Web Worker Daily

The next generation of Universal Serial Bus (USB) is upon us. The final specification for USB 3.0 is due in the fourth quarter of this year, and Intel has delivered a key part of the draft spec.  I’m betting that version 3.0 will make life easier for web workers in many ways. That’s largely true because of the many conveniences that I remember USB 2.0 introducing.

USB 3.0 has been widely interpreted as a way to increase speeds for consumer-oriented tasks, such as downloading HD movies. Indeed, speed is the new version’s main selling point, but version 3.0 is also likely to make mobile and other tasks easier.

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We’ve talked about Site Specific Browsers like Bubbles in the past and while I have found them to be useful in some instances, it’s only with the proliferation of web applications with iPhone optimized interfaces that I have really started using them.

I have found that setting up multiple SSB windows ,each containing the iPhone view of a web application, allows me to create a dashboard of sorts on my spare monitor. At a glance, I can view my stable of important apps in nice compact, consistent windows.

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This week I’ve been using an interesting, free Firefox extension called McAfee Site Advisor, which you can download here. While Firefox 3 has new features built into it designed to identify potentially malicious web sites, I’m betting that McAfee has a larger knowledge base about these site than Mozilla does.

McAfee Site Advisor shows up as a green icon at the bottom right of Firefox, as seen above, and warns when you arrive at a dangerous site. You can right-click on the icon to get options such as View Site Details, which will take you to a page letting you know whether McAfee has tested the site and found it to be safe, and more.

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Users of the Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 suites for the Mac will want to get a hold of newly issued updates for each suite. They’re available for download now and Microsoft confirms that they enhance not just security but stability and peformance. It’s also increasingly a good idea to track where you can find out more about the updates you receive, as they arrive.

Remember when Apple landed in hot water a few months ago for slyly slipping a copy of Safari for Windows into its software updates that it sent to Windows users? As you’ll see from the chart shown in the link I just supplied, that gambit worked, in spite of the charges of sneakiness that it drew. Here is why it’s good to look into the contents of your software updates.

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Do you ever need to surf the web anonymously? Do you like to keep useful applications on a USB thumb drive? If so, look into OperaTor, a free download that delivers a portable version of the Opera browser incorporating Tor (an anonymity network that keeps your traffic protected through proxies). As the folks over on Download Squad note, it slows your browsing down, but that’s also exactly how you can tell that it’s doing its job–keeping your surfing anonymous via proxies.

I’ve loaded OperaTor on a USB thumb drive and on a PC (it is for Windows only at the moment). It only has a 7MB footprint, making it ideal for a USB flash drive, and if you’re particular about keeping, say, your public online sessions anonymous, OperaTor in conjunction with VPN (virtual private network) software should do the trick.

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I’m a big fan of online meeting and collaboration tools. Among other things, they’ve saved me from some of the many flights and hotels that I used to have to put up with. I found this comparison of online meeting tools interesting.

I’m always wary of whether these kinds of studies may be funded by vendors rather than independent. However, the results of this study–at least among the winners–lined up at least reasonably closely with my experience with the applications tested. The test approach for the study is found here. The winners in the study tended to be the professional (paid) versions of applications, instead of the free ones that I use, but that’s understandable since paid versions of online meeting applications often allow for extras such as up to 1,000 meeting participants–an extra that I don’t need. So who were the winners and did they win for good reasons?

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You don’t have to be a literature buff to know about the scene in Tom Sawyer where
Tom, faced with the daunting task of whitewashing a fence, finds a way to get his friends to whitewash it for him. For web workers, there are countless sites and resources you can reach for that can save you from building complex things from the ground up. Here are seven good ones to know about.

Do you use Photoshop? Luxa collects tutorials on creating effects and completed images in Photoshop, and if you take a look at some of them, you’ll see that many of them are eye-popping enough to make a web page look special. Luxa also has a sub-site specifically for web designers. There are also instructional videos at the site.

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Windows, as well as the browsers that Windows users use, offer lots of under-the-hood productivity and efficiency boosts that you can deploy if you know about them. Here are five tips that I use all the time.

Quickly Go Back to the Desktop. Do you have so many applications and windows open that you don’t want to minimize them to go back to your desktop? Press Ctrl+Esc and then Alt+M to pop up the desktop.

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