Pep’s Here

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.

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!

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