Customize Facebook Appearances With Firefox Through Stylish Or GreaseMonkey

For Mozilla Firefox users only:

Facebook keeps its user interface and layout pretty standardized, meaning that all users will be given the same GUI and layout, including the colors and background applied. Well, one of my criticism of Facebook is exactly this; although it offers an abundance of features which i appreciate very much, i could not understand why Facebook won't allow us to apply graphic customization to our own page when other social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster could.

Here's a tip for Mozilla Firefox users who are bored with the lack of graphical customization on Facebook: They can use either Stylish or GreaseMonkey, both user script manager specially for Firefox, to change their Facebook's graphical appearance. It won't result in a slower loading of Facebook's webpages nor would it affect any available features on Facebook!

  

For novice users, user script is one of the key elements in web design and one which determines what a web page is supposed to have/do/show. So quite simply, if we want to change Facebook's graphic appearance, all we have to do is to edit the script of the web page itself! Problem is, scripting is complicated and will easily bore most users out. Fortunately, there are those who have learned, and are willing, to create tonnes of user scripts that will change the appearance of Facebook online...and all we have to do is use Stylish or GreaseMonkey, as previously stated!

Let's get started: 

1. Visit the Firefox Addon Site and install the add-on 'Stylish' or the add-on 'GreaseMonkey'. You will be prompted to restart Firefox.

2. After Firefox restarted, visit the website UserStyles.org, where many user scripts writers have generously posted tonnes of user scripts which include scripts for Facebook.
 
3. Browse through the library of user scripts for Facebook and select an appearance you like. On your right hand side, you'll notice that there are two options; one is for Stylish, the other for GreaseMonkey. Choose the 'Install with Stylish' button if you installed the Stylish add-on; choose 'install as a user script' button if you installed the 'GreaseMonkey' add-on.

4. Visit Facebook and see the changes! Here's a sample of a customized Facebook Login Page using the Greasemonkey add-on:

5.  Scripts installed as Stylish is manageable from the Stylish Menu. On your Firefox toolbar, find Tools>Add-ons>Extensions>Stylish. 

Similarly, you can install as many scripts as possible and manage them from the GreaseMonkey addon's Options menu. On your Firefox toolbar, find Tools>Addons>Extensions>GreaseMonkey and select the 'Option' button. This is what you will get:

From here, you can manage your scripts easily: disable or enable scripts, add or delete scripts and many more!

The one thing that bugs this customization method though, is that it only allows users to enjoy the customized appearance on the PC where either one of the two add-ons are installed within Firefox. Another similar problem is that other users will not be able to enjoy your customized appearance elsewhere even if they do have the add-ons installed; all they see out of your Profile page is still the same old standardized background. Nevertheless, if used for personal enjoyment, the scripts really work on all Facebook sites, including users' Home page, Profile page and even Application page. A little tip for all: it even works on the Lite version of Facebook as shown below!

Thank you, Firefox, for the addon. You make Facebook more beautiful now!

NOTE: It took hard work and effort for those script authors to write user scripts and share it to us, so if you like the user script and would like to support them through money, do make a tiny donation at their respective user script pages!

Read more >>

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 4 Beta Client For Facebook

For the first time ever...to both Windows and MacOS fans~


Remember Fishbowl for Facebook? Well, for those who didn't, it was a Facebook desktop client released by Microsoft during their annual PDC back in late 2009. Fishbowl is developed by UXLabs@Microsoft and is entirely powered by Microsoft Silverlight, providing an incredible browsing experience of the popular social networking site. Question is, Fishbowl is slightly slow and can be a bit hard to get used to.


Worry not, for Microsoft came up with another alternative - a better one! Microsoft released a Silverlight 4 Beta Client just for Facebook as of now. Like Fishbowl, it runs Facebook using a desktop application instead of the browser, but compared to Fishbowl, it is much faster and more complete in features! This new desktop client for Facebook spots a dark and sleek interface, starting off with the Home screen right down to the Photo-browsing page. Even the photo uploader is pretty neat and workable compared to Fishbowl.


I would ditch Fishbowl any day for such an improvement, but there are setbacks too. If there's anything...anything that this desktop client lack in features, it doesn't have the chat function which is available in the browser-based Facebook. Besides, since Silverlight 4 will required reinstallation once it is out of beta, so it may be a troublesome thing that novice users will have to worry about in the future.


Some additional screenshots for your viewing pleasure:

 

For those interested to use Facebook poweredby the latest Silverlight 4 Beta, you can get them from this website.

