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One of the new upcoming features in Firefox 4 will be the Firefox menu on Windows and Linux. The goal is to have no menu bar by default, and for the Firefox menu to be a single button in a shorter title bar. I’ve been following this feature closely in nightly builds. I was surprised a couple of days ago when I saw a 2-tiered menu by default (see Exhibit A below). The first thought that struck me is that it looks very like a Windows start menu (Exhibit B below).
For the record I like it, because you don’t have to drill down to find Add-ons and other features. The design is no doubt still in flux and not final. Does anyone know the bug number?
[Update: the bug # is 583386, but note comment 129:
This bug is marked as fixed. Please fill new bug if you think that something is wrong or you want to improve something.
]
What do you think?
 Exhibit A: Firefox menu in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0b5pre) Gecko/20100821 Minefield/4.0b5pre  Exhibit B: The MicroSoft Vista Start menu
    
While I’m not a gamer in general, I do love retro-games. I’ve been thinking that on Mobile, games provide great opportunities for Firefox add-on developers. They are a great way to spend that short bus ride, for example. I think there should be a Games category on Mozilla Add-ons. At Briks we wanted to showcase this with some fun games, so are going about porting a couple of the wonderful distractions from games.mozdev.org. First up, the Tetris clone Xultris.
 Xultris 2-Player. Firefox Add-on Fun
Sure, the front-end is cheesy but this is just a small glimpse of the possibilities. This is XUL, JavaScript and CSS. With the technology stack in the Firefox platform (WebGL, better SVG, better Canvas, better SVG, open video and audio) to graze from, you have much more now than ever to bring your idea to life. Start building!
Next up? You tell us. Given the recent Google home page gaming incident, I know one that would be popular.
On Wednesday, a very hot day in London Town, the last day in June, we had a Mozilla Add-ons Workshop. It was a day without football, and while England may have been knocked out, everyone seemed in fine spirits. A fitting day, as Mozilla Add-ons was fast approaching the 2 billion download mark. A fine achievement and testament to the extensibility of the Firefox and Mozilla platforms.
 Love Your Add-ons Nick and Justin from the AMO team flew in from the US as did Myk from the Jetpack team, and we were joined by a troupe from the Mozilla Europe offices in Paris. I spoke on Mobile add-ons and we covered a bunch of other topics, keeping the attendees engaged for over 3 hours. The big hits seemed to be Myk demoing the Add-ons Builder, and Paul Rouget doing his HTML5 and Web.Next demos.
 Paul On-Stage [More Pictures on Flickr]
For more details, check out these blog posts from the following folks:
So I’ll leave with a thought, feedback welcome. Given that these events are about more than add-ons, morphing to include Web tech in general, should we re-brand these events to ‘Mozilla Hacks Workshop’ or something similar?
 Big Ben, by apdk on Flickr Calling all software developers in the UK and Ireland. If you are interested in the Web, an event not to miss is the upcoming Mozilla Add-ons Workshop in London. It is an evening event scheduled for 6:30pm -10:30pm on 30 June.
We’ll be talking about extending Firefox, the latest and upcoming happenings on the Mozilla Add-ons site, as well as the great Web technologies packed into modern browsers – HTML5 and more.
Personally I am very curious about the local scene in the UK. Who is building add-ons? Where can we find them? If that sounds like you, come along and tell us about them.
Or are you a Web developer building great Web apps? Are you curious about how the new Jetpack SDK leverages Web technologies to enable you to extend the browser? Come along and find out.
The event is free and open to everyone. Just make sure to register here.
For more information, click here.
I do quite a lot of public speaking. I was never formally taught, nor have I actively done much to improve my technique. Rather, it has grown organically and I’ve become more confident (and hopefully better) over time. One thing I have done is read the Presentation Zen book to try and improve how I make slide decks. The conclusions drawn there are less is more, and bullet points bore. I try to adhere to this now but have not yet got to where I want to be. So there is always room for improvement. The start of this process is to watch myself talk, and for many people watching themselves is agonising. I’m going to throw it out there for everyone to see.
