Pretty Install

USAGE:

• It only works for remote installs. For local installs, the current dialog shows.
• Clicking anywhere outside the doorhanger dismisses it and cancels the install.
• Switching to a new tab or window when the doorhanger is open cancels the install.

If you feel like it is an experiment worth pursuing further, the source is available on github.

Huge thanks to Sylvain Pasche for his work on the original patch and help in turning it into an add-on.

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.

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:

• Winners post on the Mozilla Labs blog
• “Jetpack for Learning” Design Challenge Winners Announced at SXSW on the Mozilla Blog

Participant posts:

• SXSW posts by Emre Sevinc of the ClozeFox project
• Jetpack Design Camp and SXSWi by Michelle Bachler of the Cohere Project
• Jetpack Design Camp by Cohere project
• Expression Widgets nominated Best Web Hack by Taboca (Marcio Galli)
• Mozilla’s Jetpack for Learning Design Winners by profhacker (Rubrick)

Press (small sample):

• SXSW Keeps Austin Weird, Wired and Wild on Wired
• LangLadder featured on LifeHacker

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.

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• Jetpack SDK: The reboot of the extensions (ajaxian.com)

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.

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.

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).

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, with pending micropayments from card. This was not good, since the card 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.

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

• Firefox 3.6 or greater
• Jetpack Add-on 0.7 or greater

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.

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• Embed CC licenses into JPGs? (hyperorg.com)
• New Flickr Search (flickr.net)

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.

I gave an overview talk on Mozilla activities titled ‘Firefox and the Open Web: Web Hacks, Add-ons, Jetpack, and More‘ (Slides: Google Docs | PDF | OpenOffice ODP) that was extremely well received. I got a rapturous applause before talking, unlike any talk I’ve given before. That cheer was for Mozilla. How great that Mozilla is still so popular.

I was interviewed by David Bailey on various things Open Source, what it means to me, and what it potentially means to the people of Kosovo. Check out the audio.

Some more random thoughts:

• James Mike DuPont is a hero for leading the way in organising the event. It looks like it will continue next year. Mike put it quite succinctly in his interview with David. His motivation is to help people get jobs, and move away from false economies like pirated software. Open Source gives you skills and job prospects. Simple.
• The local team who helped out are also heroes. There are too many to mention. Thanks for everything.
• Burek!
• My Flickr Photo Set. All tagged sfk09.
• The main currency used there is the Euro. I’m wondering if they will adopt their own currency.
• The Firefox t-shirts were in huge demand, and I didn’t have enough to go around. I must try and bring more next time.
• Was great to meet, amongst many others, Novica from the Macedonian Firefox l10n team.

Click here if you can’t see the image

The design is subject to change, but it does what it says on the box, getting your pictures online in batches, simply and fast. Sub-features include choosing albums, creating new albums, tagging, and adding metadata like title and description.

Facebook is now the #1 user-generated picture content hosting site online. So you are in good company. Let us know what you think.

Technical note: In Firefox 3.0 builds, upload progress is per photo. There is finer granularity in Firefox 3.5 due to the use of XHR progress events.

Image by King Molan via Flickr

There is a new Firefox add-on called KidZui that makes things easy. We at Briks are proud to have worked on this for the KidZui team. It provides a custom browser and other features wrapped in a locked, secure environment. It provides over a million sites, pictures, games, and videos that have been checked allowing independent surfing. It also has social and sharing features.

If you have children, try it out and let us know what they think. There are still a few bugs to be fixed, but we will be putting out regular updates over the coming days and weeks.

P.S. Tip: Don’t just leave the kids on their own. Sit down with them sometimes when they are online, help them learn, and above all have fun.

Image via Wikipedia

Video from eLiberatica 2008 published – see interviews with representatives from Google, Mozilla, Sun, European Union, FSF Europe, Gartner and more

eLiberatica on YouTube

The general message I took away from the conference was:

a) the market is not as large as other parts of the world, or even other parts of Europe.

b) the market in Eastern Europe is in its infancy and there is a lot of opportunity.

c) Open Source software and services have become mainstream and will continue to make inroads.

I think these are exciting times in Eastern Europe not just related to business, but in areas of social development, innovation, and culture. If you have a free half an hour or so I encourage you to watch the videos to get a feel for what is happening in the OSS world there.

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• FOSS, Business, and Bucharest

Mozilla Addons Workshop (MAOW08)

- Good venue, well equipped. The audience was spit into different perspectives but there were screens and televisions scattered around making sure every could see and hear the speakers.

- I enjoyed Wladimir‘s talk. It focused less on popups (or lack of them) and more on the community model and mechanics of maintaining a successful extension. Apparenly 5% of Firefox users approximately use AdBlock Plus, which converts to about 1% of the total Internet user population. Not small numbers on the grand scale of things.

- I did not follow the rest of the talks well, them being in French and all (I wish I studied more in school)! But from what I understood and heard from others, the quality bar was high.

- Met Patrick Finch of Mozilla Europe Marketing for the first time. We chatted over a pint of Guinness (not very Paris I know) on Saturday night and found out we had a lot in common. And David, it was a pleasure as always!

- Met a bunch of other interesting folks. Special mention goes to J.C. Combaz, the Founder and CEO of a French startup called OutWit. He was showing me their smart and powerful Firefox extension called OutWit Hub that scans and mines data from pages. Sometimes the word ‘extension’ does not do justice to software written on the Mozilla Platform. Try it out.

- And last but not least, kudos to William Quiviger, Paul Rouget, and the XULFr.org team for the organisational work. Looks like there will be more similar events upcoming.

The City

- Second visit, first in 2000 for XML Europe 2000.

- Ranks up there as one of my favourite ‘big cities’, if not the favourite. The atmosphere walking alone the Seine on a sunny day is unique.

- Did not talk to one rude Parisian. We need to start moving beyond stereotypes.

- Shops close on Sunday in Paris. This seems different to other major European cities.

- If you like taking photos, you are spoiled for choice. Some of mine are here.

Or if you prefer other formats:

• PDF
• PPT