So I made this Safari 5 Extension which saves your favorites in your browser when you click the heart icon+link. It makes use of html5 localStorage. This means your favorites will be available to you every time you access dribbble.com, even upon browser restart, etc.

As you can see on the screenshot, you will get new ‘my favorites’ tab, which displays your favorites only. Each favorite also gets ‘remove’ link.

Try the extension yourself and please let me know any bugs. Thanks.

Download here

In a previous post, I was explaining how to enable Google Gears within Mozilla Prism to turn Gmail, Google Docs and other Google Applications into stand-alone offline applications, that may come useful e.g. when you are in plane or train.

You may know, that specifically for Mac, there is an alternative to Mozilla Prism, that is called Fluid. In principle, it is the same as Prism, i.e. “site specific browser”. It is just based on WebKit engine (like Safari) instead of Gecko engine (like Firefox).

In Prism, enabling Gears required a simple “hack”, changing the target application descriptor. I was quite surprised that in Fluid, this is not a problem. You just click the Offline link (at top right) in Gmail or Google Docs to activate Gears. You will be then redirected to Google Gears package download, which you need to install. Then you just restart Fluid applications and there you are! No problem, it just works.

It seems Fluid is much more configurable than Prism. For example, it nicely integrates with 1Password, which makes moving your favourite web applications under Fluid even easier.

What’s more, the Gmail icon (use the nice one I provided in previous post}, if placed in Dock, even shows the number of unread emails, just like Mail.app does!

Now the Helvetireader. Fluid makes it super easy to include user scripts. So here are the steps to be taken:

UPDATE: step 0. Download my new Helvetireader icon.

1. Create new Fluid app from Google Reader. Select to use the icon downloaded in step 0.

2. Download the helvetireader.user.js file.

3. In the newly created Google Reader Fluid app, click on the script icon on the top menu bar and select New Userscript…

4. Call it Helvetireader and you will get a Dashcode opened. Now copy all contents of helvetireader.user.js and paste it into this widow instead of the comment “// do yer thang!”. The result shall look like this:

5. Save & close & refresh Google Reader.

6. Activate the offline Gears mode.

Done! You should have one of the most beautiful, full fledget RSS reader around!

See a screenshot with offline Gmail, Google Docs and Helvetireader:

So if you are on Mac, your life is easier (as always ), if you go with Fluid. Enjoy!

Here is the screenshot of Vojto’s wallpaper “in action”. It’s for tiny displays: 1680×1050

Grab the underlying JPG wallpaper here.

Now the scripting. It’s going to be just a little bit more difficult than with Things, but nothing to be scared of.

If you need the introduction to GeekTool, please see the previous post.

1. You will need Apple Developer Tools and Ruby, which should both be included in your Mac OS installation.

2. You will need rb-appscript which you install by entering “sudo gem install rb-appscript” in terminal. This makes application scriptable using Ruby (alternatively Python or ObjC). If you don’t know what the hell does it mean, just don’t care and proceed

3. Now create file ~/.hitlist and put in the following code UPDATE: the new code checks if The Hit List is open, and if not, it will close it again after taking the to-dos from it.

#!/usr/bin/ruby 

# Load up appscript
begin; require 'rubygems'; rescue LoadError; end
require 'appscript'

# Load Hit List and check if running
thl=Appscript.app('The Hit List')
begin
  wasnt_running = true
  thl.run
end unless thl.is_running?

# Get todos
puts thl.today_list.tasks.get.find_all { |t|
  !t.completed.get
}.map{ |t|
  t.title.get
}.join("\n")

thl.quit if wasnt_running

Save & close

4. In terminal, type “chmod +x ~/.hitlist” to allow reading from this file.

5. Open the geek tool and add new item as follows:

And you should be done! Enjoy!

Here is what the result looks like:

So here is how to do that:

1. Grab my wallpaper or use your own, as you wish. My wallpaper is in 1920×1200. If you would like a smaller version, please let me know, I will try to add them asap if demanded.

2. Get the GeekTool. It allows adding the dynamic elements to desktop.

3. Open the GeekTool in System Preferences and add the “Time” item with following content:

Adjust the font style, size, colors and position according to your needs. It’s kinda self obvious how to do that.

3. Add “Date” item as follows:

GeekTool uses standard PHP date and time formatting. So if you want them in different format than I have, use this as a reference.