Read more >>

Microsoft launched Fishbowl, a Silverlight-Powered, Desktop-Based Facebook Client

I've been following news regarding the annually-held Professional Developers Conference (PDC), where this year Microsoft really debuted tonnes of stuffs, from the latest news on Internet Explorer 9, Windows Azure, Microsoft .NET 4, the newly unveiled Silverlight 4 and then...Fishbowl, a Facebook Client!


It sounded pretty unusual that Microsoft would even spend precious time & resources in developing something like this but hey, they must be Facebook fans as well! After their preview of the upcoming Silverlight 4, they demoed Fishbowl, which is now officially available for download. Not only does Fishbowl provide a nice, clean display of your stream, but Fishbowl stand out as a better Facebook client than any other applications because it is packed with excellent stability & features (some not even available on Facebook itself), is pretty responsive (even more so if you have a high-end machine), and extremely intuitive to use.

Although Fishbowl supports the 32-bit version of Windows XP and both the 32 & 64-bit of Vista and 7, Microsoft has stated that the application is designed best for Windows 7, and it's no wonder why. Yes, Windows 7 is the latest OS released by the corporation from Redmond, but its features notably the Windows 7 taskbar with jumplist (as shown in the image below) and Aero Peek, gives Fishbowl an edge in terms of design & usage over XP and Vista. Most importantly, Fishbowl is designed to be touch-screen supported, meaning that users of Windows 7 can literally control Facebook using their fingers!

Some of Fishbowl's best features I immediately noticed is the way it lets you explore photos & friends' pages. Pick an album/friend to browse, then flip through the images/friends list using your mouse's scroll wheel. Zoom is also supported (you can zoon in and out anytime!), and you can also print or save images (or an entire album) in a single click. There's even a full screen Slideshow Mode for hands-free viewing. As for uploading your own images, the drag-and-drop feature heavily used in Windows makes uploading an almost-too-easy task with Fishbowl.

However, if you've gotten used to browsing Facebook using Firefox, Chrome, Opera or any other relatively unknown browser, be prepared for some slow speed, because Fishbowl is probably using IE8's rendering engine (it's Microsoft's product, after all), so opening external web content is going to feel slow. Also, Fishbowl is notably slow at rendering walls on profile pages, which sort of showed off Silverlight's weakness.There are options for users to change the color of the application, but then the color choices are limited (though it looks good) if you're a hardcore customizor, anyway.

To conclude all, if you're a user of Microsoft Windows XP & above, a Facebook user and a hardcore photo-sharing and status-updating person, then Fishbowl's the right tool for you!

Visit Fishbowl's official website here.

Read more >>

Supercharge Your Facebook Experience With Boost & Facebook Lite!

I have an account on Facebook and needless to say, I often use Firefox to browse Facebook since it's virtually my top browser to use now. However, i hate some of the way Facebook is run and managed. There are some features that users are not being able to control and change, for example, eliminating those annoying flash ads which only slows down the page loading process. I also find Facebook a little lacking on the customization side which differentiates it so much from Friendster and Myspace that are more customizable. Most recently i also discovered that Facebook is getting more and more slower on my machine. I was sick of the way the flash games lags on me and was even more annoyed that the interface has become more and more cluttered as more features are added, on which i don't even use some of them...literally.

After some searching and testing, here are two pretty effective solutions to the above problems:



1. Boost


Boost is a free Firefox add-on developed by StudioBoost which allows users to customize their Facebook via Mozilla Firefox with 300+ skins, 30+ features, rollover pics, selectable options, one-click pokes, video downloader and many more. There are also other enhancements, for example, the option of refreshing the Home page of Facebook at selected intervals, options for downloading videos on Facebook, disable display banners and ads and even an auto image-magnifying option when you mouse-over an image.

Boost works with Firefox v3.5 and above and is completely freeware with no adware bundled. It is still currently in beta stage and so you can expect a few minor stability issues. As a user of Boost, i would strongly recommend that users disable some of the beta features of Boost if it is making your Firefox lag. Other than that, Boost works as advertised.

Download Boost add-on here (Require Mozilla Firefox v3.5 and above in order to run).

2. Facebook Lite

Facebook Lite is essentially the lighter version of Facebook. It offers the basic functionality while trimming out or getting some of the lesser-used features out of the way, making stuffs such as page loading and navigation easier and smoother. My experience with Facebook improved a lot better after i used and compared the lite version with the original version.

There are no limitations to accessing the lite version of Facebook. Simply access Facebook Lite now and feel the difference yourself!.

Facebook Lite works on all version of different browsers.

