Turn On Click-to-Play and Make your Google Chrome More Stable

You are watching a video in Google Chrome and suddenly a yellow notification bar pops-up saying that the Shockwave Flash plug-in isn’t responding. While Chrome may have come a long way, these frequent Flash Player crashes still remain the most annoying thing about Google’s browser. →

Shockwave Flash isn’t responding – the most frustrating error in Google Chrome?

Fixing Shockwave Flash Crashes in Chrome

The easiest solution to the problem would be that you completely disable the Shockwave Flash plug-in inside Chrome. Go to the Chrome address bar, type chrome://plugins and find the entry that says “Adobe Flash Player /Shockwave Flash.” Click Disable.

While this certainly resolves the crashing behavior, you now have to deal with another problem. You can’

YouTube is probably the biggest reason why we need the Flash Player in our browser and once we disable the Shockwave Flash plugin, some of the videos won’t play. YouTube does offer an HTML5 video player but videos that are enabled for advertising (most professional content) still require the Flash Player. Also, the YouTube video player served with Flash seems to offer more features.

Run the Flash Player On-demand inside Chrome

A better alternative is that instead of completely blocking the Flash plugin, you configure Chrome such that the plugin loads only when required.

In this case, the plugin stays inactive by default but if you happen to visit a web page that requires Flash, you can load the plugin on-demand.

Go to the address bar and type chrome://settings to open the Chrome Settings windows. Choose Show Advanced Settings -> Content Settings (under Privacy) and then choose “Click to Play” under the Plug-ins group.

If a YouTube video or an audio clip on the Soundcloud requires Flash, you can click the plug-in icon to temporarily enable the Flash Player for that page. This obviously isn’t a permanent fix but just a workaround to deal with a very frustrating and common problem of Google Chrome.

Also see: Why is your Flash Player Green?

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This story, Turn On Click-to-Play and Make your Google Chrome More Stable, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 29/01/2013 under Google Chrome, Software.

Search The Web Faster With Quickrr Search Extensions [Chrome]

Is productivity overrated? There certainly is value in getting things done better or quicker and saving time. But at what price? Do some shortcuts let us miss out on essential experiences, the kind that make life worthwhile? I think it’s worth pondering those questions before we plunge ahead mindlessly. Do save time for what matters in life and maybe some of the extensions introduced below can help.

Quickrr provides a collection of Chrome productivity extensions, which enhance your browsing experience in 25 different ways. One of the extensions, Quickrr Google Maps Search, made it onto our list of Best Chrome Extensions in the category Maps and Weather. This article introduces four more Quickrr search tools.

Quickrr Google Maps Search

This extension is a shortcut to Google Maps. Click the place mark icon within the list of extensions, enter your search term, and hit Enter to see the result in Google Maps. If you need directions, enter a respective search, for example ‘Chicago to NY‘ and you will see a route instantly.

Note that for a new search using Quickrr Google Maps Search, you first have to close the tab from your previous search. Or simply search directly within Google Maps.

Quickrr YouTube Search

Quickrr’s YouTube Search extension for Chrome is almost identical to Google Maps Search. Click the respective icon, enter your search term, hit Enter, and off you go to a list of results in YouTube.

Quickrr Research

Do you often use multiple search engines and sites to research a topic? Maybe Quickrr can save you some time here. Preset with an impressive list of engines, it will make your research a breeze.

Is your favorite resource missing from the list? No problem! Simply do a search for I_Love_Quickrr and the extension will recognize the new engine and ask you whether you want to add it.

Quickrr Image Search

For those of you frequently on the lookout for images, this extension will come in very handy. It allows you to search multiple pages in parallel. It comes equipped with 7 image search engines, but you can fully customize the list. To do a search, click the icon, enter your search term, check the pages you want to search, and click Go.

What impressed me once more is how easy it was to add an engine. We use Shutterstock for MakeUseOf. To add it to Quickrr Image Search, all I had to do was run a search for Quickrr Image within Shutterstock. Quickrr recognized this search and asked me whether I wanted to add a new search engine.

Quickrr Site Search

Tired of searching for the search box on every other website? If this happens to you a lot, you need to try this extension. It simply lets you search whatever website you are currently viewing. No more typing the site name into Google, Quickrr does it for you.

