Stu Downes

After many years I’ve finally started using one browser for 99.9% of my requirements.  Yes it happens to be Firefox 3 but thats old news for any readers here, many of you use it, but interestingly NOT a majority here.

The real benefit to me and most other Firefox users is the extensions and plugins.  Here are my favourites:

1.  Feed subscription:

Firefox allows me to choose the tool I’ll use to subscribe to feeds by clicking on the RSS Icon to the right of the URL:

2.  Evernote Integration

The ability to clip text from a web page using the “elephant button” or save a URL to Evernote (”clip to evernote”) is absolutely superb.  I’m finding evernote and increasingly useful research tool and its tablet capabilities are excellent.

3. Session Manager for Firefox

Now this is superb, I can’t fault this at all.  It gives me equal functionality to the session management in Maxthon.  It is great to open a session and be exactly where I left it, down to how far I have scrolled down a page.  You can also open the folder containing the session files and send one to someone else using this plugin, great for sharing links …. but thats where the next one comes to the fore…

4.  Sharing Sessions Online

Agglom is a superb tool that allows you to share a group of URL’s either publicly or privately (Hat tip to Marjolein Hoekstra).  This can be in the form of a web page, multimedia web page, RSS feed or slideshow.

Conclusions

Longer term I can see us using many tools to access the web.  I’m in agreement with Stowe Boyd, in future we won’t access the web with a single tool, it will be the correct tool for the job.  The job of research, making use of the massive overload of information on the web, is made that much easier by these tools.  I’d recommend these tools.

Collaboration

I regularly have to run powerpoint presentations through web meetings.  And we all know the joy that brings.  Steve pointed me to zoom-it many months ago.  Today though I want to share how I use it with my lenovo tablet.  Prior to the conference I run zoom-it and set the options to run annotation using the left arrow:

Note: when you stop presenting you may want to change this back or close zoom-it otherwise everytime you left arrow you realise that annotation has started and you didn’t move left a cell in excel

So now in presentation mode in the web meeting with tablet in tablet mode I can use the buttons available to me on my mouse to control slide flow, the left button on the tablet to trigger the annotation and the escape key to remove annotation before moving to the next slide.

Why the left arrow?  simple, there are very few buttons available when in tablet mode, the X60 has enter, the arrow keys and escape.  You may want enter to advance slides, escape you’ll need to cancel the zoom-it pen function, and there are no other keys available.  You can see a sample of the kind of annotation here.

Its a really simple yet powerful adjunct to running the slide show in the web meeting.

Even if I’m presenting in normal PC mode using presenter view I’ll use zoom-it over the in-built powerpoint pen as I find it just doesn’t work well when working in presentation mode.

Collaboration

Would you mind spending some time completing a survey for a friend.  He is completing a PhD focusing on agile development and wants some developers to complete a survey.  You don’t have to be using agile today, any developer is encouraged to complete the survey.

http://ou1211237011.agile-adoption.sgizmo.com

Collaboration