Google Chrome impressions

September 2nd, 2008

Google Chrome has just been released, and I’ve been playing with it for a while. Well, I’m quite impressed with the browser’s speed! The UI has also quite a lot of things “made right”: the autocomplete works very well, the status bar is hidden most of the time, the search has highlightning on by default, there’s a “new tab” button at the end of the tab bar, their “new tab” default page is very useful…

However, it also has some annoyances:the most important, for me, is the lack of “auto scroll”, clicking the middle button and enter the browsers “scroll mode”.

Also, the search highlightning seems to apply with “alpha channel”; it works well if the background is white, but if it’s black it makes things difficult to see. In Firefox, the colors will show a lot better.

I took the time to examine the browser’s files to see how feasible it would be to make an extension. I could see that the front end of their “DOM Inspector” is made with HTML and JS (found those files inside the “Resources” folder), but other than that, I saw that most of their functionality is implemented through DLL libraries, meaning that it will probably not be easy to develop extensions for it, if at all.

In any case, I think they made a very nice job, there… but I believe that it’s more of a Opera clone more than Firefox’s. Of course, they’ve the brand and the hype to push it to a lot of users, so this one is here to stay (unlike Safari for Windows).

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Speed Dial gets an upgrade

January 1st, 2008

Well, my Christmas/New Year vacations are almost over. The last two weeks have been quite busy, although I decided to spend some quality time with Speed Dial. The result? I added 3 new major new features:

  • Dial Groups: basically, it’s a tab bar for Speed Dial, which will allow the organization of dials by category.
  • MultiKey:  Because that “dial groups” feature can substantially increase the number of dials, this feature allows to access any dial by using keyboard shortcuts. This is enabled by default, so when there are more than 9 dials, the behavior changes. For example, if you press “Ctrl+1″, and there are more than 9 dials, a window will appear, which will show the dial assigned at position “1″. Pressing another number will act like a TV remote control, so if you would press “2″, it would show the dial at “12″. Using backspace will remove the last introduced dial, and using the cursor keys (and the “+” and “-” keys) will cycle through the existing dials. Releasing the “Ctrl” key will select the specified dial.
  • Thumbnail cropping: I received quite a lot of complaints about people not being able to read the thumbnail properly. This feature will allow to select an interesting portion of the assigned website! This is complemented by the “Crop Selector”, a visual tool to select the desired area.

Other than that there are a lot of other features and improvements, like the ability to use an alternative URL for thumbnail generation, to choose between 4 types of scaling, options to increase the quality of the thumbnail, a reduced configuration dialog that will show when Speed Dial is installed (actually, it’s more like a one-page wizard), special treatment for images… I’m rather proud of this release :)

I already posted it in Speed Dial download mirror page. However, it will take a while until it’s available in AMO, as I would like to have it localized before that. I woul really like to get feedback on this new version, so feel free to comment about it or contact me by email.

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Life’s going on!

December 19th, 2007

Well, this month I already posted updates for Firefox Showcase and Speed Dial. I’ve been quite busy, so the updates are relatively minor, but I really wanted to update the compatibility information to include Firefox 3 beta 2 (which should be released really soon), and Speed Dial 0.5.0.7 had some nice stability improvements.

Christmas is coming, and I’ll be going back home for a couple of weeks :) Good! It has been a while since I’ve had proper vacation, although I’m planning to work a bit on my extensions, and also on some other stuff.

The other day I learned that Mozilla is organizing a new edition of the Extend Firefox competition. Well, that certainly brings back good memories! I’ll be submitting my extensions, but since I’m not planning to invest the same amount of effort as the previous edition, I’m quite sure I won’t win anything this time. Anyways, I’m certainly not doing this for the fame or the money, but to build something people will use and enjoy.

I’m thinking on some good improvements for Speed Dial, and I’m sure that I’ll be able to make it better next year :) That will be one of my new year resolutions!

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Kind of busy…

November 25th, 2007

Well, here I am, updating my blog again! I’ve been way too busy between my “real life” job and updating my extensions (not all of them, just Showcase and, specially, Speed Dial).

First of all, I was quite surprised to see a new extension that also tries to bring Opera’s Speed Dial functionality to Firefox. Nothing new there… I would be concerned otherwise :) If an idea is good, there’ll be at least a couple of extensions trying to do the same! In any case, I think competition is always good for users. During the last few weeks I’ve been updating Speed Dial, and although I had a serious issue (an incompatibility with IE Tab that rendered the location bar unusable), I could fix some long standing bugs, and improve most of the aspects of the extension.

However, in Firefox 2 people complained about the lack of quality in the new version… the last version (which I keep posting here in order not to upset Speed Dial’s users with constant updates) adds a configuration parameter to use the old method, but I’m not really happy with it. I’m considering adding a dialog when installing Speed Dial that will allow two sets of settings, depending of what the user wants: speed or quality.

Also, I’m considering of submitting Speed Dial to the Extend Firefox 2 contest :) I’m sure I’ll not be as lucky as the last time, but it will be fun.