We also mentioned Quickrr Dictionary in the article 7 Chrome Extensions That Help You Look Up Words & Meanings As You Browse.

Summary

Quickrr’s extensions can help you get things done faster and free up time for things that matter. If you like several of their extensions, save some system resources by installing the Quickrr Productivity Kit. This extension includes four of Quickrr’s search tools, as well as Translator, Dictionary, Calculator, Tasks To-Do, Notepad, Calendar, World Clock, Unit Converter, Currency Converter, and Quickrr’s Stopwatch & Timer. Unfortunately, it does not include Quickrr’s YouTube search. However, you can easily add YouTube to Quickrr Research.

What do you think of productivity extensions for your browser. Do they help you save time and work faster or do they just distract and consume system resources? Which ones have worked for you?

The post Search The Web Faster With Quickrr Search Extensions [Chrome] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Introducing Tall Tweets v2.0

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There are situations when you need more than 140 characters to express yourself but Twitter won’t allow you post tweets that exceed the limit.

Some apps – like TwitLonger – let you bypass that 140-character limit by posting your message to another page and then tweeting the hyperlink to that page. The downside to this approach is that Twitter users will have to leave the Twitter website to read your full tweet.

If you are looking for an alternative, check out the latest version of Tall Tweets. This web app also allows you to publish longer tweets on Twitter but takes a slightly different approach as shown in this video demo.

What is Tall Tweets?

Tall Tweets will slice your tweet into multiple smaller tweets of 140 characters or less, and publishes them all to Twitter in a sequence. The tweets are numbered and are sent in a reverse arrangement such that they can be read from top-to-down inside any Twitter client.

Alternatively, you may choose to publish your long tweet as an image and in that case, the entire text gets published in a single tweet. The image tweets are rendered in the Roboto font (originally design by Google for Android) and thus the text in the images should be readable even on mobile screens.

The main advantage with Tall Tweets is that your Twitter followers can read your entire tweet inside their favorite Twitter client. This is also true for image tweets since most Twitter apps (and the Twitter.com website) offer inline image previews.

To get started, sign-in with your Twitter account, compose a tweet and hit publish. If there are hyperlinks in your tweet, they’ll be shortened using bit.ly. The app uses OAuth and therefore you won’t have to share your account credentials anywhere.

Send tweets as images and bypass the 140-character limitation of Twitter

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This story, Introducing Tall Tweets v2.0, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 29/01/2013 under Twitter, Internet.

Improve Your YouTube Experience With These Chrome Add-Ons

If you watch YouTube videos often, you may have developed some pretty strong preferences regarding how you like YouTube to be. Being a huge Google service, YouTube is not exactly a flexible, customizable service, but with some work and some handy add-ons, you can get rid of some YouTube annoyances, and get a YouTube experience that better matches the way you use it.

In the past, we’ve told you about ways to achieve a more cinematic YouTube experience, and we’ve listed some handy Firefox add-ons that enhance your YouTube experience. Today’s it’s Chrome’s turn. Do you use YouTube mainly to listen to music? Do you like browsing around for interesting videos? Or maybe you have a favorite list of subscriptions you stick to? No matter how you use YouTube, there are ways to make it even better than it is with useful YouTube Chrome extensions.

ChromeTunes

YouTube is a great music source, and while it’s pretty easy to find or create music playlists to listen to, the task becomes even easier with this simple extension. ChromeTunes turns YouTube into a bona fide music player, taking away the videos, the comments, the suggestions, and even the need to load youtube.com. After installing ChromeTunes, click on the red play button to start listening to YouTube music.

The ChromeTunes player has two parts: the player itself, which you can see above, and the settings layer, where you can add or remove playlists, search YouTube, and more. The player itself comes loaded with two sample playlists which you can easily move between using the bottom playlist switcher. The player comes complete with all the usual options such as repeat, shuffle, reload and share. You can also view more video information such as views count, likes, and more.

To add new playlists, either click the search and play button on the bottom right, or click the cogwheel button on the top right. From here, you can search YouTube for more playlists and add them to ChromeTunes.

Hovering over the extension’s button will reveal the name of the song currently playing, the artist, and the song’s length.

