Pep’s Here

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!

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’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.

Haven’t had too much time to work on Speed Dial lately… anyways, I hope I can spend some time on it soon, so I can finish the features that I already discussed in previous posts. On the bright side, today I could work on Showcase; I added more intelligent code for navigation icons, so they won’t overlap even if there’s not enough space.

One thing I should start working on is full compatibility with Firefox 3. There’s a bug in the alpha versions that will require me to do some important changes… I would like to avoid that, but in any case, I’m sure I can make it work.

This August I’ll have quite a lot of time to work on my personal projects. For instance, I plan to release some of my old mobile phone games for free! The only problem is that they need to be updated for the current Java implementation, but I don’t think it will hard.

So, as I said in the previous post, I’m back at my old place. I wanted to make a new release in June 1st, but it will take a little bit more; in any case, I want to release the new version before returning to the Netherlands (on June 5th).

I’m quite satisfied with the new version. Although it doesn’t sound difficult, adding a background loading system has been a bit of a challenge, but it seems to work quite well. There are still some things that must be done before the release (mostly minor), and some things that should be there but aren’t, like dynamically loaded page icons. In any case, more things come for sure.

I’ll also be releasing a minor update to Firefox Showcase. I really couldn’t work on it too much this time… There’ll be “progressive” releases until Firefox 3 is released (which should happen October-November this year, I guess), and then start working on Showcase 1.0 . I just want to make sure that Firefox 3 users don’t have to wait a couple of months to be able to run Showcase properly.

Well, I haven’t updated this blog for some days… I’m moving to The Netherlands in a week, so I’ve been quite busy.

The new Firefox Showcase version is almost ready, but I got a bug report from a Windows Vista user, so I would like to solve it ASAP… I also want to prepare a “splash” page showing the most important feature of the 0.9.3: navigation buttons on thumbnail. This is not really new, since it was already implemented in Tab Sidebar, but it’s the first “previewing tool” to add it.

The “Speed Dial” extension for Firefox is still awaiting review in AMO… it takes quite a lot of time! It’s quite normal, since new extensions require an extensive review to verify that it doesn’t contain any spyware/malware/virus/etc. I’ve some quite good ideas for this extension, so I’ll keep working on it!