Soroush Javidi

Something that I had found some time ago was SSB applications. SSB stands for Site Specific Browser, and is basically an Internet browser dedicated to a single website. For example, You could have an SSB on your desktop, which when you double-click, takes you directly to your email account (say, Gmail), and no where else. It's not meant for surfing the Internet, but dedicated to one website that you frequent.

I'm not a big user of SSBs, I use one for Remember the Milk and now recently Splitweet. I use Fluid.app on Mac, and Mozilla's Prism on Ubuntu Linux. With Fluid, you can assign an icon to your SSB, which then shows up in the Finder and the Dock, should you put it there.

I needed to create a PDF from a Word document recently and found that the resulting PDF was 12MB! I noticed that the images inside the document were the cause. In Word 2003 in Windows I know that there is a Compress Pictures button that will remove cropped areas and compress the image. I was using Word 2008 for Mac which unfortunately doesn't have this option. Also, the Print dialogue in Mac OS 10.5 doesn't provide a 'compress PDF' option as it did in 10.4. A search on the Internet gave the following options, which I would like to share here.