Read more >>

Software Informer: A Powerful, Community-Driven Software Updater

I shared in this blog months ago about a free software called Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI), which gives us free scans and updates on some of our applications & Windows system. While it is a very useful tool, it has its weaknesses, some of which i really dislike. Firstly, Secunia PSI is only meant to be a vulnerability scanner and a security add-on, meaning to say that it only gives users update over software with vulnerabilities and issue links towards security patches in order to secure your PC. Secondly, Secunia PSI is extremely sensitive towards connection strength & firewall settings; if you happened to have a weak connection or a very intrusive firewall installed on your PC, Secunia may not even run at all. Lastly and perhaps most annoyingly, Secunia can easily hang and crash due to it being reliant on internet connections and online software databases.

Due to the above issues with Secunia, i spent weeks trying to find an alternative to it and by chances i stumbled across Software Informer, a little tool provided by Informer Technologies Inc. Software Informer is a small but powerful software updates informer, much more better than Secunia, in fact. It resolves all the issues users will have with Secunia, which are unreliable performances and limited features. It loads and sits quietly in your system tray and shows only a small, semi-transparent update box on the desktop, consuming less RAM and CPU performance compared to Secunia PSI. Not only does it shows updates for vulnerable application software, it also shows other applications which do not have vulnerability issues. It also runs much more smoothly than Secunia PSI, with no crashes, hangs or lagging performances.


Having said that, Software Informer is not just as simple as that. It is actually also a community-driven software updater, where registered users can participate in providing updates on various types of software, updates and security patches. These feedback and recommendations from users apart from the developers' own database update are the key to Software Informer's software database information. Besides, users can also give feedback on a certain software by leaving a comment and using its star-rating system. That way, other users who happened to run the same application on their PC will get some ideas on what other users think about that particular application when they browse throught their list of installed applications with Software Informer.


Another two good things about Software Informer is that it provides very detailed information regarding an application and is very easy to use. It will mention the developers or companies responsible for the software, version numbers, file size and the amounts of users running the same application. It is very easy to use because it provides search option for users to filter down their software list, in case they installed a lot of applications in their PC. Users can also do lots of task with Software Informer, including uninstalling an application, visiting an application's website through direct links and ask a question regarding an application.

In short, Software Informer is a must-have for users who like to keep their software up-to-date. While it doesn't emphasize on security as much as Secunia had been, it is overall, a much more better choice than Secunia because it touches on every aspects on software-updating issues. I strongly recommend users to install this freeware, as it definitely makes software management a much easier task!

Software Informer works with Windows 200o and above, including Windows Server & Windows 7.

Visit Software Informer's Official Site by clicking on this link

To download Software Informer now, click this download link

(Note: users who have IObit's Advanced SystemCare v3 installed on their PC can download the software directly in its program. Simply launch the program and click on the 'Utilities' button and you can see Software Informer's download link under the Tuneup tab)

Read more >>

Download the Latest Windows Live Messenger 9!

Microsoft seems to have many releases these days. We have unlimited Windows 7 Beta downloads released to public, we have Windows Live Essentials released...and now, i'd like to tell you that now is the time that you can safely upgrade you Windows Live Messenger to the latest version!

Windows Live Messenger is previously going on a beta spree but now it finally released the official stable version. As Microsoft frequently pushed the download to me telling me to download the beta version, i accepted it and thus, had a chance of experiencing how its development goes. Some of you might be reluctant to upgrade due to fear of stability issues but no worries: the final release works fine and smoothly.


Basically there's nothing much about the new Windows Live apart from some bug fixes and a few more features which makes live messenger more colorful, only if you're the graphical type of users of course. One of the features that has been incorporated is the ability to attach .gif image to your profile so that you can have an animated picture. The other feature is the new "scene" features which allows you to change part of your messenger window's interface to be a picture of something else. Other minor features including live updates of your friends (example, the last time they changed their display pictures) a few security options and of course, some minor overhaul of the GUI!

There's two ways for you to download, install and use the new live messenger:


Method 1: Install with Windows Live Essentials (previously known as Windows Live Installer)

Note: Be sure that you are always connected to the internet if you're using method 1. Even if you saved the W.L.E installer, it will still require an internet connection when you tried to install in the future.

1. Go to the Windows Live Homepage and click on the download button to download Windows Live Essentials.

2. When the download finishes, run the installer and go through the customization process. You can also install additional package with W.L.E such as the new Windows Live Movie Maker and the Windows Live Writer.

3. Windows Live will automatically download the required components and install Windows Live Messenger 9 for you.

4. When prompt for a restart, do so and you're ready to go!


Method 2: Install with the standalone Windows Live Installers

1. Download these separate installers. They can be saved to any storage device so as to install Windows Live Messenger without requiring an internet connection in the future.

(a) Messenger.msi (the main component of Windows Live Messenger)

(b) Contacts.msi ( this is a MUST to avoid the error code 8000FFFF)

(c) Crt.msi (Microsoft Visual Studio Runtime)

2. Install these component and do a restart.

Read more >>