The Mozilla team just posted Firefox 3 today. Go grab it now!

A few cool new features include Page Zooming, Smart Location Bar, On-Click Bookmarking and most importantly Improved Performance and better memory allocation. Personally, I’m struck by the sexy new interface, snappier feel and better organization of the browser interface.

For me the new Firefox feels a bit like Safari and Flock blended together.

Chances are if you’re a seasoned web developer at one time or another you’ve needed to insert Flash into a website but you have no idea what the dimensions of the movie are.

Previously there were basically three options for solving this problem:

1. Go directly to the person who created the flash and ask them the dimensions.
2. Open the .fla file in Flash (if you own a license) and get the document dimensions yourself. Chances are you’ll end up getting a cup of coffee at the same time because Flash takes so long to start up.
3. Shistily try to take a screen shot of the open Flash movie and measure the dimensions in Photoshop, usually ending up 1 or 2 pixels off and forcing you to go back to option one or two.

Or… browse to the .swf file in Finder and drag it into your TextMate file window. Wala! Now you have the flash insertion code right along with the exact dimensions of the movie. No more annoying hassles.

In their perpetual quest to index the World’s information Google has now started a health record service. Users can add medical conditions, allergies, procedures, test results and drug interactions. Partnerships with Walgreens, CVS and Quest Diagnostics allow users to import current records into Google Health.

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.

The service was officially announced in February of 2008 and tested via a pilot program with Cleveland Clinic with great success and acceptance. Personally, I’ve never seen my full health record. I have zero clue as to how many, and what people have seen it so far, so the fact that Google is holding this data is perfectly fine with me.

Just when I was starting to knock Google’s track record of innovation they roll out GrandCentral. While it isn’t truly a Google “innovation” what they will be doing with it sure is innovative. I’m not a user of it – yet, but it sounds like an awesome idea and I’m very excited about getting into the application.

If you never heard of GrandCentral, it’s a phone aggregator…. in a nutshell it will allow all your phones and voicemails to be managed under 1 account.

Here are just a few of the features I’m excited about:

• One number, rings everything
• Let people call you from a Web pageClick2call from your keyboard
• Call Record. Yep… record your calls… this will be fun to see the lawyers debate
• Voicemail notifications via SMS
• Mobile Access, similar to the iPhone visual voicemail

I can just hear the telecos whining about this latest invention by Google. But why are they doing this, I’m only guessing at this point but let’s follow the money for some clues.

• Phone based ads using AdWords
• Click to Call, perfect for tracking AdWords conversions over the phone
• Planting the seeds for the Google Phone
• Searchable Voicemail

OK, I’ve drank the juice and I haven’t even used this yet. I encourage you to visit the site and sign-up as well.

By default OSX has a nice screen capture feature which is invoked by hitting Shift-Apple-4. Sure, it isn’t the most intuitive key set but now you know. The default is set to capture all images as PNGs which is fine in most cases but sometimes a hassle if you are capturing the image for quick posting to a blog, in which case GIF or JPG would be useful and the file conversion is just another step.

So here goes:
Open up Terminal ( under Applications / Utilities )
Enter the following command into the Terminal
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type *FILETYPE*

Where the command says *FILETYPE* replace it with JPG, PDF, TIF or PNG.

Hit enter and you’ll be good to go!