Tag: Chrome

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Reviews

Use Social Translate To Translate Tweets

Social Networking sites has made this world a small place to live in. Sitting here in India you can find out what a person in France is doing, just by following him on Twitter or Facebook. Social Networking sites has undoubtedly removed international boundaries.

But there are times when language becomes a barrier. What if a person you follow, tweets in a language that you don’t know? If you are thinking about Google Translate which pops up every time you open a site in a foreign language, well that does not work with sites like Twitter or Facebook. See the example below:

One way is to copy the message and go to Google.com/translate. Easier way is to install Social Translate– an extension for Google Chrome.

Installing Social Translate

Social Translate is an extension for Google’s Chrome that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language on the fly using Google Translate. At present it supports Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Flickr and Amplify. From my experience it works best for Twitter at present.

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Install social translate from the extension gallery.

Once you install it, go to Extensions (or in Chrome address bar type chrome://extensions/) and click “Options” for Social Translate.

Here you can set your preferences regarding Translation Quality, and setting up Primary and Secondary Language.

Social Translate in Action

Once you have Social Translate installed, you’ll see the Social Translate icon in the address bar for the pages where the extension can work. It translates the status message automatically. You’ll see the icon next to the tweet that has been translated, and if you click on it, it’ll show the original message below the translated tweet.

This is a must-have extension for those who spend time on social networks as it automatically translates messages to your native language. However, the translation reliability is not very good for small messages (which is clear in the above message). But that is because of limited ability of Google Translate which this extension uses.

Do you know of any other extension that can be used for translating messages on Social Networking site? Do share it with us.

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Reviews

List of 4 Chrome extensions for social bookmarking

I was never a big fan of social bookmarking before I became a blogger. I just failed to realize the importance of it. This is because before becoming a blogger I was only interested in finding things which I needed on the the internet rather than learning new things from the internet. Social Bookmarking websites like Digg, Stumble, Delicious and Google Bookmark are my favorite when it comes to bookmarking websites and sharing them with friend and colleagues.

#1. Digg’s Chrome Extension

I like using Digg for just browsing and finding interesting things on the net within a broad niche. Digg has a nice extension for Chrome which allows the user to simple Digg a post and also look up the Digg counter. It can be used to submit pages to Digg. 🙂

If you are at a webpage you like you can also submit it with your Digg credentials. From a personal point of view I do not use Digg to actually save bookmarks which I want to refer to at a later time. I use Digg to explore the web randomly.

Download Digg Chrome extension

#2. Stumble Upon Chrome Extension

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Stumble Upon is very similar to Digg except that it does allow a much easier way to add stumble to any page you might like compared to Digg. I confess that I do not use Digg as much as I use Stumble simply because it is really easy to just sit and come across new and interesting websites. Just like Digg I use Stumble to really surf and look up fun stuff randomly.

The StumbleUpon extension allowed me to Stumble any page which basically add the Stumble tool bar at the top of the page I was on when I clicked on the extension.

Download StumbleUpon Chrome extension.

#3. Delicious Chrome Extension

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Delicious Bookmarks are my favourite. I really do not use this as a bookmark facility. Unlike Stumble and Digg I use Delicious to look up what my friends and colleagues find useful. So Delicious for me is a way to get back to some webpages or sites I really liked. With Chrome’s extension for Delcious I could add any page to my Delicious account.

One note about this extension is that it is in beta but it has never given me trouble.

Download Delicious Chrome extension.

#4. Google Bookmarks on Chrome

Google Bookmarks is relatively unknown compared to delicious but it also allow bookmarking websites online. I use this sometimes to save up interesting Google related links. This is not actually a extension but a bookmarklet. Just visit the Google Bookmarks add a bookmark page and drag and drop the bookmarklet on your Chrome browsers bookmarks section. When you like a page and want to add it to Google Bookmarks just click on the bookmarklet and add the details you want with the page as shown in image below.

These are few of the popular Bookmarking websites and the four here are my favorites. I have started using Chrome browser a lot recently and hence find these Bookmark extensions very useful.