This talk was given on April 3 at Istanbul Bilgi University during Free Software & Linux Days [slides]. See more videos in the series.
If you have a spare 58 minutes or so, and are interested in the topic (Mozilla, Firefox, and the Open Web), give it a watch and send some feedback my way.
Can’t see the video? Click here
You know how I feel about Texas…We’re not going that way
Wait. What? You want to go to Mexico from Oklahoma and you don’t want to go through Texas?
Thelma and Louise (1991)
I’ve been quite busy the last few weeks and have neglected writing about this. I need to get it out there as a digital memory if nothing else. Others have written about the shared experience. I’ll make those references here and throw in some words of my own, to keep it short. In three words — it was great.
Jetpack for Learning Design Camp
The pre-SXSW arranged by Mozilla went extremely well. All 10 participants were engaged, did good work on their Jetpacks, and seemed to enjoy themselves as well. Some highlights for me:
- The program, organised by Gunner and Matt of Aspiration Tech, was first-rate. Mixed in with the coding sessions were group discussions, demos, and what we called ‘analog’ exercises. The latter are designed to challenge participants to take a stance and debate certain issues. One example is putting a couple of meters of tape on the floor, making a statement, and asking you to stand anywhere in the tape depending on whether you agree or disagree. Fun ensues.
- Meeting Andy Edmonds for the first time. Andy and I have known each other online for ages, and finally had the good fortune to work together. It is great to have him back as a Mozillian after a forced exile, luckily his current employer is more open.
- The Mozilla Party on Saturday night announcing the winners.
- On the last day of the camp, Nick Nguyen of the AMO team (accompanied by Justin and Julie) dropped in to talk about how Jetpack will fit into the AMO infrastructure. Aza Raskin also dropped in for chat and judging.
See my picture set, and all Flickr photos tagged #jet4learning.
Mozilla posts:
Participant posts:
Press (small sample):
More information on the project from the firehose.
SXSW
If there is such a thing as event overload this is it. Being a newbie, it was overwhelming at first. I had bought a platinum badge (Interactive and Film), being naive enough to think I’d take in some movie panels and screenings. Wishful thinking. The Interactive events kept me busy. Perhaps I was lucky in my choices, but the interactive talks and panels were compelling. I liked the variation of themes that you don’t really get at any other conference. The topics ranged from hot topics like social media to niche topics like running an small Open Source business. The only complaint I’d have is that the convergence (tech/music/film) talks on the last day of interactive were not so interesting for me, but I can imagine how they would be for a sub-set of attendees. There were a lot of talks after I discovered that would have been great to attend that did not turn up in my pre-event research nor in the printed programme.
Of course, there were plenty of party opportunities. If you were a poor student and inventive, there were free meals and drinks to be had around town. The Web Awards were enjoyable, with Wolfram Alpha getting the Best of Show award. Austin was great, a true spirit of its own. But it felt strangely like a city without identity. A culture hemmed in by surrounding large buildings. What I was surprised about was how it felt more like an American city to me than I expected, whatever that means.
There are more photos at my SXSW photo set. I need to give a big shout out to Michael Kaply, an Austin native, for some great conversations and showing me the SXSW ropes. Michael is blazing a trail at Kaply Consulting, doing as I do in working with Mozilla technologies and pushing the Firefox platform.
San Antonio
So on the 17th, the day after Interactive wrapped, I hired a car and went down to San Antonio. SA felt more like a place with an identity, culturally, architecturally, and in other ways. Lots of tourists, for the Alamo of course and the weaving sub-city river walk. Despite only having an afternoon there, I got a good feel for the place walking around the downtown neighbourhoods. With it being St. Patrick’s Day, there was plenty of green to be seen around the city. I resisted going into an Irish pub, waiting until I got back to the hotel later to have a pint of Guinness.