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I’m back!

September 14th, 2007

It has been more than a month since I last updated my blog. I’ve been quite busy, and nothing really interesting was going on, so I didn’t find the time for it. I definitely should update it more often, though :)

The last couple of days I’ve been working in the next Firefox Showcase update (0.9.4). It’s biggest change is an improved zoom mode specially designed with the Showcase sidebar in mind. Basically, it will show the thumbnail you zoom in at 100%, and when you scroll through it using the arrows, it will smartly decide whether to change the view of the current website, or scroll it. I think it’s useful, specially for sidebar users, since zoom mode was pretty useless for them, before. This mode will also be available on Showcase window and tab modes, but disabled by default.

Another thing I would like to add to the zoom mode is the interactivity with the thumbnail found in the “Tab Scope”. Basically, it means that you would be able to click on the links of the page represented by the thumbnail without the need to show it first in the browser and then click the link. Shouldn’t be difficult to implement! However, I cannot promise that it will be included in the next release. Firefox 3 alpha 8 will be released before September 18th, and I want to post an update very soon after that supporting it.

By the way, some time ago I posted about Firefox Showcase being included in Zonbu, and now I found the confirmation of that. Well, I’m really happy to see my extension distributed by default with Firefox :)

About Speed Dial, I’ll work in a minor release for this month. I already improved the “drag & drop” (so dragging a dial over another dial will exchange them, not overwrite), and I want to try to solve some issues. I’ve a list of features that I “promised” to implement, but that needs time and updated translations, so it will have to wait a little (hopefully, next month).

I’ve been thinking on updating my MultiSidebar extension. There’s some incompatibility with some extensions, the web panel doesn’t work as it should, and I’ve some ideas to make it better. However, I don’t think that many people uses it, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it.

Well, basically that’s it for now! :) Although I guess that most people that visit this blog expect information about my Firefox extensions, I want to update it more often with topics not related to that… now, if only I would write more than a post per month! :P

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Website problems

August 9th, 2007

Funny… I got a spam comment, and I noticed that the title of this blog now was “Hacked by … ” :) My hosting provider had some problems lately, so I’m wondering if this is linked to an attack of some kind.

The new version of Speed Dial will be released very soon.Right now I’m waiting for a couple of translations to be finished! I’m quite proud of this new version, although I couldn’t fit it everything I wanted to. The release after the next one will focus in improving the configuration for the different input methods, so people will be able to configure the different actions for mouse and keyboard actions.

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Speed Dial’s new release coming soon

July 30th, 2007

I’m actively working in Speed Dial, and I hope to have the new release finished in a week. However, before the release I’ll send it to the translators, so it should take 2 weeks.

Hopefully I’ll be able to include the ability to configure the number of thumbnails. This is something a lot of people have been asking me, but it’s not trivial to implement… Anyways, I’m quite sure I’ll be able to pull it out.

I already included some nice features: plugins are disabled by default in the background browser, and I added some buttons in the thumbnails for easy access to the different actions (although only “reload” will be visible by default).

Of course, I’ll take care of the reported issues, so I’m quite sure that people will be happy with the new release :)

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Firefox Showcase included in Zonbu

July 21st, 2007

Today I found out in an article in MozillaLinks that Firefox Showcase is included in Zonbu, a new Linux-based PC that costs only $99. Showcase is the only included extension, together with an unnamed parental control extension (probably developed by them), and the Mostly Crystal theme.

It was a big surprise to find out about that in the news, and I’m really thrilled that they decided to include my software in their device. Now, can I get one of those boxes for “testing purposes”? :)

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Busy life…

July 18th, 2007

I’ve been quite busy lately, but I found time to work on a new Speed Dial release. I planned to add customizable number of thumbnails for this release, but that will need new translations, and I think I would like to make a new release before that.  I really like the changes of the new version, and I’m sure that Speed Dial users will like them too :) Expect a new release this weekend.

This August I’m planning to update the mobile phone games on uWorks, and offer them for free! They’re simple and fun, so I hope people will enjoy them.

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New extension: Link Reporter

July 15th, 2007

Yesterday I posted a new extension to AMO: Link Reporter!

What it does is easy: place your mouse cursor over a link, and after a little while a tooltip will appear with information about that link. Usually it will be only the URL, but in the case the destination page is not an HTML page, other information will appear, like the type, size and last modification date.

It also adds a few more features: more information will appear as tooltip (by using the “ALT” attributes), and the link tooltip will change color in the case the destination site is a web forgery (”phishing”).

It’s a functionality I wanted to have and that I find useful, so I decided to publish it because probably someone else will think the same :)
To get it, go to the Showcase download site, or to the AMO extension’s page (although it will be in the “sandbox” for a long while, so you need to log in).

I’m already working in the new Speed Dial version. For now, I improved the “open in new blank tabs” functionality. Next I’ll add faster Speed Dial tab loading, and I will hopefully be able to add configurable number of thumbnails in the next release… Hopefully next weekend!

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