YouTube Preview

So you’re watching your daily dose of YouTube videos, going from one video to the next using the ever-present right sidebar. YouTube’s sidebar is a pretty good source of related and recommended videos, but as good as it is, you often find yourself clicking on videos that look promising, only to find out they’re not really what you were looking for. Sounds familiar? YouTube Preview is a handy little add-on that can help you find out more about a video just from looking at the thumbnail.

The first thing you’ll notice are the colorful green and red bars under each thumbnail. These are indicators of how popular a video is, and represent how many people liked this video out of all the users who’ve rated it. If you hover over the thumbnail, the thumbnail itself will start playing, and you’ll see a small walkthrough of the video. While it’s not like watching the full video, it’s much more informative than just seeing a static thumbnail.

Read a full review of YouTube Preview.

YouTube Options

Want to create your very own new and improved YouTube? YouTube Options has everything you need to upgrade and personalize your YouTube experience. With a few checkmarks in the right boxes, watching a video can turn from the regular page you’re used to, to something like this:

That’s right, no comments, so suggestions, to counters – not even a white background. With YouTube Options, you can control every aspect of YouTube you can possibly think of, from ads, annotations and comments to playback, background and layout. To start playing around, access the add-on’s options through Chrome’s Extensions menu.

And best of all, YouTube options doesn’t work solely with YouTube – you can apply your favorite settings to other video websites such as Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe and others.

Read a full review of YouTube options.

YouTube Video Deck

Are you a subscription fiend? If you have many subscriptions on YouTube, keeping track of them all can become somewhat tiresome. YouTube Video Deck is a Chrome app that brings all your YouTube subscriptions under one roof – sort of like Google Reader for YouTube subscriptions. After logging in, you can add all or only some of your subscriptions, and receive notifications when a new video is uploaded.

You can set up the layout to your liking, and check the app every time you’re bored for the newest fixes from your favorite YouTube accounts.

The app is ad-supported, and you can choose to see ads either at the bottom or on the left. If you want to get rid of the ads, you can buy the Pro version for 1.89€ (approximately $2.50).

If you’re not using Chrome, Video Deck is also available as a Web app.

Conclusion

YouTube being as popular as it is, there are endless ways to customize it, upgrade it and generally make it better. Have a favorite way to enhance your YouTube experience? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Image credit: circle image via Shutterstock

The post Improve Your YouTube Experience With These Chrome Add-Ons appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Compare Nokia Lumia 920 with HTC 8X

The new Windows Phone 8 devices – Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC 8X – hit the retail shelves earlier this month and if you want your next phone to stand out from the crowd, these devices may well be an option worth considering. →

Nokia Lumia 920 vs HTC 8X

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This story, Compare Nokia Lumia 920 with HTC 8X, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 28/01/2013 under Windows Phone, Gadgets.

Offline Google Slides

Google Slides is just another name for Google Presentations, but that's not actually new. The big news is that you can now use Google Slides offline to create, edit and run presentations. "Any new presentations or changes you make will be automatically updated when you get back online. So you can continue polishing slides on your next flight, and head to your upcoming presentation without worrying about whether there's going to be wifi."

The offline functionality is still limited to Chrome and requires the Google Drive app from the Chrome Web Store. If you've already enabled the offline support and use it for documents and spreadsheets, you don't need to do anything.



This table shows which Google Drive features are available when you're offline and you use Chrome for desktop or the mobile apps for iOS and Android. You can sync any file when you use the mobile apps, but the editing support is better in the desktop Chrome. You can also install the Google Drive app for Windows and Mac to sync the files that can't be edited online using Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings.

Quickly Switch to the Basic Google Image Search

If you don't like the new Google Image Search interface, you can't go back to the previous interface. Fortunately, Google still includes a link to a much older interface without infinite scrolling, but with useful information like the file size and a page snippet.



Infinite scrolling makes it difficult to get to the bottom of the page because Google continuously loads new image results as you scroll down. The best way to find the link that switches to the old interface is to press "End" on your keyboard (Fn + Right Arrow if you have a Mac) and click "switch to basic version". Google doesn't remember your setting, so the switch is not persistent.

New Google Image Search Interface

Long time, no see. After a long vacation, it's time to get back to the latest news from the Google world. Last month, Google tested a new image search interface and now it's been rolled out. It's the first desktop interface that drops the landing page and no longer loads the web pages that included the image results. The previous interfaces loaded these pages using iframes more like a courtesy to the third-party websites than to improve the user experience.



