Extensions

Mozilla has a relatively large contingent headed to OSCON this year. Here’s the Mozilla speaking line up:

I was a co-presenter for two sessions at the Tokyo developer conference held a few weeks ago:

Dave Humphrey’s latest post really got me thinking about a couple things. First, I think what he proposes is a timely, interesting idea. It illustrates the power of the web brought to bear on a particular problem. Specifically, the post got me thinking about building communities and lowering interface friction placed on users. Not exactly peanut butter and chocolate, but I think they are related none the less.

We’ve been pretty busy around here with various sorts of things, but we finally got enough time to get XUL Explorer (XE) 0.4 out the door. XE 0.4 has some neat features that we hope will help Mozilla platform developers (extensions and applications) be a little more productive. The highlights include:

The schedule for the Tokyo developer conference is really coming together. I’ll be giving separate presentations on FUEL and XUL Runner with some moderated Q&A. There seems to be a lot of sessions on various aspects of extension development. From tutorials and development environments to AMO submission and reviewing. There will also be several lightning talks from various extension authors. I am interested to see how the “extension dissection” session turns out. The session will be devoted to discussions of how various extension “do” what they “do”.

Currently, I am adding bookmark wrappers to FUEL 0.2 using the new Places API. As I do, I am just struck by how much functionality is exposed by the new API. Accessing bookmarks is a common request for extension developers. The old bookmark service isn’t as easy to use (IMO), mainly due to the amount of RDF that is seeping out of it. The new bookmarks and annotation services are very straight forward and clear. Here are some of my highlights so far: