Xul

One of the opportunities I had at MozCamp was to get caught up on the stuff happening in Thunderbird & Calendar. They have a goldmine of great data, functionality and UX possibilities. During some of the sessions and a small ad-hoc discussion, the use of HTML in XUL to create compelling, interesting and useful user interfaces came up. Thunderbird 3 will be using HTML to enhance to appearance and functionality of message display. Calendar might be using HTML to do the same for displaying tasks, IIRC. The examples I saw looked great.

I am headed to Barcelona to take part in Mozilla Europe’s MozCamp 2008 conference. I’ll be presenting sessions on XULRunner, Fennec Add-ons & Embedding Gecko. If you’re interested in any of these sessions and have topics you’d like to see covered, let me know. Commenting here or adding items to the wiki pages are goods ways to do that.

XUL Explorer is a small tool I started a while ago to allow me to quickly create and preview short snippets of XUL. At the same time, I used the process of building XUL Explorer as a use case to help me discover and learn various parts of the Mozilla platform. With the help of some great contributors, it’s been extended beyond simply previewing XUL.

The newest official XULRunner has been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.3 matches the Firefox 3.0.3 release. Firefox 3.0.2 was out for a very short time, so we skipped it for XULRunner.

In HTML you can use a DIV as a container and when the DIV changes size, the contents will wrap or adjust the layout. This does not happen with XUL BOX (or HBOX and VBOX) by default. However, you can easily add this capability with a style change. Make the BOX style="display: block" and the wrapping behavior will occur when the box is resized:

As promised, XULRunner 1.9 has gone gold. The final release of the runtimes, SDKs and source tarball are now available. Release notes can be found here.

As you might have heard, Mozilla is working on a mobile browser (codenamed Fennec). If you are interested in Mozilla and mobile, I’d encourage you to start following the project. Besides the just plain awesome idea of a Firefox browser running on mobile devices, there are other reasons I like the project.