Picasa 3.9, rating: 9/10

Good: A bunch of new photo editing/enhancement methods.  My new favorites: Lomo, Boost, Vignette.  Face recognition seems improved.  Side-by-side photo viewing for original versus edited comparison.

Bad: Although admittedly a rare occurrence, I wish there was a way to create two separate photo edits from a single original without making a copy of the original.  I.e. somehow one managed to get two good subjects in focus in one photo and one wants to create separate photos from them.

Firefox 3.6

The latest thing is personas (or themes) which allow you to customize the look of your firefox.  Also useful for distinguishing your running browsers, if you happen to use two firefox profiles (for two yahoo or google or whatever accounts).

QuickProxy Firefox add-on

Good: Actually my work provides an automatic tool which does this, but unnervingly often it screws up and doesn’t update the firefox proxy setting even with firefox closed, and it is still a pain to close firefox and reopen it just for updating the proxy setting.   It’s also annoying to navigate all the menus to turn on or off the proxy if you keep firefox open.  This add-on flips the switch with a single button on the status bar.

Bad: Actually, it’s nit-picking, but I’d like a navigation toolbar button.

Update 3/22/11: I finally realized that firefox 3.6.4 and greater has the system proxy setting which allows me to do without this add-on.

Fastflip News Reader

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ Google lab’s experimental page with a kind of paper/page format for presenting news.   The three different ways to look at the news put in different rows: recent news, topics, and sources .   I think I still prefer my feed reader, but fastflip seems to have benefits for dynamic news browsing.  You can track recent events to an authoritative source (currently about 40) without having to ‘subscribe’ as you do for feed readers.  Meanwhile, Google places ads in the right column next to the first ‘page’ of the article which you can peruse before clicking through to go to the full article.  Revenues from the ad ‘predominantly’ go to the content/news provider according to the NYT Article.  Will be interesting to see if it takes off or not.  Commentary from the NYT bits blog.