, if the choice was given, I always selected RSS over Atom. I’ve heard several times that I should do otherwise, but no suffecient argumentation was given, so I continued as is.

Finally, this post at Slashdot linked to this wiki page that clearly explain the differences and why everyone should select Atom 1.0 feeds over RSS 2.0.

If you intend to use the web for at least the next few years, then take the time and read it!

Gwenview – image viewer and browser for KDE

Gnome users might be a bit luckier than KDE users when it comes to image viewers and browsers. Gnome features an excellent application – Eye of Gnome (eog). Another good alternative that many people find satisfying is GQview (gqview).

KDE also ships a couple of image viewing and browsing applications, but they need some work.

Firstly, one could always use KDE’s file manager Konqueror (konqueror). It can browse through the directories nicely, generating thumbnails for preview, and even editing EXIF comments via the Properties dialogue. Scaling image to fit window is not trivial, but can be achieved. And it is somewhat slow. I wouldn’t spit on better keyboard navigation too.

Secondly, KView (kview). This is a pure image viewer. All it knows about browsing is “Previous image” and “Next image”. For a simple program that it is, I can’t stand its startup times. It takes ages to start and load the image. If I have to go through a collection of pictures, I am reading to kill myself by the time I reach the third image.

Thirdly, Kuickshow (kuickshow). This one is both a browser and a viewer. It shares the slow start up time with KView. It also has a rather limited functionality and poor keyboard navigation. My biggest problem with this one is absense of “Delete” in the viewer. Which means, I have to switch back to the browser to delete an image and than go back to the viewer to see the next picture. That’s simply annoying.

I have asked for suggestions in #kde today and some people pointed me towards Gwenview. I looked through the website and decided to try it. Luckily, it is also in Fedora Extras, so all I had to do to install it was to run yum install gwenview.

Gwenview (gwenview) is a really nice application. It works fast. Navigation is extensive, flexible, and natural. It also has all the usual functionality for simple image manipulation (rotating and flippig) as well as configurable menu of external tools (edit in Gimp, set as wallpaper, open in Konqueror, etc). EXIF comments can be edited via same old “Properties” dialogue. Image viewing is avaiable in a number of forms (thumbnail, small preview, full size, full screen) with an easy keyboard-oriented switch between them. Bookmarks are available as in most of KDE applications that deal with file browsing.

Gwenview also has support for Kipi plugins. Kipi, in case you don’t know, is the KDE Image Plugin Interface. It is an effort to create a base for exchange of plugins between several graphical KDE applications (Digikam, KimDaBa, Showimg, and Gwenview).

With all those nice plugins available I am still missing the historgram preview.

Firefox bookmarks tip

I found this excellent tip in Ovid’s LiveJournal.

And if you use Firefox, here’s a tip that many don’t seem to know about: keywords.

Let’s say that you’re constantly searching images.google.com. Go there and type a search for “daisies” and bookmark the resulting page. Then, goto “Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks” and select the bookmark you just saved. Ricght-click the bookmark and select “Properties” (or “Edit -> Properties” from the Manage Bookmarks menu). In the resulting dialog box, you can edit “Name”, “Location”, “Keyword” and “Description.” The “Location” will look something like this:

http://images.google.com/images?q=daisies&btnG=Search+Images

In that URL, find the word you searched for (“daisies”, in this case) and replace it with “%s” (without the quotes):

http://images.google.com/images?q=%s&&btnG=Search+Images

Then, type “images” (without the quotes) in the keyword field. Click “OK”.

When you’re back at the browser, you can now just type “images” followed by what you want to search for and you’ll go straight to the google images page for that. Try it with “images puppies”, for example. This technique will work for just about any site where you can search.

Changing the world view with fonts

Somehow I ended up at KDE Look website today. I’ve got a bunch of stuff installed from there, but most noticably lots and lots of fonts. If you are not in the mood for searching, here is the link to Microsoft core True Type fonts and here is the link to the package with 6,760 True Type fonts. You will never need another font in your life. And there’ll be plenty left for your kids and grandkids.

After I installed all these fonts, the world looks and feels different. I’ll have to get used to it. At least in the browser.

Platypus plugin for Mozilla Firefox

Platypus plugin must be one of the coolest plugins for Firefox that I’ve seen around. It allows the user to modify the appearence of the website and save the chages. Here is a small feature overview from plugin’s page:

Some of the things you can do with Platypus include:

Remove parts of the page you don’t wish to see.

Move a part of the page to a different location.

Change the style and format of page elements.

Modify all the links on the page using a regular expression.

Insert your own HTML code.

I’ve found it via this post.