That’s the thing that gets me so excited to get up and get going every day. Technology has reached a point where anyone can get involved with innovation. Patents and degrees matter a lot less. Imagining something and then coding it up is what its all about these days.A VC, Jun 2009

You should read the whole article.

Target

It might be obvious to say this, but Fennec add-ons are much different beasts than their desktop counterparts. All the goodness of the Mozilla Platform is there and available to use, but the UI is completely different. Less hooks are available simply because there is less space, but the design and UI flow provide different challenges. Sure, there are toolstrips, aka vertical bars to stick icons on to, but what would happen if every extension did that. Pretty soon yours would be lost in the mix.

Madhava Enros did a good job of explain the design behind the Fennec UI. Dialogs and context menus are just 2 things among others that are out in Fennec, and their usage is strongly discouraged. With regard to dialogs, one concern I was hearing from devs is how to show preferences. Recent builds of Fennec (get desktop builds here, or ask on irc.mozilla.org#mobile) have already taken steps to address this.

Fennec Add-ons Manager

So as you can see, when Options is selected, the UI appears inline and not in a dialog. While there are still bugs, it is clever, but is it scalable for larger pref sets? Or should extension authors scale down?

Stepping Back

I started off my talk about porting existing extensions [Slides: PDF | PPT] by challenging authors to really think whether they should do it. Ask yourself, does it make sense in this context? Does it fit into the browsing habits of users of smaller devices, which is different than desktop usage? For example, users on the go want more information suggested to them as opposed to go hunting for it which can be cumbersome. Now I don’t want to discourage you from porting your add-on. We certainly need more. Keep in mind that it will be more work than just adding Fennec as a target application in install.rdf, and while doing it, get inspiration for new ideas. I think some of the best add-ons will be ones built from the ground up that take advantage of device capabilities such as GPS and voice.

The document story needs to get better. Mark Finkle posted last week about his documentation efforts so far, and thanks to Mark for that. It gives us a solid foundation to add more. I urge everyone working in this area to post your finding on the Mozilla wiki / Devmo / your blog / anywhere to make life easier for those who follow and help promote adoption. I’ll be personally following up with all participants to make sure they do so.

The Winners

Before the event, we offered a challenge at short notice on Mozdev to developers to propose ports of their existing work or new add-ons for Fennec. 4 entrants got to go to Copenhagen. The winners were (in no particular order):

1. Fabrice Desre - Develop a “local guide” application leveraging the geolocation support in recent Fennec builds. The geoguide will show informations relevant for the user, like touristic information, photos, retaurants and hotel etc. using various data sources such as flickr and dbpedia. The focus here is not to rely on a cluttered map display, but to provide a clean UI : in the same spirit of the experiments going on for the “new tab” in Firefox, but for a “new place”.
2. Chris Neale - Port Link Widgets to Fennec.
3. Marien Zwart - Port RadialContext-mz to Fennec.
4. Benoit Bailleux - autoOpenID looks for OpenID sign-in forms and (depending on its configuration) can log-in automaticaly (or propose to) with no more than one click.

Of the four, Fabrice completed GeoGuide, Chris is almost complete, and Marien and Benoit are still working on it.

GeoGuide

GeoGuide determines your location using the Geolocation API, and with that data present you with a map view, weather, local events, images, and wikipedia articles.

And The Rest

Some other good work came out the weekend.

• Nicolas Belloni and Mattias Rost are working on Detector which is their own words, “is an add-on to bring more fingerfriendliness to the content of webpages on Fennec. We strongly support Mozilla’s effort to make a browser adapted for mobile users. So we are aiming at adding more interaction to phone numbers, addresses and contacts’ names. The type of interaction style that we add to the content needs to be thought in order not to be destructive and to take into account the lack of contextual menu. To begin with, we want to detect phones numbers and give the possibility to users to call, save or sms this number”.
• Jesper Hansen is working on a few things — The first is Save Image. Since Fennec has no possibility to save images, then this addon will provide a list of all images on the loaded page with name, ext, size and a single button to save it. Save Image will also provide a simple canvas dialog (or alternative) that slides up from the bottom of the screen when a onmousedown is being detected for longer than a specific time on an image. Second up, Toastercat: an add-on to monitor and display content of icanhascheezburger.com (and friends, see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11945) RSS feeds in a simple way without having to load the entire page but only rely on the content provided in the feed. A third add-on is related to about:config since Fennec is missing some features there.
• Fabrice followed up the excellent GeoGuide with the equally excellent GrafiTwit. This brings a new twist to tweeting, allow you to doodle on a canvas, send the picture off to Twitpic, and post the link to your stream.
• I ported Zemanta, a few hours of effort, and it now works as the desktop version bar a couple of bugs related to the icon in the location bar. Let me know if you want to try it out, it is not public yet.

