Described as ‘a no-shit freeware HTML colour generator’ Huey is one of those tools that you would never think you needed, but once you start using it you will wonder how you ever did without it!

Value for Money

Huey is a freeware product; meaning you can use it freely, as long as you don’t try to sell it as a commercial product…. so great value for money!

User Interface

The initial interface you are presented with when you load up Huey is the ’simple’ window - I’d recommend you click the details button straight away, otherwise once you have saved a colour scheme you will have the same nightmare I had not being able to find a ‘load scheme’ item on the toolbar! Apart from this strange omission from the toolbar the program works as expected for a windows program, with some nice features such as the ability to save your favorite colours and only see web-safe colours or greyscale.

The different aspects of a website are organised using tabs - one for background, foreground, links and visited/active links - this works very well, and you get a nice updating display as well, this has become an integral part of planning a website for me.

Memory Usage

Almost none - currently using up 4K of memory and has no laggyness… at all!

Help/Support

This is where the program falls - as the author says: “They are NOT supported products.” - you will not receive any help, support or anything if this program should break something, or die itself.

That said I have had no problems whatsoever with this little program, and it has proven very useful.

Problems

Only that initially the option to load a pre-saved colour scheme is hidden, the program itself works like a dream.

Overall Impression

My overall impression of this program, after using it for quite a while, is that it should be an essential part of every webmasters arsenal. The fact that you can pick any colour off the screen is so useful, even on your own sites where you just want to save time on loading up photoshop to get at the hex code! This program is well deserving of its 4.5 stars - it misses out on 5 stars because I couldn’t find the load scheme button - and there is no support. Seriously though, Go get it!

Firefox is the ‘next generation’ browser from the Mozilla group, and aims to be lightweight yet expandable. It is worth mentioning at this stage that this is version 0.9 - the program has not yet reached 1.0 and is still a beta program and when you download it you are given the disclaimer that it might not be stable enough to be used as a primary browser.

Value for Money

Well, its free! Mozilla firefox is open source software, and is available to use or modify to anyone. Great value for money I’d say!

User Interface

The user interface is very similar to other web browsers; the only differences being that the toolbars are slightly narrower than most other browsers.

The program is VERY easy to customize, with many, many skins available - I am currently using Mostly Crystal as my skin of choice. A great feature is the bookmarks toolbar folder (similar to the links toolbar in IE) which I use all the time.

There is also a sidebar which is used by many, many extensions such as a text editor, a web developer toolbar and others, as well as things like history and bookmarks.

Memory Usage

The current release uses quite a bit of memory - right now, with only this page open it is using 40k of my memory, and with the same page open IE is using 41k. In this respect Firefox is about equal to the market leader.

Help/Support

Being an open source development there is massive support on the internet and you can find an answer (usually a bug number, sadly) to any problem you might encounter. The in-browser help system is also very extensive and answers almost any questions you might have. One more nice thing; if there is a feature you think is missing then just make it yourself!

Problems

OK, well being a beta program you would expect some problems, and you would not be disappointed. A few problems I have noticed are that it sometimes deletes all you’re bookmarks - this has happened a few times to me, and is a major bug which I hope gets fixed. Also sometimes the favicons are messed up and in its current state it can’t seem to handle javascript redirects in forums properly.

In spite of all of this I AM using this browser right now, as my primary browser.

Overall Impression

My overall impression is that this is a GREAT piece of software which will, when it is completed, overtake the other PC browsers (IE, Opera etc.) in terms of features if not in terms of market share. The fact that it is free is just the icing on the cake, and a whole other article could (and might be!) written about its sheer expandibility due to extensions.

It is also very secure, whether this is due to lack of hacking attempts or a geniunely secure program remains to be seen.

Where to get it?

You can download mozilla firefox by clicking on this text.

Briony.cc is a portfolio of Briony. It is split up into various sections for each type of media: digital, print and photography, and has a very unique aussie feel to it.

Does it Work?

Almost! All of the work is there, and there are a lot of sub-sections of each section. The only page missing seems to be the contact page, which isn’t particularly crucial for me as I’m not looking to get any work done but may be useful if some potential client wants to contact her based on her portfolio!

Design

This is probably the most impressive part of the website; it looks totally different to most other sites. The layout is based on horizontal lines and images, with the navigation on the right of the page - not a good thing as some of it is cut off at 800*600 resolution, making the page look strange.

The aussie feel to the site is obvious from the images, most notably the orange and white kangaroo logo, which I really like as it sets the website apart from the rest. CSS is used throughout the site to produce a nice clean feel, with lots of straight borders and rollover lines.

User Friendliness

Once you realise the navigation is on the top right, navigating the site is easy. The site uses a hierarchical menu system, with each section having several sub-sections which serve their purpose well - so that you are not overloaded with choice.