Do try them out or even suggest any new ones that you think you might like to share with our readers. Do drop in your comments and views. 🙂

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Reviews

3 fun extensions for Chrome browser

We take browsers and their extensions very seriously but sometimes we forget in life there is room for fun. So instead of looking the them most awesome Chrome extensions for blogging or social media I thought I might as well share with you 3 great extensions which if not do anything productive might atleast put up a smile on your face. 🙂

So here is the list of 3 fun extensions for your Chrome browser.

#1. High Five

This Chrome extension called High Five does just that and displays a large ‘High Five’ on your Chrome browser. It really does nothing except I find it fun to have my browser give me a high five after writing a nice post. 😛

#2. Scramble

I am sure if you have an email id you must have received forwards explaining how in the English language you can write any word incorrectly by replacing certain alphabets but the brains still guesses it correctly. This extension does exactly that and lets my brain get a little exercise.

#3. Do not press the Red Button


Do not press the Red Button which shows a red button on the top right corner. Press it once and its starts to tell you not to press it again and again. What follows is a very funny conversation with a red button. 😛 This one gets very funny as you keep pressing the red button.

So lay back, install these three extensions on your Chrome and have fun! If you feel like getting serious again you might like to look up 5 Chrome extension to enhance your Google Search experience.

Do drop in your comments if you know about and want to share other interesting Chrome Extensions. 🙂

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News

Chrome Announces List of Favorite Extensions

Ever since Google Chrome was launched two years back, it has received love from internet users in a way no other browser ever received. One of the prime reasons for this is the presence of numerous extensions that takes the browsing to the next level. However because of so many extensions, users at time feel at loss in selecting the right extension for their requirement.

At Devils Workshop we have tried to do our bit in removing this confusion by coming up with posts like

5 Chrome Extensions To Enhance your Google Search Experience

5 Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Designers

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3 Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Developers

This time Google has decided to help the users in selecting the right extension by coming up with its list of favorite extensions.

Chrome team has listed down their 19 favorite extensions in the official Google blog, which are:

  • Opinion Cloud: Summarizes comments on YouTube videos and Flickr photos to provide an overview of the crowd’s overall opinion. This comes in handy if a video or photo has hundreds of comments and you want to know what others think about it. Instead of going through each and every comment, with the help of opinion cloud you can find the general consensus.
  • Google Voice: Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Voice inbox and gives you quick access to your most recent messages with transcripts and voicemail playback. It works only in US.
  • AutoPager. If you are reading an article that is spread across several pages, you no longer have to click Next to continue reading. AutoPager automatically loads the next page of a site as you scroll down.
  • Turn Off the Lights: Fades the page to improve the video/image watching experience. It supports several videos like YouTube, HTML5, and also work with Picasa, Google Image Search etc.
  • Google Dictionary: Double-click any word on a web page to see its definition.
  • After the Deadline: Checks spelling, style, and grammar on your emails, blog, tweets, etc.
  • Invisible Hand: Does a quick price check and lets you know if the product you are looking at is available at a lower price at some other store. It currently supports retailers in US, UK and Germany, with Canada soon to follow.
  • Secbrowsing: Periodically checks that all your plug-ins are up to date.
  • Tineye: This is an image search utility which helps to find exact matches (including cropped, edited, or re-sized images) of an image. So you can find who is using the images from your blog.
  • Slideshow: Turns photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Google Images into slideshows.
  • Google Docs/PDF Viewer: Automatically previews pdfs, powerpoint presentations, and other documents in Google Docs Viewer.
  • Readability: Reformat the page into a single column of text by removing sidebars, thus enhancing readability.
  • Chromed Bird: A nice Twitter client extension that lets you see all your tweets, follow timelines, reply and retweet.
  • Feedsquares: Cool way of viewing your feeds via Google Reader.
  • ScribeFire: This is a full-featured blog editor that lets you easily post to any of your blogs.
  • Note Anywhere: Digital post-it notes that can be pasted and saved on any webpage. When you go to that page again, the notes get loaded automatically.
  • Instant Messaging Notifier: Get IM on multiple clients which includes MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, Skype and Facebook.
  • Remember the Milk: To-do application from popular Remember the Milk. It lets you manage tasks directly from Chrome.
  • Extension.fm: ExtensionFM turns the web into your personal music library. It indexes every music file that you come across while browsing and builds a music library for you.
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The above list consists of extensions for almost all possible scenarios. There might be many other extensions with similar features but being endorsed officially by Chrome team talks about their quality and also makes it easy for the users to find them.