Zemanta on Fennec

There are a few more add-ons for Fennec available on Mozilla Add-ons. UPDATE: More than a few.

Lessons Learned and Bugs

One of the lessons learned is best summed up by the mantra ‘performance, performance, performance’. Things you take for granted on the desktop may bite you on the mobile device. Here are some performance related guidelines. Another important point is to try if at all possible to test on one of the mobile devices that Fennec runs on. When testing existing add-ons on Nokia developer devices, it was apparent quickly that this was not done for some existing ones. The desktop versions just don’t highlight some issues, e.g. related to touch. Another alternative is to run Maemo virtually.

Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend 2009

At this point, bugs are good. If you come across any, please report them and make them block bug 492546 [Develop an extension showing a xul page in BrowserCanvas]. Vivien Nicolas of Mozilla Europe is working on identifying all XUL related bugs in Fennec, triaging, and following up on fixes.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ‘Firefox Mobile’ alpha hits Windows Mobile 6 (news.cnet.com)
• Firefox Mobile (aka Fennec) Hits Beta [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)

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.

Remember, all we need now is a commitment, we don’t need to see the code until the end of the month. It will be a great weekend in Copenhagen.

Over and out.

Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana will be bringing together 20 of the best seed stage web tech startups with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from all over Europe to participate in a day of intense mentoring, panel discussions and presentations at the superb Tehnoloski park Ljubljana.

We are looking for strong, quality startups that have the talent, drive and capacity to fully embrace the opportunities that participating in a Mini Seedcamp brings. Which is receiving quality advice from top industry leaders and start building those key relationships to help drive your business. Relationships that normally take years to build, you’ll have access to in one day. Mini Seedcamps are not a conference, but an entrepreneurial ecosystem of support to strengthen and catapult your ideas into a viable business.

You still have until 27 April (next Monday) to make your applications, so get to work! I’ll be mentoring, and am excited to be working with some of the best Web talent in the region. Hope to see you there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• We’re on a mission - Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana applications now open! (seedcamp.com)

(Don’t see the embedded presentation? Other formats: PDF | PPT)

Robert talks more about the conference here, breaking the news that there will likely be a MozCamp in Vienna in October. My talk and Firefox in general got some coverage in the local press - Read (in German) ‘How does Firefox Become the Number One‘.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mozilla at Linuxwochen in Vienna (brian.kingsonline.net)
• The shifting of the Web; Browsers over time (ajaxian.com)
• How Can Mozilla Empower Nonprofits & Movements? (zak.greant.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Tomorrow I will be in Vienna and speaking at Linuxwochen.at, a premier Austrian Open Source event.

The schedule is packed, and up just before me in the evening will be Robert Kaiser talking about the Open Web. If you missed Paul Rouget’s demos this week, I urge to to check them out.  I’ll be focusing more on Add-ons and other areas and the discussion in both talks is sure to get interesting.

I’m looking for ward to hanging out with my neighbours. If you are around, drop in to check out some of the talks and say hi.

It was a tweet from Christoper Blizzard that I can’t find right now, or perhaps it was this blog post. So I put out a call. Lo and Behold, Marko Mrdjenovi?  (aka Fry, aka Slovene web dev extraordinaire) was listening. He didn’t know of an existing tool, so he went about the task of making one.

The result: tweecious

Features:

• auto-discovery of  your twitter and delicious accounts
• no login
• runs in the background, unobtrusive
• uses longurl API to find the real links from all those nasty short urls
• use Zemanta’s suggestion engine to pull in tags

So if you don’t want all those great links you are tweeting to get lost, go get tweecious! Thanks Fry.

I covered a wide range of topics so you won’t find much detail on any one. I’ve tried to compensate with links. The goal was to introduce the audience to some things they may not have come across.

(Can’t see the embedded video? Go here)

The fox is hard to stop!

Some personal thoughts:

- I enjoyed hanging out with Marco Zehe and getting an insight into the work he is doing in accessibility and his perspective on life in general.

- Mike Connor’s talk on what’s coming beyond Firefox 3.1 got a lot of attention. He talked about a few things including uplift of Labs projects into Firefox, and what the next iteration of add-ons will look like from a technology perspective. On the latter I called him on some things like sandboxing and silent updates which come from the Google Chrome extensions design doc. But as Mike pointed out these ideas are nothing new and Mozilla have been talking for a long time about making extension development easier. It seems like what might happen if some sort of two tier add-ons system. Light weight extensions with a smaller reach and less privileges, complimented by light-weight themes like Personas. The existing system giving more privileges and power will be for heavy lifting add-ons.

