Today is the time for SeaMonkey advocacy again. Just kidding… I don’t care which browser you use. For me, SeaMonkey has been an extremely stable and usable companion for many years so I want to share my positive experience with a few tips and tricks once in a while.

Horde IMP, often referred to as just Horde, is a web mail client you’ll find installed on just about every ISP’s webmail interface, in cPanel installations, schools, universities, etc. Horde can make a good use of the browser’s sidebar and that’s what today’s post is about.

So where is that hidden setting? In order to install the sidebar you’ll need to log in to your Horde interface, go to Global Options, then Display Options (first item in the right column in the screenshot above).

You’ll be presented with a screen with a link to add Horde as a sidebar. After clicking the link you will be presented with a dialog to confirm your choice. That’s it!

Finally getting warmer outside again. Here is one of the sketches I made in the park …

If you’re battling with the text display in jEdit, like I did the first time around, and you’re not a big fan of the omnipresent Courier in the developers’ editors, I suggest you search for “Bitstream Vera Mono”, a nice monospaced TTF font.

After you install the font you should, in Windows at least, tweak the font smoothing to make it look good. See the screenshot below for my settings:

Keywords: cleartype, clear type, font smoothing, smooth fonts, font display, jedit options

Many people still ask me what I use for website design on the coding side with a thought that “Dreamweaver is better than Frontpage” on the tip of their tongue. Since they are usually quite new to the world of Web from the developers’ perspective they end up baffled, because I argue that they invested unwisely: into tools, rather than skills.

I’m not going to waste time laying down the pros and cons of using this or that. I will rather just put down my recommendation. First, use a simple text editor, rather than the all-knowing tools. It may appear slower and harder at the beginning, but will pay off in the end. Secondly, the best such editor is, in my opinion, Slava Pestov’s open source jEdit. You can download it on their page and once installed head on to selecting the plugins you’ll need. Here is a screenshot of the ones I recommend for PHP and HTML.

If you do give jEdit a try, then read the jEdit 4.3 User’s Guide first. It’s in PDF and can be printed out for handy reference.

Gmail reserves some words e.g. “voicemail”, which cannot be used to name users’ custom labels. They actually may internally use these labels to indentify such emails, because searching for “label:voicemail” will, in fact, list all emails that contain a voicemail.

Keywords: voicemail, gmail, tags, label, labels, reserved, allowed, name, naming, search, searching, attachment

Just thought I’d share my accidental finding out of a few image dimensions in my E61 (haven’t found any information on this on the net, yet). Notice that all image thumbnails in the cache found in the device use either 54×54 or 47×40 pixels.

keywords: E61, E61i, contacts, gallery, thumbnails, resolution, image, size, pixels, number, symbian, s60, s60 3rd, 9.1

Let’s continue our polishing of SeaMonkey, the best browser the Windows platform has ever seen.

Intro
When installed the SeaMonkey browser, like many others, shows the word SeaMonkey on each browser window. This may be a good practice for some apps, but for a browser, where the title bar can be quite useful and very often read, it just means you’ll be xeroxing that word onto your brain day after day.

Also, instead of using Gmail notifiers and other memory baggage to inform you of new email, you might just keep a minimised browser window in your taskbar and watch out when the message count changes.

How to remove the word “SeaMonkey” from the browser window
Now let’s get down to business and remove that last unnecessary piece of UI in this nice and fast little app.

First navigate to the directory “C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\SeaMonkey\chrome” and find the file en-US.jar. This is a .jar file and its structure is virtually that of a .zip file, so go ahead an open it in 7-zip or similar. (If you’re having trouble opening the .jar file with your ZIP file manager, you can rename it to .zip, go through the procedure below, then back to .jar when finished).

Once inside the “en-US.jar” go down the directory structure to “\locale\en-US\navigator\” where you’ll find navigator.dtd. This is your file. If you’re using 7-zip (recommended) and a reasonable editor (like jEdit or PSPad) just hit F4 and edit this file.

Just remove “&brandShortName;” twice, then remove the dash below in the line marked “…separator”, save and you’re done.

That’s it. You can now restart your browser and enjoy.

Screenshot above shows the title bar showing gmail and the number of unread messages without the additional and unhelpful ” - SeaMonkey” text.

SeaMonkey browser has a highly developed cookie management system. And this is a good thing. Why…

• For sites that require a cookie to work use “session cookies”.
• For sites that will display content without cookies enabled, use the default setting “block cookies”. Added bonus is that your browser cookie cache will shrink, too.
• For sites that won’t work without cookies (see below) switch to “accept cookies for this site” on site by site basis.

I block all cookies by default. Then when a site needs one I switch my preference for given site through the menu Tools :: Cookie Manager. Once in a while I view all my stored cookies, click the checkmark next to “prevent removed site to set a cookie in future” and delete.

…and then there was doubleclick that is .. I meant to say google that is .. I meant to say gmail and all our efforts went down the drain. But that’s another story.

Keywords: mozilla, seamonkey, cookies, privacy, blocking, browser

MacGourmet, my favorite for managing recipes.