Tag: mozilla

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Stylish for Thunderbird 3.1

I got sick of waiting for Stylish to be updated to work in Thunderbird 3.1, so I took care of it.

By “took care of it” I mean I did the following:

  1. Read through Hacking Firefox Extensions
  2. Hacked Stylish
  3. Tested the Hacked version

And since it worked for me, I’m putting it out there.

Over in the code section is a new directory named stylish. Go there, download the file stylish-1.0.9a-fx+tb+sm.xpi, and install it into Thunderbird.

There’s also a simple readme file there that explains what I did. I’ll show it here as well: 

stylish-1.0.9a-fx+tb+sm.xpi is a hacked version of stylish-1.0.9-fx+tb+sm.xpi

There are basically two differences from the official version:

 - This one has an 'a' in it's name.
 - This one will install into Thunderbird 3.1.x

All I did was change the string that says what 
version of Thunderbird it can install into.

I could find no license info for the original code. 
If the author wishes me to remove this, I certainly will.
Update 2010-07-28: The code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0

Use at your own risk.  <-- the lawyers told me to say that!

So if you trust me, feel free to download the hacked version and install it into Thunderbird 3.1... and if you don't trust me, go read the Hacking Firefox Extensions post and then do it yourself.

(You'll also find my 'Various Tweaks' file in the stylish directory as well. This is a style I use for Thunderbird based on info I got from this page on Thunderbird Chrome. )

Update 2010-07-28: The source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0

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Pencil – Prototyping with Firefox

One of the reasons I love Mozilla so much is the diversity of projects that have come out of the technology they’ve created. Take for instance, the Pencil Project, which has a mission to “build a free and open source tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.”

I spent a little time playing with Pencil in Firefox (there’s also a standalone version if you’re using Windows or Linux, made possible by XULRunner) and it’s a nice little prototyping toolbox.

Pencil UI

Here’s what the Pencil UI looks like when run in Firefox on Mac OS X. The left side contains your typical drawing elements, bits, and pieces, and the right side is your canvas.

Pencil Sketchy GUI

Here’s the “Sketchy GUI” collection, which simulates rough sketches of UI elements, allowing you to quickly mock-up what something like a web app control panel might look like.

Pencil Mock-up

Here’s a quick mock-up I did with Pencil. Wow, it looks just like an actual sketched mock-up of a web UI element… pretty amazing, eh?

Pencil Graphic

Pencil also lets you drop images into the canvas and resize and crop them, so you could use it as a quick-n-dirty (somewhat limited) image editing application that runs within Firefox.

There’s much better screen shots at the Pencil site. There’s also guides for users, and developers, and plenty of other stuff to check out, so get prototyping!

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Greasemonkey

I’ve uploaded a Greasemonkey script to Userscripts.org. It’s called WebGrader Link Rewriter and it takes the goofy Javascript used by WebGrader.com and makes real links you can click on and open in a new tab/window. I made it because the developers of the site wrote what I consider poor code.

I should note that I contacted the company that develops WebGrader a few weeks back and said I could suggest improvements in their system, and they replied to me pretty welcoming. I have not gotten back to them yet, as I’ve been busy, but writing this script took me about 10 minutes. (Yes, I pretty much copied an existing script someone wrote to fix Haloscan comment links.)

Userscripts.org looks pretty awesome for those of us who want to put fixing sites into our own hands. I would like to be able to choose a license when uploading a script but hey, I’ll forgive that for now. (Maybe it’s all public domain? I dunno…)

I do worry that Greasespot “The weblog about Greasemonkey” hasn’t been updated since May 2007. I hope it’s not abandoned. Then again, I should look around more, since I’m new to this. There is also a wiki at wiki.greasespot.net I should explore.


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What makes Firefox open-source?

I’ve had this argument many times with Justin… defining what exactly makes something open-source.

He is confident in telling me that Firefox is not open-source, and (as I understand it) he believes this because the Mozilla Organization, which controls the source code for Firefox, does not easily allow people to contribute code. They keep a tight grip on who was their bits put into Firefox. And while it is true that there are pieces in Firefox that you cannot use elsewhere (branding elements, graphics, etc.) I still believe that Firefox is open-source due to the fact that it uses the Mozilla Public License which is considered an open-source license by the Open Source Initiative.

I asked the question on Pownce recently, Is the Firefox web browser open-source?

And I think it’s a question that most people who have a basic understanding of the term “open-source” would answer “yes” to, but… Is that the case?

I thought maybe searching for “firefox is not open source” would unveil some great conspiracy I was not aware of, but no such luck.

Personally, I don’t think allowing people to contribute code is a requirement of open-source. It may be an important component of community and “open-ness” but accepting someone else’s code into your project does not seem to be a requirement. Providing the source code, and allowing people to modify and use that source code does seem to be a requirement, and though I’ve always downloaded binaries, I just downloaded the source code to Firefox.

So what is the scoop here? Is Firefox open-source?



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Suggestive Search

Yesterday Dana was using my iBook and needed to search for something, so she started typing in Firefox’s quick search bar. Then she says to me “So, been looking for college girls, eh?” (She asked it jokingly. I think.) Which surprised me a bit, mainly because I hadn’t been searching for college girls, but also because I almost never use the quick search bar. I’ve been using Mozilla’s keyword feature for so long, I’m wired into just hitting command-L, and then ‘gg’ followed by the term I am searching for. (Notice the small grey text ‘Suggestions’ below.)

Search Suggestions

So just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I checked it on another install of Firefox, and the same thing happened. You can also see this in action if you go to Google Suggest and type in ‘co’. At least it worked for me just now. Oh, Google does have this to say:

Google Suggest might offer suggestions that you will find novel or intriguing.

Novel or intriguing indeed. Anyway, it’s a good idea to know about this suggestive search feature the next time someone thinks your search history includes something you were not searching for. Not that there’s anything wrong with searching for whatever you’re searching for…