One thing I dislike is the CSS effect on the sub-menus, which makes the text move slightly to the right. I also think some more direction to where you should be looking would be nice on the sub-pages, as the links you need to click are below the displaying area, which you can’t see at low resolutions!

Speed

Despite being fairly image-heavy the site loads pretty fast - see the speed report here - as you can see the code is very concise, and the images optimized.

Overall Impression

Briony.cc is a very clean, professional website, which displays her skills well, and presents the content in a concise manner (if you are running higher than 800*600 resolution). Her photography is also very, very good and displays Australia’s gorgeous views to great effect.

Apart from a few niggly problems like some navigation elements being cut off, and some vital information being below the fold the site works well. Because of the missing contact page and accessibility issues detailed above the site only gets 3.5 stars.

Scryypy, besides being the hardest website to remember how to spell, is a website split into two areas: the blog and the portfolio, both will be under scrutiny in this review.

Does it Work?

Everything works but the photography section is empty. In my opinion if something isn’t finished then there is no need to link to a page saying that its not there yet!

Design

Scryypy’s design is pretty simple and very clean, with the entire site having a very consistent layout and colour scheme. It uses a single centred column, and has a nice black outer glow spreading outwards from the content (similar to Infinite-Fire v4).

I really like the overall design, and the small details are pretty good as well - the font is a good size and the paragraphs are well-spaced. The latest work being displayed on the front page of the portfolio is a nice touch also.

The only issue I could find with the design was that there maybe too much text with nothing much to distinguish anything, or lead your eyes - all the headings are the same size with the same two-colour emphasis, maybe a larger font in some places would be better.

User Friendliness

For the average user, the two sections of the website may be a little confusing - not a good thing if the portfolio is to be read by prospective clients! The navigation is well placed though, and I had no problems in figuring out where to go. One gripe is that only the actual ’scryypy.com’ text in the header actually links back to the index page - whilst the rollover is a nice touch, I prefer to be able to click anywhere on a header to return to the index.

Speed

The site loads fairly fast if you have a high-speed connection, and loads fairly fast on dial-up, the images are pretty well compressed and there is no loss of speed due to sloppy code, as the page validates as XHTML 1.1 and uses CSS throughout.

Overall Impression

The biggest problem with this website is that it is split into two parts, which seems pointless; people looking for his blog won’t be interested in the portfolio and vice versa. I feel the two sections should be separate sites, and if the focus is on a portfolio, then the blog should be at a subdomain or different domain (and I hate splash-type pages).

Although the design is not ground-breaking (it doesn’t need to be), the content on this website is well-written, and the site gets 3.5 stars!

Digitally Driven is a website aimed at 16-30yr olds, who are interested in web design, more as a career than merely a hobby. It comprises mainly of articles and interviews about various webmaster issues, and also has a nice budding forum.

Does it Work?

It sure does, this is one of the things which impresses me most about this website; EVERYTHING seems to work and is complete. A very (very very very) common problem for websites is lack of regular updates, but in the short time this website has existed they have amassed a lot of unique content.

Design

The design of DD is pretty simple, but in a good way. It uses one central column to display all of the content, which works well. The navigation is by and large pretty intuitive, although I would prefer it if clicking on the logo took me back to the home page; a minor niggle.

One other issue, which is distracting me is the lack of padding on the left side of the articles, and also at the top of an article - I think it could do with a 10px padding maybe. Overall very good!

User Friendliness

This site is very user friendly and intuitive, the only possible complaint I could have is that there are quite a lot of links in the top navigation bar (although they are split up by differing sizes). Other than this minor niggle its great!

Speed

OK, as this is my first review I have a confession to make, I have very fast broadband access, so this might not help everyone, but this site loads pretty much instantly for me - 2 seconds tops.

Because I have a massive unfair advantage over dial-up, I ran the site through a speed tester - and it will take a decent amount of time to load if you have a weak 56k connection, this will be GREATLY reduced if you have caching enabled. Click to see the speed report for exact values.

Overall Impression

There are a few things which don’t fit into the previous sections which I feel deserve merit here. The content is very informative, but not technical - the writers have a very informal style which is greatly appreciated in the web design industry, where technobabble tends to rule!

Another thing worth a mention is that the forum is very friendly and a great place to go for some fun chatting. So final score? 4.5 stars, very almost a 5 star site but needs more content and to speed up the download speed if it is to improve!

This extension is the big one - it offers a lot of useful information and features; I will do my best to cover most of them.

