Category: Mozilla

Growl

Growl Extension released!

Well, today I added support for Thunderbird (2.0b2 and greater) for my Growl integration extension. It also works in Firefox for the downloads. You can get it here, but you need to make the sandbox visible in order to see it (it isn’t a public release yet). You should not click the link to go to the extension since it logs you out of amo (another bug that I don’t know the number of, but will be fixed soon). Copy and paste it, and all should work out.

It only says support for Firefox on that page, but that’s only because of Bug 374890. It really does support Firefox 2.0, Thunderbird 2.0b2, and Flock 0.8!

It will display notifications for download start, download finish, download canceled, download failed, and new mail notifications (depending on which application you install it in). If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

EDIT: There seems to be some possible issues for those using 2.0.0.1 of Firefox. Please make sure you have the latest version!

EDIT2: OK, there seems to be some confusion about the url. Sadly, this is in the sandbox, which means there’s a nice complication. You have to log in/create an account at the site, go to your user preferences, and then enable the sandbox. From there, the url will work just fine – otherwise you’ll get an “Addon not found!” error (see Bug 374406 and friends)

Firefox Growl

Growl and Firefox

Well, about an hour ago I checked in some code into the Growl subversion repository for an extension that will get Growl working with Firefox. There is still a minor issue with it, and sadly the issue prevents it from working, but I think that can be solved sooner rather than later.

As of now, the only thing it does is enable the download complete notification to work. You might say “but we’ve already got that!“, but I assure you that my approach is much better. First of all, it doesn’t require that you have growlnotify installed anywhere. It uses the same code that I’m using for Bug 362685, with a few changes for it to work on the 1.8.0 and 1.8 branches (Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 respectively).

I’m starting off small, but it can get much more advanced as things go on. This will, of course, be more useful for extension authors (as consumers) as opposed to browser functionality (the only thing nsIAlertsService is used for is the download complete notification). I can add more notifications down the line though, and I also plan to support at least Thunderbird, and maybe even Sunbird too! I’ll try to keep anyone interested in this updated here.

Code Firefox Personal

Web Forms 2.0

I’ve recently picked up the task of implementing part of the Web Forms 2.0 spec from the WHATWG. So far I’ve got some work done on the RepetitionEvent Model and the RepetitionElement interface.

Well, my initial plans were to use XBL to implement a large portion of the code as per conversations with my co-conspirator Alex. Well, bz brought up an intersting point – XBL isn’t applied to elements that have a CSS property of display:none. Well, seeing as how repetition templates are supposed to be hidden with that CSS property, I couldn’t use XBL.

As a result, I get to test my knowledge of C++. Yey! I’d like to state right now that my skills in C++ are not great. In fact, I have very little expereice with it. I mean, I only have had two classes in C++, and one was a very basic course. I feel it goes without saying that I really have my work cut out for myself.

All is not lost, however. There are some really useful tools that are making this so much easier. For example, lxr lets me easily look at existing code and see how things are done the “right” way. Then, there is always a ton of documentation available on Devmo, XUL Planet, and occasionally Google comes into play. Then of course I always have the wonderful folks on irc in #developers. Folks like biesi, bz, and timeless have helped me countless times, and I am really greatful.

This is going to be a long and and winding road, but it will be very beneficial for me. I’ve already learned a lot, and I’ve got a lot more to learn.

Mozilla Personal

No really, I’m still here

I’ve been doing a lot of work, which takes away from time I could actually post something interesting here.

That, however, is exactly why I am writing now! I’m embarking on something new yet again (did I mention I like being busy and have a lot of projects ongoing?). As many of you may know, I have been fixing bugs in the Mozilla Code base. Primarily, those bugs are dealing with the DOM Inspector, which is a wonderful tool that can solve a lot of weird issues you might come across. I find it especially useful dealing with large documents because the DOM is often too complex to just understand by looking at the source code. If you haven’t seen it before, I strongly suggest you at least take a look.

Anyway, what I am wondering is how many people actually have heard and use the DOM Inspector? I know a lot of my friends didn’t even know about it when I asked them (these are my technical friends, so I kinda expected them to know), so this is somewhat of a feeler. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

Firefox

2.0’s “Addons Manager”

I just got the latest build of Bon Echo, the alpha build of Firefox 2.0, and noticed a nice new feature called the ‘Addons Manager’. For what I can tell, it is a combination of the theme manager and the extension manager from previous versions of Firefox. I imagine that this could be expanded to include things just as the Flash plugin, Java plugin, etc. This is all a part of the visual refresh that is planned for Firefox 2.0. Here’s a screenshot:

The nicest thing about it is that there is now an options button associated with the extension, instead of down below. People always seemed to miss it before, so now it’s a bit more obvious.