Few months back, I had blogged about GMDesk – the Adobe AIR app that makes access to all your favorite Google services easy. However, the issue with the app was that it worked fine on Windows but on Linux, the app crashes when you type M/m in user-id/password text box !!!

Mozilla Labs came out with an interesting add-on called Prism which like GMDesk allows you to access your favorite sites as a standalone app.Yesterday, I gave a try to Prism and really loved it – some of the reasons listed below:

• Firefox on my PC has lot of add-ons and few like TwitterFox make it really very slow since they have to poll for new messages every xyz minutes.
• For users of Chrome, this would be one of the potential reasons to switch to Firefox since Prism does not share the memory with Firefox and hence Prism app continues to run even though your browser crashes/hangs.
• Last but not the least, Prism enhances your productivity since you don’t have to switch tabs or open multiple windows to get to your favorite sites since, the desktop shortcuts to your Prism apps would do the trick

Though Prism apps take up lot of memory [snapshot below] yet they really make browsing fun as well as interesting.

Important Links :
Prism download page
Youtube channel

Do give Prism a try & definitely it would be a big productivity booster for you like it has been for me !!!

All of us know that something that is visual carries more appeal and also sends the right message with less effort. Though pictures are very effective, many a times; videos have an upper hand over them.Take the example of Google Chrome, instead of numerous cartoons giving insight into Chrome, if Google would have created a small video[or a series of videos] indirectly demonstrating Chrome’s capabilities over other browsers-high CPU usage by Firefox, V8 etc., it would have been much more appealing.Since, Google being a brand in itself, such things may not have a negative impact on it’s business.

This podcast focuses on why online videos are becoming a crucial part for promoting the business.The best example to demonstrate effectiveness of online videos is the following clip:

If you find found this clip interesting, you can check out the actual video live in action on my test blog, definitely worth a watch !!! It really interested me[like many of you] how this video was made; after looking into the source code, I came across this Google Gadget which is the heart of the video.Debug version of Flash Player & addons like FireBug were also quite helpful to find it’s details.

Keeping the technical brilliance apart, the shake-it up video resulted in 500% increase[from 5000 to 25000] in it’s total number of page views/day.

This article provides the complete insight into “How Wario Land’s shake it video broke the Viral Marketing mould !!!” Though there are lot’s of Viral Marketing videos around, if you come across any video that has created such a high impact; do drop-in your comments & it would be added to the article.

Last few days, I have been trying lot of things with the Chrome especially Blogging.For me, Firefox changes the entire blogging experience with it’s two addons – Web Developer Toolbar and Greasemonkey. Though Scribefire and other offline blogging tools namely Live Writer make life simpler but nothing matches the experience of blogging like the good old Firefox

As you might see , Smileys add a lot of visual effect to any article and hence, Greasemonkey was a must addon for Chrome !!! A Japanese company named Cybozu Labs has come up with version of Greasemonkey for Chome called Greasemetal. Though, still in it’s initial phase, Greasemetal still solves the purpose and since, I had some initial problems while setting up; hence thought it would be nice to list the steps here:

You can also find an alternate solution to setting up Greasemetal here .Hope you have a nice Blogging experience with Chrome [& in the meanwhile let's wait for some more Chrome addons ]

Reader’s Contribution:
Rob – Use GreaseMonkey scripts with Chrome

May be, I was somewhat late in noticing this Firefox plugin but like me there would be many others who might have missed this one.Hence,thought of updating this on my blog

Many people might have wanted to grab the videos on YouTube(or some other site where live streaming of video occurs) and Unplug is the solution to all your problems

What is UnPlug?
UnPlug is an extension which lets you save video and audio which is embedded on a webpage – it’s a video download tool

What can UnPlug do?
UnPlug works for lots of sites including Youtube, IFilm, current.tv, MySpace(video) and lots more.Unlike many other extensions, UnPlug scans the page, and if it doesn’t know there the data comes from it can guess – correctly most of the time.

My Experience with UnPlug:
After installing UnPlug for FireFox 2.0,I tried unplugging my favourite movie “Guru” and as per my expectation,it was excellent.It saved the file in a .flv format and you can download flv player from here
I saw the feedback for UnPlug and found that the user might encounter some problems with the Firefox versions which are older than 2.0