Pep’s Here

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.

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!

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). Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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”?

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.

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!

After some tests, I can report that the bug I talked on the previous post is solved in 3.0a6. Still, I needed to add a few lines to make Showcase work well in Firefox 3, but it’s working… and really well! I was concerned about that, but next version of Showcase will have full support for Gran Paradiso betas

Also, I’ve been working in a new extension, and is almost finished. You may want to visit this blog on Sunday, since I’ll publish the first version by then. It’s something small, but quite handy!