Disabling things

One of the first things I used this extension for was the disable option, which allows you to change settings without wading through the preferences menu. I primarily use it to disable styles to see how my pages would look in older browsers, or to disable images to see how it would work in text-only browsers (lynx etc.). Everything works as expected, and the “disable image animations” is an absolute godsend when viewing some beginners website’s (think geocities clipart style sites). All in all a very cool thing to be able to do.

CSS

Again, I love this; you can apply your own style sheet to a website - so if that gaudy background on your favorite website is getting on your nerves, simply whip up a style sheet with a white body background and black text and you have instantly readable type! This can also be used to test changes to your own website’s styles without FTP access.

You can also edit and view CSS on-the-go or, a GREAT feature is a “view style information” option which lets you see the inheritance hierarchy so you can see which styles are messing things up. I’m sure if you’re that way inclined this would also be pretty useful for javascript programming.

Playing with pictures

My favorite option here is the ability to display alt text instead of images - to see the page as a search engine does in other words. Whilst checking out (v3) infinite fire I found that hardly any of the images had alt or title tags; hopefully I can do better on this version!

The images feature also lets you hide images, display image dimensions and directory paths, as well as finding broken images.

Page layout features

Yet another great ability of this extension is that you can outline table cells, links without title attributes, frames, and especially for when using CSS, block level elements and deprecated attributes. These options came in VERY useful when developing v4 of Infinite-Fire, aspecially the block-level outline feature when laying out each page.

Another useful shortcut on this toolbar is the ability to validate your website to various standards (HTML, CSS, links, 508, WAI etc.) - this is a great idea if you are developing say for a minority audience (people who use screen readers etc.) and need to see if your site is accessable enough.

Conclusion

There are a few things I have left out, and a lot more features in the pipeline so if theres something missing you can probably get it included in the next release! One more feature I think deserves special merit is the ability to display various information such as class names and block (element) sizes on the page.

Overall I personally beleive this is the best extension for firefox, simply because of the huge number of features available and the fact that everything works. Because of this it gets a deserved 5 stars.

Bookmark Backup is great, and very, very simple. Backing up is one of those things that everyone KNOWS should be done, most people (including myself, many times) have been stung by forgetting, or just not bothering to back up - yet very few people back up anyway! This extension is one of my favorites; it backs up your bookmarks every day, and saves them in your profile directory as bookmarks.html.day (eg. on monday it is bookmarks.html.mon etc.) - this is even more useful because firefox has a tendency to ‘lose’ bookmarks every now and then (see Firefox Review).

Because this extension does all it sets out to do, and solves a problem that needed solving (bookmarks disappearing) I am going to award it the full 5 stars - it does nothing amazing, but does everything it should.

Autoform is an extension which lets you enter details into a form once, then never again! This extension is a great time-saver, you just have to enter the form fields, click the save form button, and a unique ID is generated for that particular form - the next time you need to fill it in just click the load form button - magic!

The main use I have made of this extension is debugging scripts - you can, for example, save all invalid data and then just load them up again when your script has been modified - saving you getting frustrated from typing the same thing for the 500th time!

This extension does, however, have a few limitations. The first is that it takes up a whole toolbar space and cannot be moved onto an existing one - irritating because it doesn’t even use half of the horizontal space. The other limitation is that it generates the ID based on hashing the current URL and form name and fields - so it will generate the same ID for the same form and URL every time, which means it overwrites previous entries. A nice addition would be to be able to have multiple IDs for the same form, so that you could have one for invalid data, one for erroneous data and one for testing combinations of other testing data, etc.

Because the functionality is pretty limited I have given this extension 3.5 stars.

Foxamp is an extension which allows you to control winamp from your status bar. It provides you with the following buttons: play, pause, stop, previous, next and load file. Now those of you who use winamp a lot will realise that this is not much! a nice addition would be the open playlist, or open folder buttons which in my opinion, are far more useful!

The major flaw in this program is that when you click the load button it opens the ‘open file’ window BEHIND the firefox window, thereby making the feature completely useless!. The entire purpose of this extension is to allow you to control winamp from within firefox - you might as well open a file via the winamp interface. Because of this major flaw, it only gets 3 stars; if you just want to skip tracks with it, then by all means increase this rating.

The Page Rank Status extension is for me, the killer extension for firefox - I now have absolutely no need to use IE at all. Previously you could only view the of a URL by using the google toolbar, which is IE-only or by visiting certain websites. Now it adds to the growing amount of things you can have in Firefox.

This extension displays the pagerank of a URL in the bottom right of the status bar (which eluded me for a while!) but once you know where it is it comes as second nature to glance at - not as obtrusive as the google toolbar. There are, however, a couple of minor flaws, one of which is that it takes a second or two to update the page rank (although this may be unavoidable due to request times). The only extra feature I would like to see is a numeric display on the bar somewhere - for this reason it only gets 4.5 stars; almost perfect!