Mozilla Extensions Anyone and Linux Applications Roundup

Lets go over how the browser is our world, class. Repeat after me,

The browser is the world
The browser is not the world but with extensions…

I’ve been looking at a number of very powerful extensions like adblock, performancing, and a really nice weather one of late. This gets me to the point of being able to extend GNU/Linux on the desktop to areas that were lacking. Running things in browsers like RSS alligators are cool. Sage as an extension is very cool. But after a few posts on Linux applications and a lack here or lots there, I’ve come up with a few that we all just need. Lets start with Mozilla Extensions that work perfectly on Linux:

• Performancing - try this one out if you post to a wordpress-powered weblog. It does so much and it runs in a window in the browser.
• Sage - if you like RSS crocodiles and alligators; you’ll like Sage. It tucks away RSS into a panel and you can have all the power of the browser at the same time. Very nice
• ForecastFox - weather when you need it! This is a nice weather alerter, forecast finder, etc.

There are so many more these days that you can definitely find the ways/means of extending your Firefox experience. You say you use IE? What in heck is IE? Is that one of them legacy web browsers? But how to find them? Launch Firefox and go to “extensions” and find more. Simple. I won’t link to each one because you will definitely want to go shopping.

Now for some Linux applications that I’ve found do things which I need:

• OODraw - I blogged this one before and got a nice comment about using it. OODraw does the wild and wooly connectors that make flowcharting fun and profitable. It runs on Linux very nicely but if you need it on other platforms, you got it! Its part of the openoffice.org projectand one of the nice things with the 2.x release is that one can launch it independently. I don’t recall this feature with the 1.x releases.
• JBlogEditor - Well, you know if you blog, you don’t want to always have performancing open because it means running Firefox all the time. Its nice to find a multi-platform blog editor and JBlogEditor is it.
• Freemind - Well, this one is common-sensical sort of. If you do flowcharting, you probably want to do mind-mapping. If you do mindmapping you may want to do outlining too. I think there is a continuum of use with these kinds of things. So I’ll link to a few outliners next… Anyways Freemind does wondrous things and its free and it installs nicely, and it does mindmaps. What’s a mindmap you may ask? Imagine a graphical representation of a project and links to tasks, ideas, requirements.
• Along with mindmappers we need outliners and there are bunches. Some nice ones that are free that run on Windows are like Keynote. Nice, very nice! We have a few on Linux too. I’ve been using one called outliner which runs on Linux nicely. Its a basic thing but it can handle multiple files at the same time. Tuxcards is another one that you may like.

The last topical area on outliners is kinda weak when you compare it to things like KeyNotes. There are bunches on Windows out there now and we need more on Linux. An outliner is a wondrous thing to me because its situated inbetween a flat wordprocessor and a more graphical editor.

Well, there you have a few and some are java-based which make it nice. Others are based on a browser model and there are some that are just glue. OpenOffice is glue basically and it makes computing on Linux that much nicer. Thanks to all the folks that produce quality software. I use and like commercial and free stuff and I appreciate them all. Great work!!