LostInTechnology

Make Firefox Your Default IM Client, Media Player and Image Editor

Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by Alae Hatoum in Browsers

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How does the casual user spend his time in front of the computer screen? Mostly browsing the net, chatting to his buddies, listening to music and sharing some photos here and there. Today we’re gonna look at how you can incorporate all of those functions in one place, your browser (assuming that it’s Firefox).

Firefox is a great browser that is only made better with some great add-ons.  In this post we’ll tell you about three add-ons that can replace three of the most common desktop applications out there : Image Editors , IM Clients and Media Players.

SamePlace

SamePlace is a very simple solution for IMing in your browser.  It does the job in a  very white minimal style and allows tabbed chat as well as Multi Protocol support for Gmail , Twitter , Jabber , AIM and MSN.  There are a few drawbacks with Same Place, though.  It doesn’t show display pictures of your contacts, and it only allows a small array of emoticons.

Usage and Features

After Installing the add-on, the setup is pretty straight forward. The messenger itself resides in a sidebar in your Firefox browser. The sidebar can be resized, closed and reopened. Signing into it is much much fatser than signing into other messengers, and it’s very easy on your system resources.

SamePlace also has support for something called scriptlets which is basically small scripts you add to the messenger to increase its functionality. A Firefox messenger which can be customized, how cool is that?

SamePlace might have a long way to go, but it’s an ambitious effort and a project worth keeping an eye for particularly for its support for scriptlets which means that eventually it will have all the features you want courtesy of a growing community.  SamePlace does require the installation of another add-on xmpp4moz that integrates the XMPP protocol into Mozilla applications and is needed for the SamePlace messenger to function properly.

FoxyTunes

FoxyTunes isn’t quite a media player.  It is more of a remote control for your media player. FoxyTunes  supports most media players and when configured can be used to control the volume of your media player, pause, stop, play your current song, jump to the next song or go to the previous.

FoxyTunes also shows you the currently playing song and also can maximize and minimize your media player as well as open a local file using the “play file” button.  It also gives you quick access to search relevant info about current playing songs.

Pixlr

Pixlr is a great image editor for Firefox that has a very photoshop like interface (minus all the right click goodies of Photoshop). Most of the icons are pretty much unchanged, and the menus host the same options and pretty much are in the same positions as their Photoshop counterparts. It has blending options for layers as well as some basic layer styles, only five actually : Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow , Bevel, Outer Glow and Inner Glow.

The beauty of Pixlr is that it loads up instantly, and it has a very friendly interface.  It promises and delivers the tools you need for casual image editing like cropping and some color correction here and there as well as the more complex editing required to manipulate images. When you are all done editing your image you can go ahead and save the image to your disk just like you would with a desktop image editing software

Do you use any of the above add-ons in Firefox? Do you have other add-ons that replace native apps on your PC? Tell us about them!

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