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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:
 Flickr Find in action Did you ever need that perfect image for a presentation you were doing? Flickr Find makes it easy. Creative Commons images are returned by default, but you can make an easy change to search all images.
Requirements
Install
Flickr Find is available at the Jetpack Gallery.
Basic Usage
- Select a word or a phrase on a web page
- Cloose ‘Search Flickr…’ from the context menu
- If the slidebar is closed, you will see the icon move. Click on it to see your results. If already open the results will just load there
- 20 items per page is the default, and you can change that in Settings. At the buttom choose ‘More…’ to fetch more images
- Selecting a new word or phrease will start a new set of image results. Selecting the same will just fetch more images and add them to the list
- Clicking on one of the images in the slidebar will open the Flickr photo page in a new tab.
I’m keeping it very simple, but if you have any features requests, I would certainly consider them.
I was really impressed with the File Upload demo on Mozilla Hacks because it mixed in a few nice technologies like XHR upload progress events, Canvas, and the File API new in Firefox 3.6. It turns out that I needed to talk about some of the things in last week’s Jetpack for Learning seminar. So rather than reinvent the wheel I lazily just ported the code over to run in a Jetpack slidebar. Go install it at the Jetpack Gallery.
 File upload in a Jetpack slidebar And so, it is presented as-is, just as a showcase. It is missing some things like Drag and Drop which would be trivial to add. So go ahead and take the code and run with it, adding some nice upload feature to your jetpack. The thing to keep in mind here is that all the great Web developer features packed into Firefox are also available to jetpacks add-ons.
The FOSDEM 2010 Front Page countdown says says there are 32 days to go. Mozilla has a dev room ready to go, like previous years. Two years ago at FOSDEM we celebrated 10 years of Mozilla, this year it is 10 years of FOSDEM.
The schedule for the Mozilla dev room is not yet finalised. This year we want to mix it up a bit, and promote cross-pollination talks between various Open Source projects present. One good example of this is Firefox and Maemo, the latter being the first Mobile platform that Firefox has reached RC status on. The schedule is usually packed but we may trim it down a little this year to allow Mozillians to roam the corridors and find talks in other areas that interest them.
Right now there is a very rough list of suggested topics up on the wiki. I’m giving myself until the the end of the week to have the first draft schedule up. What this means is that if you are coming or would like to come, you still have time to get your topic suggestions in. William has set a deadline of 15 January. It is still wide open. Just go ahead and edit the wiki page, or leave a comment here. Even better, let me know if you would like to speak.
Come and join in this unique event.
 Image via Wikipedia
I’m privileged to be be one half of the technical mentoring team for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge, along with the prolific Andy Edmonds. We’re well under way to getting the participants going with implementing their ideas in Phase 2. You can read about some of them on the Mozilla wiki. I’m looking forward to seeing the ideas turn into great browser add-ons.
A huge hat-tip to Frank Hecker for getting the project going, and I wish him much success and happiness in his new pursuits. Philipp Schmidt has done amazing things pulling things together, and he writes about Phase 2:
The selected teams are eligible to participate in a set of online seminars covering Jetpack development and user interface design. They will also get support and mentorship from the Mozilla community to help them turn their ideas into Jetpack prototypes. At the end of phase II up to 10 participants will be invited to a hands-on Design Camp at SXSW Interactive 2010.
Read Philipp’s full post.
Here in Slovenia we like to party like any good nation, so what better excuse than the birthday of our beloved Firefox. After all we were 2nd or 3rd to reach 50% Firefox market share, but are still licking our wounds after being pipped at the post by an Indonesia that came from nowhere. Not ones to hold a grudge, we have vowed to become the first country to reach 100% market share.
 Firefox Fathead at Kiberpipa's entrance - by nitot on Flickr That might require some pretty heavy political lobbying and/or bribery, so in the meantime we’ll start off by having a party. Read all about it over on mozilla.si and RSVP at the Facebook event page. If you can’t speak Slovene (don’t worry, you are not alone) or have an aversion to Facebook, here is the short version:
- Event Title: You’ve Come a Long Way, Foxy (hat tip)
- When: 19:00 on Wednesday, November 11
- Where: Kiberpipa Kersnikova 6, 1000 Ljubljana (map)
- What: 4-5 very short talks, followed by an evening of immense fun
The famous Firefox wine will be served. There will be cake. There will be blood. We are working on the music. Mozillians and party-lovers everywhere, you are invited.
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