A Firefox Annoyance - Restoring from Minimized
This is something really small, but for me it’s a blemish on an otherwise almost perfect browser (after installing all my extensions). For whatever reason, when I minimize a maximized Firefox window to my taskbar, then later click a link in another application that needs to open a browser window which causes Firefox to restore, it restores to its “windowed” size, rather than restoring to its last state which was maximized. This little quirk just drives me crazy, and I can’t seem to find any reference to it, or any fix for it. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if it’s a behaviour brought on by one of my many extensions, or if it is default Firefox behaviour, as I suspect.
Has anyone run into this? Were you able to fix it?
I’m on Google Talk - Google’s Instant Messenger They’re Announcing Tomorrow
Man, working for Download Squad has its benefits. I’m currently chatting with some co-bloggers on Download Squad using Google Talk. Google Talk is the instant messenger that Google’s been working on, that uses your Gmail ID. If you’d like to ping me, I’m clarkeja at gmail dot com. Check here for the latest.
[Update] For those that haven’t gone back to the Download Squad article, the Google Talk client is available for download.
Last night I wrote a post for Download Squad about AutoHotkey. I just had to repost it here:
The other night as I was trying to fall asleep, I made a mental note to search for a utility that I would like to have that I figured probably didn’t yet exist, or at least not in a way that would be useful to me. I wanted to be able to remap hotkey assignments in a way that is contextually valid depending on the application I’m in. In other words, I’d like to be able to create consistent hotkeys regardless of the program I’m in, so that pressing a given keystroke always performs a similar action.
In my case, I have been using an email client for awhile (NEOPro) that has some pretty well thought out and easy to use hotkeys, like pressing space marks a message as read, shift-space marks it unread, the backspace key will file the message, etc. I wanted to be able to have the same keystrokes perform the same actions in Outlook.
It turns out that the application I was looking for already exists, and even better, it’s free! And the kicker is that it’s far more powerful than just remapping keys, though it does that job extremely well. It’s called AutoHotkey. Now I must warn you that this is a bit of a geeky tool in that there is no GUI for setting up hotkeys; you have to learn AutoHotkey’s scripting language. Thankfully, it’s quite simple, and doing a few quick searches for example code will almost always help you find what you’re looking for. I have to say, I’m in love with this program.
Positive Feedback
Well what a nice surprise! Someone wrote some nice things about the posts at Download Squad yesterday, and as it turns out, all three posts they referred to were mine! It’s nice to get positive feedback like that - and I’m quite amazed, since I consistently feel like the posts being done by the other Download Squadders are particularly good, and very hard to keep up with.
Using Only One Computer
Marc Orchant links to a post by Russ Beattie where he has a moment of realization: that using only on computer is where it’s at! I completely and totally agree - that’s why I don’t think I’ll have a dedicated desktop computer ever again. I realize you can get faster desktops than laptops, but the difference isn’t worth the price of non-portability. Laptop and PDA - basically, for a computer to be more than only useful in specialized circumstances for me, it must be mobile. There are obvious exceptions to this, but those constitute the “specialized” circumstances - servers, PVRs, high-end workstations (maybe). That’s it, really.
