• MAOW Perú afterthoughts

    March 4th, 2010 by jorge with no comments »

    The first Latin American MAOW (Mozilla Add-ons Workshop) was held last Saturday in Lima, Perú. The event was organized by Percy Cabello from the Mozilla Perú community, also the maintainer of the very awesome Mozilla Links blog.

    I did the first part of the workshop, explaining extension development.

    Me explaining stuff

    I learned from this experience that it’s not a good idea to cover all of the boilerplate parts of extension development in a presentation with such limited time. For future events I think it’s a better idea to have some sort of required reading before attending, so that it’s easier just to dive into the actual juicy parts and get stuff done. I still managed to cover several topics surrounding extension development, and the slides were full of references that people can follow to continue learning about the topic.

    The second part of the event was about Jetpack development, and was presented by newly appointed Jetpack Ambassador Hernán Rodríguez, from Agentina:

    Hernán showing shinny stuff

    Hernán did a fantastic job. I also should give Jetpack some credit because it is incredibly easy to get started in a few minutes. The attendees had a chance to play around and do more experimenting than on my presentation. We had some fun playing around with Hernán Twitter slidebar and messing around with CSS transformations.

    The event was a great success, and this was all thanks to the great work of the Mozilla Perú community. I was pleasantly surprised of how well organized they are, and the great deal of large-scale technology events that are held in Perú that could be good platforms for Mozilla to attract new community members.

    Much more details about this event can be read (in Spanish) in the Mozilla Perú blog and Hernán’s blog:

    Thanks again to Percy and Mozilla Perú community for organizing this event. I hope to see you again soon!

  • Extension update

    July 27th, 2009 by jorge with 2 comments »

    Recently I’ve been occupying myself with several Firefox extension projects:

    1. Most of all, I’ve been contributing to the AMO editor team to keep the add-on review queues down to a manageable size. There’s a great deal of new submissions and updates due to the release of Firefox version 3.5. There are hundreds of updates that are minimal to non existent compatibility changes, so I’ve been able to review close to 200 updates on this month alone. I enjoy my work with the editor team, specially because I’ve very fond of doing code review and being ruthlessly critical. It’s in my nature, what can I say… There are plans for removing the AMO sandbox, which I find intriguing, to say the least. I wonder how that will change the editor group and their work.
    2. The Extend Firefox 3.5 competition has been officially announced. With an October deadline, it includes several new interesting categories to compete in. Jose and I are already working on Fire.fm 1.3, which will be our entry for best extension update. There’s a great deal of new features we’ll be putting into it, which I think will greatly improve our user experience. We’re also working on a few ideas for new add-ons. I hope to be able to submit a couple of entries to increase our chances of winning.
    3. Finally, the Add-ons Contributions pilot was introduced to AMO. This enabled add-on authors to request donations for their project right on AMO, giving our donation links more exposure and possibly allowing a few authors to remove donation requests from their add-on UI, which is always a loss for user experience. We have activated contributions for Fire.fm, and so far the response has been pretty good. We’re very happy about it and hope people will continue helping us out.

    I still feel in ‘break mode’, and hope to start working in full gear soon. There’s so much I want to do, and I still need to get everything sorted out. More updates soon!

  • Introducing My Personas

    May 28th, 2009 by jorge with 1 comment »

    For my first “official” Xulforge project, I decided to take on a relatively simple task, so that I could get the site and blog started quickly. This way at least I have some content to show for while I work on larger projects ;) . This first project is My Personas.

    This project is a set of skins for the Personas extension. Personas is a new approach to developing themes for Firefox and other Mozilla apps. Creating a skin is pretty simple: all you need is a header image and a footer image. Creating a good one is a little harder; you’ll need to fill a very, very large image area, while at the same time keeping in mind that only a tiny fraction of the image will be visible in the majority of browsers. Patterns and other artificial designs are probably easier, but mine are just extracts from my large photo collection, so it’s trickier.

    I have a list of the skins I’ve created in the project page, with explanations on why I chose the pictures. So far my designs are doing pretty well, with a few hundred active daily users at this time. You can see the user counts in my designer page.

    My skins were all created using The Gimp, and the pictures were taken with 2 different models of the Canon PowerShot (I upgraded recently). Artistic feedback is greatly appreciated.

  • Regarding Fire.fm

    May 27th, 2009 by jorge with 2 comments »

    Fire.fm is a project that a friend and I began in order to compete in the Extend Firefox 3 competition, particularly to participate in the Best Music Add-on, which was being sponsored by Last.fm. I was a big fan of Last.fm at the time, given that it offered free online radio all around the world.  Sadly, that ended somewhat abruptly.

    Anyway, at the time we were pretty excited about it, and we spent a great deal of time and effort making Fire.fm a sure winner. And we won! We won the Best Music Add-on category, and I think we weren’t allowed to win in others, because I think we should have won the general competition as well ;) . Needless to say, we were super happy with this, and we have been actively maintaining the add-on in our spare time.

    Fire.fm is, in a nutshell, a Last.fm radio player. It used to be a very easy way to tune into Last.fm radio without having to be on top of the website all day long. Our users loved it, and shortly we were in the AMO Recommended List.

    Sadly, Last.fm cut off their free radio service to most of the world shortly afterward, so at least I lost a lot of the motivation I initially had to continue making it grow. Still, I don’t want to abandon a project that still has much to be fixed, so I’ll certainly won’t quit until all the annoying bugs are solved. Most users have a very smooth experience with Fire.fm, but there are a few unlucky ones that have some serious problems, like not being able to listen to stations at all… New features in Fire.fm are probably going to be very rare from version 1.2.3 and later.

    Xulforge was already in my mind when we began working on Fire.fm, so I always kinda saw it as a Xulforge project. Xulforge was put on hold until very recently, so it feels weird trying to associate the two. I’ll keep Fire.fm in my project list, though, because I it was one of my first independent projects, and also because it has been very successful and I’m very proud of it.

    Fire.fm is open source, BSD-licensed (more on that in another post). So, if you want to take a look into our code, you’re more than welcome. See the Fire.fm Sourceforge Project Page for more information.

    Fire.fm Logo

    Fire.fm Logo