• 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.

  • 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.