• Doing my part for open audio

    March 4th, 2010 by jorge with 3 comments »

    The past few years have been completely surreal for me. I still can’t quite believe I’m working for Mozilla and helping the project in such a significant way. It’s one of those things you dream about but you never expect it to become true. Then it happens and you realize it’s just a matter of working hard and doing things right. Go figure.

    I keep feeling the same about a side project of mine that began shortly before I joined Mozilla. A long time friend of mine has lead a heavy metal band called Pneuma for quite a few years now. They had to break ties with their production company recently because of unacceptable delays on their part, and lots of the typical crap professional musicians have to deal with. They were looking for people to invest in the independent production of their next album, and I guess I was just in the right place at the right time.

    Of course I wouldn’t invest in them if I didn’t think they were really good.  I have great expectations for their upcoming album and I’m helping them in every way I can. The best way I can help them is by bringing my knowledge of the web and technology to the table. So far I’ve helped them set up their temporary website and twitter account. I will also be helping them out with their online distribution, because not having your album listed on the iTunes Store is a very new and very big mistake a band can easily make.

    But I digress. The point of this post is that I decided to use HTML5 on their site, and provide their first single in open OGG/Vorbis format (falling back to MP3 and Quicktime), with the added bonus that the band agreed to have the track available for download and free distribution. So anybody can listen and download the track in their preferred format, MP3 or OGG. The audio player looks fantastic on the site, by the way. Much better than QuickTime or WMP plugins. The audio quality is also great, and the file is much smaller than its MP3 counterpart.

    Adding also to the surrealism of the whole “music producer” side of my life is the fact that Pneuma will be the opening act at the first Metallica concert in Costa Rica, next Sunday. This is the biggest concert in Costa Rican history, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be backstage. I haven’t really taken that in yet, there’s just too much work to do before the concert. But WOW.

    If you like thrash / progressive metal, I recommend you visit http://pneumametal.com/ and have a quick listen. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

  • 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

  • Getting started

    May 14th, 2009 by jorge with no comments »

    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.