My personal favorite from this list is NoteAnywhere, After the Deadline and Remember the Milk. We have reviewed Remember the Milk in past which you can check here.

Which of the above extensions do you like? Can you think of some other extension that Google might have missed?

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Reviews

Search for Flickr images with Chrome extension

Flickr is a great website to search for images online. Many bloggers use Flickr to store screenshots but I personally like using Flickr to browse for cool photographs and images. The only issue it you have to set time out for looking up Flickr webpage and then spending some time looking for that particular cool pic you like.

Flickr image search allows searching for images using your Chrome browser. It displays images in a thumbnail format.

About Flickr Image Search

  • The extension once added allows you to search for images on Flickr. The images are show up as thumbnails.
  • This is a great extension for people very active on Flickr and using it extensively.
  • As a blogger it is useful as  I might like this extension to search for copyright free images which can be included in my post. (never forget to link back and give credits if you are using images from Flickr on your blog)

You might like to check out how to share Flickr images on Facebook and also the top 5 Flickr uploader tools.

Try out and install the Flickr Image Search extension and do drop in your comments about your views and any alternatives you might know about.

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Tips

Is Firefox losing the battle of the browsers in the long run?

When I started writing for Devils’ Workshop last year, I wrote a post about how the pie is shrinking for Internet Explorer when it comes to the browser market. In those days Internet Explorer market share had fallen from heady 70’s down to mid 60’s when it come to the percentages. The one browser gaining momentum was Firefox and closely on its heels was Chrome.

I decided to check some stats on Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer when it came to their market share for the month of June 2010 and the stats threw up some interesting trends.

Credits: MarketShare

  • Some of the things that stand out are that Internet Explorer’s share is at 60.32%. This is actually better than a month ago but over all if you compared it to last October it is quite disappointing when it was about 66%.
  • The interesting part comes reading the Firefox and Chrome numbers. Chrome in the last 10 months has probably doubled its market share from 3.17% to 7.24% now. Firefox has not grown much but seems like plateauing out as in October 2010 it had 23.75% is now only at 23.81%.
  • I think this has been mainly due to Chrome being a real competitor and is pretty much as good as any other browser. It has added the options of syncing bookmarks and settings. It has added extensions support and that has led Chrome to grow with lightening speed.

Good news is Mozilla Firefox 4 will probably spruce up the browser and really give us something amazing to work with. But Firefox lacks the solid support of a internet giant which Chrome enjoys.

With Chrome OS expected later in the year I think in all probability Firefox is in trouble over the long run.

What are your thoughts about Firefox and its growth prospects overall? Do let me know through your comments.

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Reviews

Improve Chrome’s look with new tab feature: Speed dial

One of Google Chrome’s special features, is its thumbnail preview and the visibility of recently closed tabs when a new tab is opened. With a little of CSS tweaks, an extension, Speed dial adds a lot more beauty to the new tab in Google Chrome.

Before installing Speed dial extension:

After installing speed dial extension:

Why install Speed dial extension for Google chrome?

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  • Very clean interface.
  • You can define which website you want to be shown whereas in the default view you can pin only the most visited sites.
  • Improved look by just a few simple CSS tweaks makes the new tab visually very appealing.
  • Customizable number of dials and six themes to choose from.
  • If you wish, you can upload a background image or just stick to the six themes provided by the extension

If you liked this Chrome extension you might want to check some others we find useful.

Go install the Speed dial extension in the Google chrome’s extension library.

I feel this extension might be useful to every Chrome user. Do drop your opinion about this extension in the comments.

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Reviews

Flash Arrives In Google Chrome Browser, Taking Too Much Time To Update

As promised by Google Chrome, Flash arrives in Chrome stable version on Thursday. Chrome 5.0.376.86, that is the latest stable version of Google Chrome released for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. There are many bug fixes in the latest version, including cross-site scripting vulnerability.