There are more San Antonio photos in the photo set. I hope I get the opportunity to visit Texas and SXSW again.
If you are an add-on fan and missed the Mozilla Add-ons blog post about the new Add-on Collector release (1.1), be sure and go and read it:
Add-on Collector now supports Thunderbird, Seamonkey, and Mobile
This is a project that Dave and I at Briks really enjoy working on. The challenge for this release was making it work with Thunderbird (TB) 2, and mobile support. Thunderbird 2 uses the Mozilla 1.8 branch which meant that the Add-on window overlay code was different. We threw away the overlay bindings and built them from scratch. It’s rarely fun supporting old platforms, but when we started the port TB3 was not out yet. TB3, and Seamonkey (SM), in comparison was a breeze as the toolkit code is the same as Firefox 3.x. Thanks to Igor Velkov for the SM patch.
Technical glitches aside, the Collector does in TB and SB exactly what it does in Firefox, allowing you to subscribe to collections, install add-on from collection, and share. On mobile it is a lot simpler, you just get to sync a particular collection from your subscriptions. Quite useful if you find useful add-ons when browsing and don’t have your mobile device with you. Extensions sync is not something Weave Sync does yet.
One technical note if you are supporting Firefox desktop and mobile in an add-on: If you need to fork JavaScript, you can’t anymore use nsIXULAppInfo.name to identify the platform. It used to return ‘Fennec’ but is now ‘Firefox’. Use nsIXULAppInfo.ID instead.
The Collector add-on interacts via a Collections API with the the Mozilla Add-ons site. Did I mention It is available in 27 languages? ! If you have not tried Collections yet, go and check them out. Create some for yourself, share with friends, family or the world.
Check out the Briks Collection.
Some answers to random questions:
Q. Why does the desktop Collector not allow you to install all add-ons in a collection.
A. We have reservations about the post-install first-run experience, as outlined here.
Q. I can’t log in. What do I do?
Note that you should be using your Mozilla Add-ons site credentials. The previous version (1.0.4) had some known login issues, but 1.1 should be more reliable. If you are still having issues, please file a bug (Product=addons.mozilla.org, Component=Collector Extension).
Q. Where has the ‘Get Add-ons’ panel gone?
It has been renamed to ‘Search’ and moved to the end.
See the list of all open Collector bugs.
Zemanta‘s semantic technology has been around in Firefox for a while now via their add-on, which is just one of the tools in their set. Amongst other things it provides you with image, link, and article suggestions based on your content as you write blog posts or compose (Web)emails. This weeks sees releases that support new clients Outlook 2007 and Thunderbird, giving users of desktop mail an opportunity to use the service.
Read about the new releases.
Here I will give a quick tutorial on how to get going in Thunderbird. Versions 2 and 3 are supported. This can be incredibly fun when composting emails to friends and family, or have practical use for writing fact-finding emails.
Install
The install XPI is the same as the Firefox and Mobile, but if you want the Thunderbird listing URL, here it is:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/7571
HTML Compose
First you will have to turn HTML Compose on. In Account Settings, for each account you want to use it with, go to Composition & Addressing and check the ‘Compose messages in HTML format‘ box.
 HTML Compose Setting Send Options
Setting HTML Compose ensures you can write and see rich emails, and the next step is to ensure the recipient can also see it in it’s full glory. This means that you have to set them to receive HTML mails. The default I believe is for mixed text/html which is fine, and you will be warned if you have the wrong setting. But just to know, first go to the main Thunderbird Preferences/Options and select the Composition panel. At the bottom select the Send Options… button.
 Composition Preferences In Send Options, look for the Text Format dropdown. Choose any options except ‘Convert the message to plain text’.
 Text Format Away We Go
That’s it. Now you can go ahead and compose a great email.
 Writing an email with Zemanta (click for full size) The Zemanta ‘Content Recommendations‘ panel appears on the right side in the Compose window. This can be opened/closed via the format toolbar button. When you start writing your email, Zemanta when it has enough words will retrieve suggestions for you. Then you just need to click on the results to add/remove items from the email. It will keep checking back for changed content and refresh the recommendations.
