I’m using TwitterFox within Firefox to keep track of everything on Twitter. The add-on sits in the status bar and pops up a window similar to the update available window with any new tweets. The timeline is nicely color coded so you can quickly tell apart you normal messages, @ replies and direct messages. It also handles more than one Twitter account with ease.
Author: Matt Walsh
Skype is a communications application. You can do instant messaging, video conferencing and voice chat with it all for free. In addition you can use their Skype In and Skype Out services to make calls to and from land line phones to your computer. The rates are quite competitive too, especially internationally. I’ve used it numerous times when I travel to Canada. Pair it up with a Bluetooth headset and I was able to call home for only $0.021 a minute. Much cheaper than my cell phone would have been.
Google Traffic isn’t the official name for it, but I think it should be. Head over to Google Maps find a major city and then click the traffic button in the upper right corner. All of the major routes through the city will be color coded according to how quickly traffic is moving. You also have the option of looking at how traffic will be at a different time of the day. Click on “change” next to “Live Traffic” and adjust the slider to the time of day that you’ll be traveling. Traffic is also figured into driving directions. You’ll now see an estimated time for your directions, and a new up to … in traffic estimate. From what I can tell the real-time data seems to be rather accurate. Except that by the time your on the road for 15 minutes, everything could have changed.
Filezilla is a powerful open source FTP client. It has plenty of built in features to appease any power user, but a simple file transfer is still very straight-forward. I’m particular fond of the nag-once-per-session options when determining which files to overwrite and how. This means when I’m updating WordPress or Gallery that I can tell it to overwrite everything and it will continue to do that until the next time I fire it up.
Instead of paying for one of the many Sudoku mobile apps offered by my wireless carrier, I downloaded Sudoku Mobile. The game also includes a solver, so you can, uh, check your answers to the one in a newspaper without having to wait until the next day.