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Extension update
Recently I’ve been occupying myself with several Firefox extension projects:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
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Introducing My Personas
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.
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Regarding Fire.fm
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.
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Getting started
Hello, welcome to Xulforge.
My name is Jorge Villalobos. I’m a software developer who has been working for the past couple of years with Mozilla technologies, particularly XUL and Firefox extensions. I co-developed the very successful Fire.fm extension with Jose Enrique Bolaños, and helped develop several other extensions during my tenure at Glaxstar. I particularly enjoyed working on the eBay Companion.
I quit Glaxstar to pursue my own projects and ideas, and this is the purpose of Xulforge. I’ll be focusing mostly on Firefox extensions, but occasionally I might try a few different things which will likely end up here as well. I also have a personal blog which I’ll continue to use (and usually neglect) for more personal matters.
I’ll post again shortly, hopefully, with updates on the projects that I’ll be working on over here.
