I will no longer be developing my first add-on, the Rooster Teeth Site Extender. I’ve established that I simply do not have time to maintain it, or do the reviews. It’s disappointing to both me, and its users to have an owner who isn’t really owning it.

Now for the good news. I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance – er, wait. That’s not it. There is a new maintainer! In fact, I’ve already transferred the ownership of the project over to him. He cares a lot more about the project than I do, so it’s a good fit.

You can still report bugs in the same place as before, but I’m just a consultant of the project now. I wish the project luck, and it’s been fun while it lasted!

This may not seem like a big deal, but there is a big benefit to using this API over the existing synchronous API. SQLite performs a file system operation called fsync which pushes the data in the file system’s cache to the disk. This operation is inherently synchronous, and on some file systems (like ext3), can take substantial amount of time given the right circumstances. If this is ran on the main thread, the UI is locked up the whole time. By using this new asynchronous API, you won’t have to worry about that fsync holding up the main thread at all!

Perhaps the best part about this new API is that it doesn’t require many code changes. You still create SQL statements the same way, but instead of calling execute or executeStep on the prepared statement, you just have to call executeAsync. The method takes one parameter – a callback that notifies on completion, error, and results. The callback is optional on the off chance that consumers don’t care if something finishes successfully or not.

Iterating through results is not much different from before either. The only difference is that results may be chunked, so the callback may get notified about results several times (with only the new data). Some good example code can be found in the tests that landed with this new API.

I’d really like people to try it out and see if they have any issues with the API. There are already a few refinements with bugs filed, and a few more up in my head that we might want if the need arises.

• (Thunderbird) Fixed subject encoding issues that sometimes occurred with messages.
• (All) Added a de localization.
• (Thunderbird) Stopped displaying RSS feeds due to the vast number of notifications that were sent. This is only temporary until a delayed system for dispatching notifications is created that will handle a large load of notifications (Growl will actually handle this in 1.1, so it may not be worthwhile)

Today I just committed a patch to trunk that properly selects the message when you click on a notification in Thunderbird. I’m not going to release that just yet as I want to play with it myself a bit.

• Cleaned up a memory leak when registering notifications
• Enabled Notification support for Chatzilla
• Enabled click-back support for Chatzilla notifications (focuses Chatzilla window)
• Enabled click-back support for download notifications (opens/focuses the Download Manager)
• Enabled click-back support for new mail notifications (opens/focuses Thunderbird)

My testing has shown this to be a rock solid release, and I’m quite proud of it. I have a few more things planned for it, so there still should be a few more releases, but otherwise, there isn’t much more to be done.

You can grab the extension on addons.mozilla.org.

I’ll get on writing docs on how to add your own notifications for Growl on the mac as well. I’ll post here when those are done (hopefully tonight). UPDATE: Developer docs can be found here.

Anywho, you can get it for Thunderbird, Firefox, and Flock right here

It should be noted that this version of the extension includes basic support for Chatzilla. I plan on working with Gijs to get more in the future, but I think what we have now is a solid start.

AMO has the latest version, and you can get it from there:
Firefox
Thunderbird

I really don’t want to compare registration dictionaries and then re-register myself, and it seems like I shouldn’t have to. So, I’ve sent a message to the Growl Discussion list wondering if that is actually the intended behavior. The first e-mail I got back seems to indicate that it isn’t the intended behavior, so I’m going to hold off on writing code to compare dictionaries for now. Once this issue is resolved, I will feel confident about releasing 0.9.5, as well as get docs out on how other extension can include support for Growl easily. Hopefully that will be within the next two weeks.

I might be able to get all the notifications done by the end of the week, and then I’ll have another preview release out for general consumption (still in the sandbox of course).

You can of course build it from the source if you are ambitious enough. ;)

Looks like it will be, so I spent some time today and yesterday getting the component setup for integration. I’m just waiting to hear back from him about how I need to use Chatzilla’s hooks, and away I’ll go!

I’m still looking for feedback, so the more testers the better. I noticed a bug yesterday with Thunderbird new mail notification, and I’m investigating that (my knowledge of mail code is much weaker than that of browser code).

I will keep you all posted!