Posted 02/04/10 at 10:00:00 PM by David Murphy

One of Mozilla Firefox's bigger advantages over Google Chrome has just been wiped away and, dare we say, Google Chrome has actually one-upped its rival in terms of overall usability and ease-of-installation. We're referring, of course, to Greasemonkey. You might have heard this name echoed across tech and tweak sites far and wide. As well you should have--the functionality you can achieve by this upgrade to your surfing experience is simply unsurpassed in its depth or scope by any conventional add-on or extension.

It's quite simple, really. You install Greasemonkey to gain access to a gallery of add-ons that benefit your browsing experience just as much as your favorite official "add-ons," if not more. By add-ons, we mean "scripts." In its conventional format, Greasemonkey is a browser add-on that grants you the ability to automatically integrate new Javascript-based modifications to a site whenever you load up the page. You don't have to design these modifications yourself--a huge gallery of scripts (more than 40,000!) have already been written for a wide swath of functions and locations. Consider Greasemonkey scripts to be analogous to extensions for Greasemonkey--itself an extension for your main browser.

Sound good? Because now, Google Chrome users have the ability to tap into Greasemonkey scripts as much as any other browser user. You don't even have to install a separate add-on, since scripts work natively in the browser! 

But here's the catch: not all Greasemonkey scripts work perfectly in Google Chrome. The running estimation is that roughly 20 percent of what's out there is currently broken for Google's browser. That's not great news for a person who's easily frustrated by failure. However, here's where Maximum PC comes into the picture. We've run through a large swath of awesome Google Greasemonkey scripts to achieve two key goals: to see what works and to see which scripts, of the 40,000+ available, are awesome tweaks for your browser. Click the jump for a look at some of the top Greasemonkey scripts you could (or should) be slapping into your Google Chrome browser right now.

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Posted 02/03/10 at 04:30:00 PM by David Murphy

Zinnnng!

It's been nearly a week since I last reported about Apple's reluctance to allow its users access to the Flash platform. Apple--and Steve Jobs himself--have reportedly claimed that the instability of Flash was the driving factor behind Apple's ripping of this app straight off of its mobile devices (including the brand-new iPad) in favor of an HTML5-based solution for interactive content.

Although Adobe seemed to be letting Jobs' alleged tirade against Flash earlier this week go unanswered, ‘twas not meant to be. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch has since responded in the company's official "Executive Perspectives" blog. I'm not much of a betting man (nightmares of CES losses haunt me to this day), but perhaps you are: Just which way do you think Lynch points the finger of blame for Flash's absence on--quote unquote--"a recent magical device."

Here we go again!

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Posted 01/29/10 at 01:00:11 PM by David Murphy

By now, you've surely checked out Mark Soper's excellent guide for creating PDFs by using a multitude of applications, editing steps, and detail settings. If not, you owe it to yourself to give the article a scan so you're as well-versed as he when it comes to transforming ordinary files into these kinds of feature-packed super-documents.

As he correctly puts it, Adobe ain't the only game in town when you're trying to turn the contents of something you're looking at into this trusty, cross-platform format.  Let's go one step further.  Installed programs aren't the only way to create a PDF, period. 

If you're on a new computer (or, for that matter, your boss's computer), you might not want to fire up the ol' Adobe installer just to be able to gain the right to transform your screen into a PDF.  And sure, there are plenty of freeware opportunities out there that will allow you to print to a PDF.  But that's still too many steps in the process.  It's 4:59 on a Friday: You want to make a PDF, hit the power button on your PC, and be able to drink one-third of your "it's the weekend" celebratory iced tea before your monitor goes black.  What are you going to do?

If the answer is "cry," then you have failed this exercise.  But let it not be said that my heart is two sizes too small.  For a little Web app exists--conveniently called PDFmyURL--that does exactly that.  Provided the subject of your affection is a Web page of any size, shape, or extension... you will be able to transform it into a downloadable PDF as fast as you'll be able to finish reading the rest of this sentence.

Explore this Web App after the jump!

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Posted 01/25/10 at 10:45:03 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Google Reader now has the ability to provide custom feeds for the sites that don't have an RSS feed, making it possible to track changes on such pages using any RSS reader. The Google-created feed is composed of snippets of page changes. However, site owners can disable such feeds by opting-out of the service. Feeds can be added by entering the URL of the particular page you wish to follow in the "Add a subscription" field.

Apparently, the feature was not developed by the Google Reader team but another set of Google developers. “At Google we're always looking for ways to take advantage of work being done in other parts of the organization. So when a team approached us with a way to follow changes from websites without feeds, we jumped at the opportunity,”  Google's  Liza Ma wrote on the official Google Reader blog. Though there are other services that offer the same functionality, it is a useful little feature that should please Google Reader users.

