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!

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.

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.

Last week I spent most of my free time thinking about switching to a new photo workflow. I pondered hundreds of issues from scalability, ease-of-use, to archival systems, backups, and even touched upon some philosophical aspects of photography and where it’s heading with the tools of trade now at hand.

On this I could write at least 15 pages, perhaps even 30, and it’s not my aim now. I’m an impatient man, if you’re too, read my conclusion:

Whatever the tool, or software, or workflow; in the end it is the content which counts. Not the sharpest photo, not the 20-Megapixel-photo, not the perfect levels/contrast/saturation/hues/white-balance/dynamic-range photograph will ever be the “keeper”. You and I, and the rest of the world, will rather give preference to a photo that makes sense.

Good luck with taking such pictures! And while I’m at it, all three programs are incredible titans in their own ways. Congratulations to the developers–they have done an astonishing piece of work!

By mistake I held Command Key (the key with an Apple on it) while in edit mode in iphoto 6 and this automatically brought up the edit controls and adjusted the white point to match the point where I clicked. Whoa! Another undocumented, hidden feature in iPhoto. And this one is extremely powerful and so much missing!! Try it. Hold the Ctrl key (another one of my finds among the hidden functions, but already known I believe) after you do so to see the original image. Let’s see how long it takes till my post gets into Macworld jar of tips.

Keywords: AWB, white point, white point compensation, white balance, setting white balance, iPhoto 2006, iPhoto ‘06, Apple, Mac, manipulation, adjustment

The folders “Sheets”, “Others”, “Preesentations”, which Symbian S60 3rd on the Nokia E-61 and other such “Smart”phones creates and irritatingly prevents their deletion can be removed by going into “Connections”, “Data cable”, selecting “Data transfer”.

Connect to PC or whatever and change attributes to SYSTEM, HIDDEN (use for instance Total Commander to do this).

Done. Enjoy less clutter and Nokia imposed folders on your Symbian!

Finally at Adobe forums a guy with an alias WRFan posted a solution to this long pending bug in Adobe Acrobat 7.

Description of the problem: Running Adobe Acrobat 7.0.0 and the Edit/Preferences/General/Enable text selection for the Hand Tool is selected grayed out. The consequence of this is that instead of effectively using the hand tool users end up accidentaly entering the text edit mode and altering text of the PDF. This is a huge problems for electronic publishing and electronic proofing of publications before print as it can introduce last stage errors in addition to making life miserable for those working with Acrobat 7 for hours on a daily basis.

Solution: Start registry editor. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\7.0\Selection and set the value of bShowKeyboardSelectionCursor and bHandSelects to 0 as shown in the screenshot. Restart Acrobat.