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Those of you who hate the recent arrival of Yahoo’s logo on Flickr now have an easy way to erase it–and get a number of useful features–as long as you’re using an edgy version of Chrome.

Fittr Flickr lets you click 'EXIF' to expand a box below the image to show photo details.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Chrome extensions let people customize the browser’s behavior, and the Fittr Flickr extension from Gmail programmer Dan Pupius whips Yahoo’s photo-sharing site into shape. Some people use extensions for using Delicious bookmarks, banishing ads, and filling out forms, but this is my favorite Chrome extension so far.

The Yahoo logo is ugly but not too bothersome in my eyes. Instead, what I like best about Fittr Flickr is its keyboard navigation options. Once the extension is installed, you can type “?” to see the options, but the two I now use a lot are “.” and “,” to navigate forward and backward through a person’s photostream. Typing “s” will star a photo as a favorite, and in a nice Google touch harkening to the vi text editor, “/” will put your cursor in the search field.

To use Chrome extensions, though, you must be using the developer preview version of the browser, since extensions are something of a work in progress. (Click to download for Windows or Mac OS X.) I’ve had to restart Chrome sometimes to enable the last two extensions I tried out.

Another nice feature for pixel-peepers such as myself is the addition of an EXIF button below the photo that reveals camera, lens, and exposure details without navigating away from the photo. Nearby are direct links to the small, medium, and large version of the photos.

There are some other nice tidbits, too, involving viewing photos against a black background, comments, and other matters.

Yahoo has to make Flickr appeal to a large swath of people, most of whom probably don’t care about these options. But for me, they unlock some of Flickr’s potential.

Firefox users who want similar technology can try Dustin Diaz’s Quickr Flickr script, which requires the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox to be installed before the script can be added. Greasemonkey fans also can use a number of scripts that will un-Yahoo the logo.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Continued here:
How Chrome users can scrub Yahoo logo off Flickr

FriendFeed’s new look, which was launched as an optional feature for brave beta testers, is now the default for all. The company flipped the switch on it this afternoon, and like previous redesigns there’s no way to revert back to the old version. Going to beta.friendfeed.com simply brings users to the normal site.

Along with the new look, the company has updated its post-by-e-mail tools. Previously users had a special e-mail address they could send items to that went directly to their home feed. Users can still use that one, but there’s now a central address that anyone can send to (share@friendfeed.com) which figures out your account by the address you’re sending it from, then sends it to the right feed. It also lets users send direct messages to one another with a username@friendfeed.com e-mail address.

For users who miss the old design, there’s a GreaseMonkey script called Cleaner FriendFeed that nixes the new gray background and makes some slight font and size tweaks to make it look as similar as possible.

The updated e-mail sharing system forgoes special e-mail addresses for a universal address anyone can send to–including direct messages to other users

(Credit: FriendFeed)

The rest is here:
FriendFeed updates design, e-mail publishing tools

If you’re the antsy type, you can grab the “Chromed” version of the popular Firefox extension Better Gmail right here, right now. However, you’ll need a little patience to install it: this is a collection of the raw Greasemonkey scripts, and it will require some fiddling before you can get them to work in Chrome.

First off, you’ll need at least the most recent beta release of Google’s browser, which supports scripts. If you don’t know which you’ve got, go to Tools and About Google Chrome. If you’ve got a version 1.x, you’ll need to upgrade, and we’re going to take a detour to explain a quick way to do it.

This part’s actually fairly easy. Grab the Google Chrome Channel Changer. When you double-click on it, change from the stable build to either the beta or the developer’s build. The beta is the more stable of the two, if this is entirely new territory for you.

Close the Channel Changer and run Google Chrome, opening the About window again. It should prompt you almost instantaneously to upgrade to a newer version. Once you’ve installed it, grab Better Gmail for Chrome and shut down the browser.

Next, point your Windows Explorer to your Chrome User Data folder. For Windows XP users, the path should look something like this:

%userprofile%Local SettingsApplication DataGoogleChromeUser DataDefault.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 users should look for this path:

%userprofile%AppDataLocalGoogleChromeUser DataDefault.

Inside the Default folder, create a new folder called User Scripts, and then extract the contents of the Better Gmail for Chrome Zip file into it.

Last step: in your shortcut for Google Chrome, add -enable-user-scripts to the end of the Target field. There should be a space in between “…chrome.exe” and the scripts command. Open up Google Chrome, log in to Gmail, and you should begin to see the effects of the scripts on your Gmail’s behavior.

Utilizing scripts in Chrome is nothing more than a way-station on the road to full extension support, but there are some usability problems that an extension and its interface wouldn’t have. For starters, removing a script from the folder is the only way to deactivate it. Likewise, to discover what each script can do, you must either look at their names in the User Scripts folder or check out their descriptions online. As simple an interface as the Firefox version has, it not only lets you quickly turn the extension’s features on and off, it also tells you how to use them. Without those details at your fingertips, you’ll have to hit the original announcement from script-wrangler Gina Trapani.

The whole process is a definite drawback that is not meant to appeal to average users, and its utility is questionable at best to all but those who are writing scripts and extensions for Chrome. Not all of the scripts are even expected to work.

Complaints aside, it’s also an interesting look at how Chrome functions when burdened with third-party features and potentially gives us a small taste of the browser’s future.

(h/t Lifehacker)

Go here to read the rest:
Better Gmail gets ‘Chromed’

to preview videos from search engine results, the company has released a new Firefox add-on that does a bit more–and without the need for Greasemonkey.

Once installed in your browser, the add-on still lets you see previews of videos from search results on Google and Yahoo. However it now throws in video previews on FriendFeed pages, and adds a neat timeline view in YouTube that lets you skip to later parts of a video just like DVD chapter markers.

I had the Greasemonkey script installed on my machine last November, but recently turned it off. It directs links that would normally go to where the video is hosted to a special page on Videosurf where it has been re-embedded. This can be useful for some videos, but if you like reading comments and leaving ratings on the original video page it’s adding an extra step to get there. Worth noting is that the Firefox iteration of this tool no longer does that.

With the extension installed you can skip to various parts of a video–as long as it's been indexed.

(Credit: Videosurf)

View post:
Videosurf’s browser add-on gets better

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