Chrome will automatically update the Flash new version therefore you don’t see any notification to download or update the Flash in your browser. It will definitely increase the security of your browser.

How to get the latest version of Chrome

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You can download the latest version from the Chrome official site. If you are existing Chrome user then you can update the old version to latest version by the method given below.

  • To get the latest version of Chrome, you need to update your browser. To update it, go to wrench icon on the top right and click on “About Google Chrome”.

  • Chrome will start checking for update. In my case, it took about 15 minutes to update it to the new version. I think it is because, it downloads the latest version of Flash along with updating it to latest version.

Did you have the same experience to update the Chrome to the latest version? Tell your experience in the comment section.

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Reviews

3 Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Developers

Before few days I shared 5 Google Chrome extensions for designers. Apart from making designer’s task easy there are few more extensions in Google Chrome which can make developer’s task easy too. With following Google chrome extensions you can make your designing and debugging easy with just a click.

Here are 3 useful Google Chrome Extensions for Developers:

  • jQquery Shell:

It helps you to run JavaScript and jQuery 1.4.2 commands related to current opened web page. This Google Chrome extension is a good way to experiment and learn jQuery and JavaScript commands.

[ Installation Link ]

  • Pendule:

Pendule is an awesome Google Chrome extension which allows you to use and customize the shortcuts. It is useful for both designer and developers for displaying linked and embedded style sheets of the current page in a new tab.

[ Installation Link ]

Worth Checking out:

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  • Chrome Sniffer:

Chrome Sniffer extension is very useful to inspect web framework, CSS and JavaScript. This extension can detect up to 50 popular CMS and JavaScript and expected for more in near future.

[ Installation Link ]

I am sure all above Google Chrome will increase developer’s productivity while work. If you are aware of more useful Google Chrome extensions for developers, do share with us.

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Analysis

Old browsers and safety [Thank Devil it’s Sunday]

We all know old browsers like IE6 , Firefox 2, Google Chrome 3 and their older versions are just hazardous. By using them, you risk your online data, or even risk yourself; your privacy and everything you do on the internet.

One of the ‘riskiest’ place is social-networking sites. Not all social-networking are bad and trusting these less-harmful sites is just cool, you know.

There are hundreds of software to control usage of social-networking sites. But this one will take your heads off! Want to know the name? It’s famous one. It is Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. IE6 has also got the label of the “worst web browser” in the past. Check out this funny usage of IE.

IE6 as a web limiter

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Well, all you need to do is install IE6. Most of the social-networking sites will automatically block you. Facebook will do for sure. Some companies do use IE6 for the same purpose. The admins do not upgrade their browsers so that the employees wouldn’t get access to social-networking sites. Facebook, as of now will ask you to upgrade your browser and will not allow you to login if you are on IE6. Orkut will too suggest you to upgrade to latest ones. Google Apps does not support old browsers any more effective March 2010.

Security adviser at Microsoft admits the fact that IE6 can limit the web. If you install a copy of WinXP, all you need not do is upgrade your browser. But, please be aware of the above said risks before installing or using IE6. It was funny noticing ‘Internet Explorer’ changing to ‘Internet Exploiter’ in a system running WinXP.

Other old browsers

There has no much risk reported on other older browsers like that have been reported for IE6. But still, it is always better to keep out of them.

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I was harassed of the “Aw, Snap!” error brought up by Chome 3 every time I open a webpage based on Java or some webkit based ones. That nasty thing forced me to use Firefox for a while. But, Firefox made me down due to its consumption of large amount of time to open a window, so after Chrome 4 released, I dumped Firefox and was  back to Chrome. But many people still like to use Firefox.

What can we do?

Simple, if you are just someone, wanting to access social-networking sites and most of the risk-free sites, all you need to do is upgrade to a latest browser. You can always download the latest version of the browsers from their respective homepages. Those maybe Chrome, Firefox or IE. I personally recommend Google Chrome. Also get yourself a good antivirus and keep it updated for the side of better safety.

Image Credit : Flickr

I hope you can do your best with the latest web-browsers. Do drop in your comments on old browsers and the risk they produce on surfing. Also do comment on your favorite web-browser.