If you’re running Windows apps on your Mac with VMware Fusion in Unity mode< but you're sick of blurry icons in your Dock and application switcher, the VMware Fusion blog has a simple solution: Replace your blurry Windows icons with high-resolution ones. Many of your Windows icons max out at 28x28 pixels, which is why you see the blur when they're on display next to your Mac's at least 128x128-pixel icons. The post highlights a few high resolution Windows icon packs for the job, and then details how to make the switch. As a bonus, the high-res icons work equally well if you just want to spice up your regular Windows install.
Replacing those blurry icons! [Team Fusion Blog]Dear Lifehacker, As we all know, the absolute greatest thing about Firefox is its extensibility, so why is it that the Firefox Add-ons window seems to be the only thing I can’t get to with a keyboard shortcut? Now that the Add-ons window has the Get Add-ons tab in Firefox 3, there’s even more reason I want to be able to get there quickly. How can I create my own keyboard shortcut to my Firefox extensions? Signed, Shortcut Junkie
Mac only (Windows version on its way): Personal time tracking software Slife gets a redesign and some sleek new features in its newest version 2.0. Slife tracks and charts what applications and documents you use and for how long throughout the day. Categorise that time into activities and goals—like “Reading email,” “Online research,” or “Designing web pages”—so you can see exactly where it is your day went. Version 2.0 for Mac offers a slicker design, goal tracking, better visualisations, Growl support—and no pricetag. Slife 2.0 is a free download for Mac only, but a Windows version 2.0 is on its way. Here’s more on the Windows beta.
Slife [via Macworld]If you’ve got an overstuffed inbox and you want to declare Inbox Zero without individually marking messages as read, you can mark all unread mail as read using a Gmail filter. Create a new filter with is:unread in the Has the words field, then tell Gmail to Mark as read all matching messages. Finally, tick the box next to Also apply filter to conversations below and create the filter. The filter will mark all your unread items as read. If you just want to clear out unread items in a specific label, add something like label:Followup to the Has the words box with is:unread. Simple, quick, and you don’t have to page through thousands of emails to get the job done. Just be sure to delete the filter when you’re done. UPDATE: As bostonguy points out, Gmail has added an option in search results to select all conversations that match a search, which makes the filter unnecessary. See the screenshot after the jump.
Now that you’ve minimised Firefox’s chrome with a few good user styles, it’s time to maximize your surfing area. Just by moving a few small things around you can have all of Firefox’s menu and location bar’s features, but without all the real estate-hogging. Check out a video screencast of how to consolidate Firefox’s chrome after the jump.
For jailbroken iPhones: For some reason or another, the mobile Safari browser on some updated iPhones and iPod touch models seems to constantly drop cookies, making iPhone-friendly sites like Google Reader and Remember the Milk a lot less useful. iRemember, a free one-fix app, makes a simple change in the Unix-y guts of your phone to help Safari hold onto its cookies better. Installing the app requires adding a repository to your Installer sources, but the fix seemed to work in a quick test, at least on Google sites. iRemember is a free download for jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches. Fixing Safari Cookie Bug with iRemember! [Just Another iPhone Blog via iPhone Freakz]
Web-based album art library and search engine AllCDCovers just may have the missing art you’ve been looking to fill in your digital music collection. Despite its name, AllCDCovers carries both album art, DVD covers, and game covers, front and back, with pretty high res versions available for free download. AllCDCovers didn’t have the indie artist I tried, so the really obscure stuff might not be here; still, when the iTunes Store fails you it may be a good stop. Share your favourite online source of downloadable album art in the comments. AllCDCovers [via Killer Tech Tips]
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Open It Online, a free Firefox extension, cuts out all the middle steps between finding a document in a Google search, in your web mail, or anywhere else online, and getting it open in a web-based office/editing suite. In other words, it adds an option to your Firefox “Open With” dialog to let you open Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and more file types in Google Docs, the Zoho suite, ThinkFree Viewer, and other locations. You can pre-set defaults for every file type, and that’s just about it—nice and convenient for fans of online editing. Open It Online is a free download, works wherever Firefox 2 or 3 does.
Open It Online [via gHacks]
