September 1, 2008

• StudioLD Boost

  I might as well start my Firefox plugin series with one of my most used Firefox add-ons – Boost by StudioLD.

  Boost is an add-on that affects Facebook pages.  My two favorite features are One-click pokes and skins.  With my K-State skin, I see a Powercat at the top, and the colors are more KSU orientated than the Facebook blue color scheme.  I should try to tweak the colors some more, since some links or text starts to blend in with the background.  However, it’s not enough of a problem that I’ve ever bothered trying to find a fix for it.

  Since I enjoy poking so much, one-click pokes make my Internet time go very quickly.  It has provisions to automatically poke, but I have never experimented with them.  I had a bad experience with getting blocked from Facebook for poking too much thanks to one-click pokes, so I try to take it slow most of the time.

  Boost also has settings to disable advertisements, automatically log in, and refresh the homepage periodically.  I disabled the auto-refresh because it put a count-down in the title bar.  The “Rollover all pics” option is very usefull if you don’t want to navigate away from your current page, but you do want to take a closer look at a picture.  I use if if I can’t quite tell who is in a picture from a wall post.  All you do if hold your mouse over the picture, and a large version of it will show up in the upper left hand corner of the page.  You can’t reposition it, and so it will disable the text that shows up with some pictures.

  There are also album enhancements – you can load up to 100 images per page rather than 20, and it has a special setting that allows you to flip through the pictures in an album.  The setting is called the Boost album, and comes in two versions – the old one with no preview thumbnails, and the new one with preview thumbnails.  I think the new one is faster and looks a little better, also.  Two things that both Boost albums have trouble with – long titles (they sometimes get truncated to just a couple words instead of the whole thing), and the “View all pictures of AAAAAA” (it generally won’t work on pictures of AAAAAA tagged by others).  Also, there is some delay when switching between photos (the Internet takes time to load those pictures up!).  When I switch to a new picture and then switch back before the new one loads, I’ll often see the top half of the new one underneath the old one.

  There is a Boost Toolbar that goes along with this add-on.  It got enabled once, and while it has some nifty features, I don’t use Facebook enough to need instant notification of pokes and such.  I get fast enough notification via my email beeping at me.  I’ve got to say it, Boost has got to be my favorite add-on for Firefox.

  • 11:43 pm
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