Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Vote for Ogg Support in Youtube

Google has started offering experimental support for viewing Youtube videos using html5 in testtube. THis means that you don't need to have flash installed! The problem is that you can't take advantage of it in Firefox, since testtube uses the proprietary h264 codec for the html5 videos, while Firefox uses the open codec Ogg Theora.

So, vote for Ogg support on Youtube. You only need to sign in with your Gmail account.

Web should be open, using open standards and formats.
Spread the word about voting for Youtube Ogg support in your blogs, facebook pages, etc.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Make Linux look better with mozilla add-ons

Since Jaunty, Ubuntu has a very cool notification system. KDE developers have also reworked the notification system to be more elegant and functional. The only problem is that not all applications use them yet, so there are inconsistencies between applications. This is solved for Firefox and Thunderbird, with the use of add-ons.

For Firefox, there is FirefoxNotify if you use Ubutnu and PlasmaNotify if you use any KDE based distribution.

FirefoxNotify for Ubuntu


PlasmaNotify for KDE

For Thunderbird you can use Mozilla Notification Extensions (currently experimental, didn't cause any issues to me) or Growl New Message Notification if you are using a MAC. The page of the last, notes that there is a newer version in the project's website, but at the moment it just displays "Blog program not done yet."

Mozilla Notification Extensions for Ubuntu

Since Firefox & Thunderbird are installed by default in many KDE distributions and Ubuntu (only Firefox), they should consider preinstalling those add-ons as well for a more unified look.