Google started to make the iframes less important when it moved them to the background. Then the mobile interfaces for smartphones and tablets came out and they didn't even load the original web pages. The new desktop interface is closer to the tablet interface: click an image result and use the left/right keyboard arrows to check the other results.

Here's the old interface (you may still see it):

"Instead of sending you over to a whole new page to preview an image, you'll see a preview of the image in your search results. Once you click on a image, you can quickly flip through the whole set of image previews using your keyboard. Your search results stay in the panel so you don't lose track of what you were doing; if you want to go back to looking at other search results, you can just scroll down and pick up right where you left off. If you want to check out the website where the image is hosted, you can click on the photo or use the tools available," explains Google.



Obviously, the traffic from Google Image Search will drop dramatically and webmasters will complain that Google uses their images and doesn't give anything in return. Google only hosts image thumbnails and loads the original images when you click the thumbnails, so it's now an image leecher that hotlinks to other people's images, using their bandwidth without generating page views or ad revenue. It's better for users, but expect to see many sites that stop displaying images when loaded from Google Image Search or use other anti-leech tricks. Finding the right balance between user experience and webmasters' interests is a hard thing to do.

WindowsAndroid: Run Android On Windows

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Android is probably the most powerful and highly customizable mobile operating system out there. Android, since it’s launch by Google back in 2007, has been powering millions low to mid to high end smart phones, including the famous Samsung Galaxy series. Users who would like to run Android on Windows have limited options. Users need [...]

SoundControl Beta Offers Easy Pandora Control In The Browser [Chrome]

If you’re not yet using Pandora, I don’t think you’re getting the most out of music. Pandora is by far the easiest and the best way to stream music online. Take it to the desktop, on your phone, or in your car. Pandora has helped me stumble across artists I’d have never heard of before and has turned the task of listening to music that I want to hear into something as simple as clicking the play button.

For those of us who aren’t yet paying for Pandora One, we’re stuck with listening along through the browser player. Having a dedicated tab up is a small price to pay for all the greatness that Pandora offers, but subscribers probably get a real kick out of that free tab space when their using their Pandora One desktop application. In this article, I’d like to walk you through a Chrome browser extension that can help take away so much attention from that pesky Pandora tab.

Click here to visit the official SoundControl Beta extension page!

SoundControl Beta isn’t an extension that is easy to get lost in. I’ve seen many confusing add-ons and extensions for Pandora on Firefox and Chrome, but this is not one of them. The function of SoundControl is simple: take the most important elements of the Pandora browser player and embed it into an extension bar icon.

Like every extension featured in the Chrome Web Store, Sound Control is a one-click install. As it completes, you’ll see a shiny new icon hit your extension bar. It’ll be a Pandora-themed play button. Click it once and, if Pandora is not yet active in a tab for you, it will be. If you don’t see it, look a little closer to notice it’s a pinned tab (meaning it should dock to the left of standard, unpinned tabs). Music will immediately begin to play from the last station you were listening to. Click the icon once again to pause streaming.

Now click the icon twice. A mini player should pop out beneath the extension bar.

This small window honestly gives you every single feature that the entire Pandora tab does, except in a much more compact interface. From here you can adjust your volume, like or dislike a song, control the basic playback features, and change stations. It also shows the track that is currently being played.

Now let’s click on Options.

The main functionality here is being able to change what happens with the extension when you click the icon multiple times. You can set multiple clicks to skip a track, thumbs up or down, or activate the browser tab (aside from the options already selected).

You’re also able to change what type of tab is automatically opened, and if you click that dropdown box then you’ll notice a Hidden option! We finally have our tab space back (although the tab and process assigned to it still remains active but invisible to the eye). Song notifications will show what song is being played as a small browser popup. Ad volume allows you to reduce the sound when ads are being played or just completely mute them altogether.

While it’s not hotkeys or a standalone client, SoundControl definitely makes using Pandora easier for the average (free) user. Clicking into that tap every few minutes can get very frustrating, and this extension sits as a pretty solid remedy. What do you think of SoundControl? Let me know in the comments!

The post SoundControl Beta Offers Easy Pandora Control In The Browser [Chrome] appeared first on MakeUseOf.