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Posted 01/09/10 at 01:46:57 PM by David Murphy

This week's Web App of the Week isn't so much for you, but your friends, family, and users. If you ever tried your hand at Web development--doesn't have to be professional, even amateur Web creation will do--you'll know that the strangest of problems can pop up in the strangest of places. A little CSS misstep here, a little HTML coding boo-boo there, and your perfectly constructed three-column layout has somehow crafted itself into a Tumblr page. And it's blinking. And it's hacking off your grandmother who just wants to see pictures of your recent family vacation.

Of course, you're going to email your somewhat-technological-savvy grandmother and ask her what the problem is. And you're then going to tell her that you don't see the problem on your own Web browser. You're going to ask her what Web browser she's using, and she's going to tell you that she has no idea. And she also won't know her operating system, her current version of Flash, or even the side of her screen. She won't be able to tell you if JavaScript is on or off and she certainly won't know how to find her own IP address no matter how many times you tell her how to work the "ipconfig" console command.

But that's okay. Like that one insurance advertisement featuring the guy with the soothing voice, your grandmother, user, friend, or angry forum commenter will be in good hands with the Web App Support Details.

Click the jump to see what it does!

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Posted 01/08/10 at 07:30:12 AM by Paul Lilly

If you're going to call something "iTunes Preview," it'd be nice to, you know, actually be able to preview songs, and now you finally can.

To get it to work, head over to iTunes Preview through Apple's iTunes Charts page. Once there, mash on any album or artist and then hover your mouse cursor over a track number. You'll now see a little play icon which, when clicked, results in a 30-second snippet.

There are some caveats. You'll to have iTunes installed, and you can't preview an entire album. Nor does iTunes Preview offer up samples of movies, TV shows, audio books, or anything other than music. Still, it's a start, and a badly needed feature if iTunes Preview was going to live up to its name.

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Posted 01/07/10 at 03:00:54 PM by David Murphy

I've been a relatively fortunate mobile phone owner. I've dropped various phones countless times throughout my geek life, including the extended cleaning of my first-ever iPhone by accidentally introducing it to my apartment complex's pool. I've broken countless critical features on my phones as a result of this clumsiness, the smashing of a phone against the car keys in my pocket, and the general wear-and-tear of a semi-busy lifestyle. In college, I had a flip-phone that was anything but, the exterior having been beaten up and bruised enough to transform the phone's external screen into a strobe light of-sorts whenever anyone called. Awesome for parties; useless for caller ID.

I've never lost my phone, though. And every day I board a train to head to work, sit in a taxicab, or go about my business without really paying much attention to where I last put my dialing device, I wonder: Is this it? Will today be the day that some unscrupulous person gets a hold of my iPhone and, by proxy, my entire online life?

In some ways, someone already has.

This isn't some kind of "won't somebody think of the children" scare tactic. It's a simple reality: You're hearing a lot about the wonders of cloud computing at this year's CES. And while that has different applications for the enterprise level than consumer, the practical reality of it for most PC users (and laptop users especially cough-cough-Chrome OS-cough) is that you're taking the data that would otherwise reside on a system within your control and placing it in the hands of another entity.

Cloud applications can be super-useful when you let others run the services that improve your geeky life. Your data, however, is your own--the more consumers coalesce their computing lives into access points, the more this data becomes ripe for abuse... or worse.

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Posted 12/29/09 at 07:03:57 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Netbooks and internet-hungry consumers began romancing each other in 2007. They cemented their relationship this year and set off on their honeymoon. In fact, most of this year has been like a honeymoon for netbooks. But the thing that makes a honeymoon all the more special is that it only occurs once in a lifetime and almost always seems to end abruptly. Some industry analysts prognosticate the end of the honeymoon period in 2010.

They feel that netbooks will again be haunted by the same identity crisis that was born with them but was overshadowed by consumer enthusiasm. But it is a question that will be hard to ignore in the new year if prices continue to rise. Some netbooks are priced perilously close to entry-level laptops much more powerful than them. Besides, most users have become used to a more exciting brand of internet than the one netbooks offer.

"It's the internet's fault for making us much more multimedia savvy," Stuart Miles, founder and editor of technology blog Pocket Lint, told BBC News. "Technology has advanced so much that it's outmanoeuvred itself. You wouldn't go for something so basic anymore."

Netbooks may come under heavy pressure from the upcoming deluge of tablets and smartphones built to provide PC-like browsing, according to a BBC report. There are many different form factors being thrown around, to the extent that it has become difficult for consumers to choose among them. But Arm spokesperson Ian Drew believes that various device types will have to eventually coexist. "It will be a lot of different machines for a lot of different people," he told BBC News.

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