Mozilla will be hosting a new Mozilla Add-ons Worshop in central London on
June 30th. We'll talk about Add-ons, the OpenWeb and Jetpack (see details
here).
I'll give a talk about the OpenWeb and how to write an add-on. Nick Nguyen
and Justin Scott from the Mozilla Add-ons team, and Myk Melez from Mozilla
labs, will be there as well.
The event is free and open to everyone. Just make sure to register: here.
You may have heard the saying "If you can't open it, it's not yours."
Because Firefox is open in so many flavors of Open, you can really say it's
totally yours.
Mozilla has been designed with extensibility in mind. It means you can
enhance, hack, bend, fix Firefox or websites in infinite ways:
First, it's a FLOSS
project. You can read the source code,
modify it, and even roll your own
version of Firefox.
Additionally, you can write extensions. Extensions and Jetpacks give you a way to do almost
anything you want. Change the UI, add new features, fix bugs, or make your life
easier as a user.
And finally, you can make websites your own. Through Jetpack, GreaseMonkey, and Stylish you can change a website behavior and/or
presentation with a few lines of JavaScript and CSS.
Everybody has his or her own reason to hack Firefox. Mine is usually:
"just for fun".
So, "just for fun", and to show how far you can go with the
extension mechanism, here is a little useless extension I wrote: a Nintendo Wiimote driver for
Firefox. What does it do? It brings Wiimote events to web content. You
can change tabs with a "forehand/backhand" tennis drive and, in your web page,
make your elements move using Wiimote events (rotation, g-force, position,
etc.). Web pages, of course, do not support this API. But, with another
extension, such as a Jetpack or
Greasemonkey, you can "hack" a
website to add support for the Wiimote.
Let's see what it looks like:
(I know, a Flash Video. GandiBlog doesn't allow the video tag. Ogg/Theora
version here)
What I do here is:
Change tabs by moving the Wiimote quickly
Rotate the Firefox logo by rotating the Wiimote
Move a canvas "cross" by moving the Wiimote
Zoom the Firefox logo by moving the Wiimote closer or farther away from
myself
Feel free tograb the code and look how a
C++ extension works with the Mozilla build system. See the readme for build
instructions.
This extension only works for Linux as of now. I probably won't have time to
port it to other platforms or to work on it further. But maybe you can :) Feel
free to make this code your own and make it work for other OSes.
By Paul Rouget on Wednesday 17 February 2010, 17:47
L'équipe Mozilla cherche constamment à se tenir au courant des besoins des
développeurs web. Pour cela, on voudrait organiser une rencontre avec quelques
développeurs web francophones pour comprendre vos attentes au niveau
des standards, de Firefox et du web en général.
Si vous avec une expérience de développement d'applications Web pour mobiles
(iPhone, Android, ...) ou que vous avez/voulez exploiter HTML5 dans des sites à
large audience, on est particulièrement intéressés.
Si vous êtes intéressés, envoyez moi une courte explication de ce que vous
faites dans le web: paul chez mozilla point com.
If a program has not been ported, I can build it myself
I can use the command line, be root and connect to the device through
ssh
I can run Firefox, browse the tabs currently opened in my Firefox Desktop
(Weave FTW) and install
extensions
I can create my own XulRunner application
I can plug the n900 to a TV or a video projector and use Fennec on a huge
screen (You can't image how awesome it is)
You can call me through SIP, Skype or GSM, I won't see the difference
(Chris dialed my official Mozilla number (SIP) yesterday, I received it on my
n900, like a normal GSM call)
I can have several browsers (Webkit: Midori, Tear; Gecko: MicroB, Firefox;
Text: Lynx ⇐ vital)