Guest post by Chris Neale, originally posted at : http://chrs.nl/w/8k7fm 30th January 2010
The Idea
Last Saturday, I woke up with a seemingly brilliant idea, a dot-st domain name for use by my online postage half-site Print My Postage. mypo.st was subsequently registered. However, this isn’t about that; I was on skype telling Brian (King) about this and mused that bri.ks would be a good vanity shortener for briks.si, his Mozilla Software Development Collective. Unfortunately, Kosovo’s dot-ks doesn’t actually exist; fortunately Kazakhstan’s dot-kz does. I proposed that Brian and briks.si should have their own shortener under bri.kz, with briks.si/! as the install location; why use one of the virtual servers of the hosting account purely for bri.kz, when it’s all the same server.
How Not To Register a dot-kz Domain
The fun really started after YOURLS was installed to handle the shortener system, first question: “where to register bri.kz?”, I went down the list of registrars at KazNIC (nic.kz) trying to find one with English as a language option (Cyrillic is bewildering), I settled on http://www.regtime.net/ (.kz 550 rubels per year roughly $20 in Jan 2010), although their https certificate turned out to be webnames.ru (Firefox mismatch warning good for your sanity).
Find your own dot-kz domain(s):
It turned out, that to pay the registration fee to webnames.ru I needed to use a web currency; I chose WebMoney’s WMZ [USD equivalent], signed up for an account (wmtransfer.com) only to find that I needed another account elsewhere to fund the WMZ purse at WebMoney from my credit card.
Note: this is past midnight, so now early Sunday morning.
Off to savechange.ru, signup, login, fill in WMZ purse number.
Liqpay, using Ukrainian bank with MasterCard SecureCode whatsit for verification still wanted to verify me, pending micropayments to card. The card was not good since it only tracked in GBP what with Liqpay wanting USD. So I talked to Liqpay who eventually talked to my card bank, Liqpay authorised payment, savechange converted it from USD to WMZ and I was able to pay the webnames invoice.
Technical
root .htaccess sends bri.kz traffic to briks.si/! which sends it to YOURLS to handle
/.htaccess, mod_rewrite [P] no good all referrers briks.si itself; basic redirect, again no good, no referrers at all; solution [E ..] set environment variable between redirects.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bri\.kz$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://briks.si/!/$1 [E=HTTP_REFERER:%{HTTP_REFERER}]
Conclusions
YOURLS is a good vanity shortener.
When registering a [very] foreign domain name, investigate payment methods and wait for any web currency purses to have funds before visiting the registrar.
Don’t do any of the above when half-asleep.
So we have entered phase 3 of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge. This will consist of continuing work for the 10 successful projects from Phase 2, culminating in the Design Camp at SWSW on 10-12 March.
Read ‘Mozilla Jetpack Design Challenge invites 10 teams to Design Camp‘ at Mozilla Labs.
The 10 chosen projects are:
Being part of the judging panel was an interesting experience because I had to put aside my technical bias (still an important factor) to take into account other criteria such as ‘Interestingness’, potential reach, UX, potential to promote Jetpack technology, potential to aid learning, and so on. Given the less than mature state of Jetpack at this point, the teams did a great job and it was difficult to choose which would go to the next stage.
We’re working out the logistics of the Design Camp now, and in the meantime the teams have to step up their game and continue with development to compete to win at the end. That’s incidental however, as they are all winners and what I am looking forward to seeing is a) how the mentors, teams, and other participants interact when put together for 3 days and b) how the projects will continue to evolve after the camp to provide real value to learners and showcase Jetpack.
Related, Mozilla will have more presence at SXSW Interactive this year. Are you a Mozillian who will attend? Go sign up and make yourself known and you might have the chance to help out in some way. Some Mozilla events to watch out for:
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