Customizing the Web

WARNING — An overenthusiastic developer with ksnapshot post.

Something fun I came across while watching Prism being developed is adding bits of Javascript to pages to change their behavior and look. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that helps you manage these Javascript files and applies these files to web pages. While fun and sometimes handy, I haven’t found it overly useful.

I then came across Stylish, another extension except this one changes CSS. When combined with some good stylesheets, they make for a good, sometimes drastic changes (click on the preview for a bigger picture) :

Google reader with a Mac OS theme. Oooh, pretty.

Youtube. Despite not having Flash in this profile, I couldn’t resist.

After finding a few cool ones for google maps, I made it into a prism web bundle (not perfect) to make it look more like a desktop application.

What’s really nice is that Google maps did not change, I changed Google maps. If this was a Flash application, I certainly wouldn’t know how to do it. I can guess that it would be a lot more work. Then again, Flash can do things that the web yet can’t. But we’ll get there.