Speed Dial plugin for Firefox

I came across this plugin for Firefox recently and cannot imagine living without it. An incredibly simple concept, the Speed Dial Plugin for Firefox allows you to have multiple home pages on a single page. Sound confusing? Not at all!

Have you got a list of websites that you visit regularly? If so then the Speed Dial plugin simply allows you to set up your home page to include as many shortcuts as you require to specific pages you allocate in a simple and attractive graphical interface.

The end result is that your home page will look something like this:

Speed Dial plugin for Firefox

Each screen shot can be allocated a web page easily by clicking on the settings button on the top right of each tab and adding in the URL of the web page you want to insert via this interface:

Speed Dial plugin for Firefox

And all the options can be edited to suit your preferred layout allowing you to add in columns and rows, dictate whether or not its in a new home page or when you open a new tab and how many tabs are available overall. Heres an example of the options screen:

Speed Dial plugin for Firefox
Grab the speed dial plugin here.

G Speak – The soe, spatial operating environment

Oblong industries blog has one totally amazing video Its included in this post below) for the demonstration of G Speak or Spatial Operating Environment (SOE).

Remember Minority Report? Tom Cruise happily interacted with a semi-transparent computer display to manipulate the information presented by waving his hands around and “twisting” the data via fluxations in the hands position to display the information as he required. Fantasy? No way.

Seems Oblong Industries have already worked on making this system a reality. Check out the video to see this amazing technology in action and then think how this type of technology would affect each and every single aspect of our life’s if it became available. I don’t think “g speak” is so far away either as the technology is already in a huge number of homes across the world.

Dont know what I mean?

Think Wii


g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Google SearchWiki – personalise your own search results

An all new feature of the Google Search Results for those users logged into their Google Gmail account. This feature allows you to dictate internally within your account how the results for particular key phrases are displayed. In other words you can effectively create your own personalised “top 10″ search results for keywords and phrases you search for regularly.

This wont affect rankings (yet) but I can see it having an effect once this gains momentum and popularity with users and may act as some kind of “vote” helping websites rank higher when more users have them personalised at the number one position within their own accounts, however I´m simply speculating about this at the moment!

For more detailed information about this check out the Official Google Blog here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html