4. Now the Things thing. Open Script Editor.app and fill in with the following code (if you are lazy or want to avoid typos, download the todo.scpt directly):

It’s written in AppleScript. Don’t worry, I haven’t done anything in AppleScript before this, but the nice thing about it it’s pretty obvious what the code does, cos it’s almost plain English. The only “strange” thing in the code is the first line, which just makes a line break between the todo items. UPDATE: the new script will open Things, get the to-dos and will close it again, if it wasn’t open before. You may want to change the update interval from 10sec to something like 10 minutes or so.

If you want to change the script to display not only items in Today, but maybe others as well, just replace “Today” with “Inbox” or “Scheduled” or whatever. It’s that easy. If you want some more complex functionality, like also showing the tags, due date, etc., please refer to the full Things AppleScript Guide.

Save the script anywhere you wish (just remember where it is )

5. Now add the “ToDo” item in GeekTool which should look like this:

Of course, use your own path to the script file. Again adjust the formatting and the position of the list.

Done! Now you should have Things to-dos, time and date at your desktop. Enjoy! And leave a comment how you like it! Thank you.

UPDATE: successfully tested also with Google Reader, Google Docs and Google Calendar. Works like charm, just the Calendar does not allow you to add events in offline mode – disabled by Google, not sure why.

Here is the screenshot of the result as a proof I am not kidding and it works

So here we go:

1. Start Firefox and install Prism add-on, if you didn’t before (http://prism.mozilla.com/).
2. Grab a nice big Gmail icon over at Iconspedia.com
3. Go to http://mail.google.com
4. In Firefox, select Tools-Convert Website to Application. You may want to change the URL to http://mail.google.com. Change other settings as you wish and use that nice Gmail icon we downloaded before.
5. If you are lazy as me, download the amended gears.xpi directly and proceed to step 12.
6. Grab Gears XPI file (Mac/Lin/Win) over here: http://65.30.72.135/prism/addons/ (thanks Matthew!) Open Opera or Safari and go to http://gears.google.com. Click the tiny “Firefox” link on the right. We are doing this in Opera, because we need to download the XPI file, instead of automatically install it in Firefox. So press “Install” and then “Agree” and you should download a gears-osx-opt.xpi file (On windows you need to find the XPI file somewhere via google, instead of the EXE installer – that should be the only difference – let me know if not, please)
7. Open the XPI file with Stuffit Expander (It’s a ZIP file, just with XPI extension) or your favourite ZIP application
8. Browse to the unpacked folder and open the file install.rdf in TextMate or your favorite text editor
9. Find the section This specifies it’s a Firefox addon, so we need to change it to Prism addon
10. Replace the whole section with this:

    
    	
    	
    		prism@developer.mozilla.org
    			0.8
    			1.1.*
    	
    
    

    Save and close

11. Now compress again the previously uncompressed folder. Make sure you are archiving the folder contents, not the folder itself! Change the zipped file extension to XPI again. We have the Gears plugin ready now
12. Run the Gmail.app previously created by Prism
13. Click that gear icon in the bottom right corner and select Tools-Addons
14. Drag and drop the XPI file into this new window, it should start the plugin insallation. So continue with the installation and then restart the Gmail.app
15. Now log in to gmail with your login info
16. Go to Settings (link on top right) and select Labs tab
17. Select Offline (should be the first item) – Enable and Save the change
18. Return to mailbox. Now you should see a link “Offline” on the top right. Click it and follow the instructions
19. It should then start Syncing. This takes some time first time
20. If everything went ok, you should now have fully functional stand-alone Gmail client application. Enjoy!

Please leave a comment if this guide works for you. Also please share it, if you find it useful.

It’s a transparent background PNG suitable especially for Apple Mac OS Leopard Dock.

Enjoy!

Google Analytics icon by Josef Richter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Czech Republic License.

But this one has everything: great smooth graphics, great controls, wonderful music and sound, many various levels (about 30) and cars (about 15) and most importantly, it keeps your attention for many many hours. At EUR 7.99 it is one of the most expensive iPhone games, but it’s worth every cent.

The game modes include a “classic” race against 3 opponents, a race where you have to crash out one or more opponents, an escape from chasing police car, etc. The car accelerates automatically, you just have to steer, brake if needed or boost speed by using nitro. You are rewarded with cash for victories, which let you buy new cars or upgrade the current one (top speed, acceleration, handling and nitro) and with style points (especially for winning individual laps) which unlock new cars for sale.

Compared to GTS World Racing, a similar kind of street racing game, the NFS is million times better! So if you like racing games, this one is definitely worht the investment. Enjoy!

I got some advice from guys at macblog.sk forum. This is a how to video. Unlike in the video, the standard wired keyboard has the key mechanism 90 degrees rotated. See detailed photos of the mechanism, if you want to swap keys as well.