- I like that we had some marketing and design content in the mix this year. There was John Slater’s talk, and the marketing workshop. I wanted so much to see John’s talk but had to head over to a workshop led by Paul Rouget on how the xulfr.org community model could be built on and changed to create more successulful Mozilla dev communities in Europe and indeed globally.

Finally, thanks to Mozilla Europe for sponsoring myself and the other community members to be there.

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven things:

1. My full name is Brian William Michael King. William is my grandfather’s name (my Dad’s Dad), and Michael is my Dad’s name (better known as Mick). I never met my grandfather, he died before I was born, but I am told I look quite like him. If I have a son I will call him Sue.
2. When I was younger I was a sports freak. I played a lot, including but not only - Gaelic Football, Hurling, Basketball, Soccer, Tennis and Rugby. When not playing, I watched almost any sport you can think of on the telly, from snooker to golf to darts. I gave up playing pretty much cold turkey when I was 16. Nowadays I watch no sport, with the exception of a bit of soccer here or there in major championships or when the Irish national team is playing.
3. I have Type 1 Diabetes, aka Diabetes mellitus, aka that particular genetic dice rolled my way. I am insulin dependent. I was diagnosed at age 31 which is quite late, Type 1 diabetes is also know as juvenile diabetes. My sister Paula was diagnosed when she was 7. I thought I escaped, but alas.
4. I was a vegetarian for 8 years. Nothing unusual there. I went back to eating meat when I got diabetes, as I lost a lot of weight at the time and it was too hard to balance the diet with my other medical needs. I’m fighting fit these days and am considering a vegetarian diet again.
5. When I was 18, I won a US green card in a lottery. During my college years and a couple of years after, I spent nearly all of my holidays in the US to keep it valid. I have lived in Connecticut (one of my sisters lives there), Boston (MA), Phoenix (AZ), and Boulder (CO) as well as visiting a bunch of other states. Eventually my visits became less frequent when I decided I wanted to stick it out in good ol’ Europe, and the green card lapsed. Later I lived in Vancouver, Canada, for a year on a work contract.
6. I came late to computers, probably because of #2. I was never into computer games growing up, and my first real exposure was typing up essays in college. My first Bachelors degree was in Politics and History at UCD, and after a year break I went back and did something completely different. I did a Higher Diploma in IT at NUI Maynooth. Luckily it was a good match and it thrust me into my future career.
7. I love dogs, but never had one growing up. Now I have an adopted “son”, Dolus, a graceful Black Labrador who is going on in years but remains a great pal.

7 people I tag:

1. David Boswell - because it is not as if he has enough to do already.
2. Sheppy - because he was not feeling the meme love.
3. David Rolnitzky - because choffman told me to, and because David is fun and smart.
4. Matthew Zeier - because he is a good Dad.
5. Jure Cuhalev - because he likes to blog, and he can spruce up his post with Zemanta.
6. Matthew Gertner - because he speaks many languages.
7. Doug Warner - because of the wonderful things he does.

Hard-coding is not necessary. In most cases the version should only be in install.rdf. The version can be retrieved from the nsIExtensionManager/nsIUpdateItem interfaces. Here’s the basic snippet:


var emid = "cooladdon@mydomain.com"; // Should correspond to em:id in install.rdf
var version = MyExt.getExtensionVersion(emid);
MyExt.getExtensionVersion = function(emid)
{
  var em = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/extensions/manager;1"]
    .getService(Components.interfaces.nsIExtensionManager);
  var addon = em.getItemForID(emid);
  var versionString = addon.version;
  return versionString;
}


And so it goes. You can retrieve other information about the extension via these interfaces.

if you can say that mouthful 10 times in a row. If you have never been, believe me when I say it a unique experience and highly eventful and enjoyable.

Image via Wikipedia

But my real motivation is to solicit session proposals for the Mozilla room. We’re leaning towards more dev talks and less l10n this year, but that by no means rules out a super hot l10n proposal. We are open to all aspects of the community, technical or otherwise. For example, John Slater has put forward a great proposal on ‘Building Mozilla’s visual design community’. We have still not chosen the speaker/topic list, so you still have time to put forward your proposal. To do so, go over the wiki proposals page and add in your idea, and the main FOSDEM page has more general information. If you have any questions, you can contact me via the comments or from this page.

Enjoy the holidays, over and out.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The annoyances of proprietary Firefox extensions