I'm happy to announce that Anthony Ricaud will be working with me at Mozilla
over the next few months from our office in Paris.
Anthony is a web developer and Open Web enthusiast well-known in France as
one of the former organizers of Paris-Web. He is also a WebKit contributor.
Specifically, Anthony will be working with me on the Technical Evangelism
team as we promote and build out new demos for Firefox 4 and the Open Web
platform. He'll also be helping us to better define and understand the needs
and wants of Web developers.
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.
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.
