Resources for Fennec Add-on Developers

We have added more information to the small, but growing collection of Fennec-specific add-on developer resources. If you’re interested in building add-ons for Fennec, here’s a list of resources you might find helpful:

The Code Snippets and Best Practices documents are new. Feel free to give feedback on any of the documents. What information or snippets are missing? Use comments, IRC channels (#mobile) or even file some bugs.

We also plan to have a few tutorials for building Fennec-specific add-ons. Fennec for Maemo and Fennec for Windows Mobile both support add-ons. In fact, the same add-on could be used on both platforms. So get out there are start building.

Ready for a Challenge?

Mozdev and Mozilla Europe have teamed up to create a Firefox Mobile (Fennec) Add-ons Challenge. The goal is to create or port add-ons to Fennec. You only need to propose a concept for now, but you’ll need to get the add-on ready for the upcoming Mozilla/Maemo developer weekend in Copenhagen on May 30-31.

See Brian King’s post for more details.

I am interested to see innovative ideas for using the limited UI in Fennec, add-ons that focus on mobile-specific functionality, and code that exposes more of the Maemo device functionality to Mozilla (yes, XPCOM is likely involved).

I also wouldn’t mind some applets (either as add-ons or XUL apps) running on Maemo. Think about mobile-specific Chatzilla or FireFTP for example. By mobile-specific, I mean dramatically different UIs, not just porting the existing desktop UI. If many little focused applets work for the iPhone, why not for other mobile platforms? And with XUL/JS, it’s pretty easy to build them. Anyone got a XUL-based Twitter app? 🙂

As always, we love to hear feedback from anyone building add-ons or apps on our mobile stack. Post comments, file bug reports, visit the IRC channels (#mobile & #extdev).