• And now they wait…

    January 24th, 2010 by jorge with 10 comments »

    I guess giving 3 month’s advanced notice wasn’t enough for most add-on authors. I guess this is partly our fault, and we should stress enough how important it is for them to stay up to date with Firefox new, or at least the Add-ons Blog.

    On Thursday, the update queue had about 80 add-on updates in line to be reviewed. This is a short as it’s been for a very long time. Today it stands close to 200 updates, and will continue to grow in the following couple of weeks. All authors are now rushing out updates because they just realized Firefox 3.6 is out.

    Well, now it’s up to the editor team to catch up. It’ll take a while, I think. Authors that decided to update after the 3.6 release will now have to wait. It’s bad for everyone, and the result of bad communication. That’s something we’ll need to work on.

  • 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