Mark's World » Flock

North West Mozilla Development Camp

Mark Lise — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:51:44 +0000

This past weekend was the NorthWestMozDev meetup. What is that you say? Well, the group provides a simple mechanism for developers in the North West
(US/Canada) using Mozilla related technologies to communicate with each
other (Yes I quote that straight from the Google group).

It was the second installment of such meetings, the first was in downtown Vancouver at ActiveState. There were a number of interesting talks – one I was most interested in was the Mozilla Labs/2010 Goal discussion put on by Mark Surman and David Ascher. (You should check it out)

One of the surprising discussions (for me) from this meetup was somewhat political/activist/social change related. How can Mozilla use it’s brand and following to encourage more openess on the web, support other non-profits or organizations trying to better “the greater good”.

Interesting stuff all around, I’m glad some Flock folk could make it out.

Mozilla MozCamp

Mark Lise — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:34:41 +0000

I made a trip to MozCamp organized by Shane Caraveo at ActiveState. It was a meetup designed to bring together XUL developers from the surrounding Victoria / Vancouver area. There was a decent response with about 20+ people representing various companies with notables such as Mozilla Messaging, Sxipper, Songbird, Activestate (obviously), and Flock.

Two of the main topics people seemed to gravitate towards was build systems and collaboration between companies developing open source software. These topics will most likely shape a more structured discussion for the next MozCamp, hopefully the next one will be in Victoria.

As for the collaboration, this is a great step forward for those using Xulrunner as their platform base. Activestate has a number of patches against Xulrunner which haven’t yet landed on the tree. I ran into some build issues myself when I wanted to build Python scripting natively into Xulrunner. I searched around and eventually found a fix sitting at Activestate (thanks guys!).

So, as a result of all this independent development on Xulrunner others may be duplicating work, or worse yet missing out on some key bugfixes. Anybody developing Xulrunner based applications should get together and pool their bugs against Xulrunner so that it can help increase the priority of the bugs. The more people running into the issue, the more likely it will be looked at and eventually pushed through .

An important side note: As a direct result of going to MozCamp and talking to the ActiveState people, Komodo Edit has now become my editor of choice. All Mozilla platform developers should be using this! I’ll report more on this as I become more familiar with the product. A big thanks to Shane for organizing this event, it was successful and I can’t wait for the next one.

DemoCampVictoria01 – Success!

Mark Lise — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:49:49 +0000

Well, what an amazing lineup of people we had and how well did that turn out! Jessica Pryde, Wendy Pryde and Dave Chard at Juliet did an OUTSTANDING job at making DemoCamp one of the – correction – *the* swankiest get together ever put on in our vibrant not-so-little town of Victoria. Dave’s buildings are something to watch for as the kind of development projects he’s doing definitely fit into DemoCamp’s philosophy of bringing a mix of people and businesses together to create vibrancy.

Here’s a pic from Tris’ photos, credit goes to Yule for doing it first on her blog

The presentations that came out where Songbird, BuyLater, SkyscraperPage.com, Flock, Professional Reading Environment, Person to Person Lending, a sensor platform for athletes, and DB programming. Lots of interest, interaction and buzz was generated from the whole event. I don’t think I could have imagined it kicking off any better than that. The crowd was interested and interactive – it’s like you’re all seasoned veterans now!

Tris Hussey, Boris Mann and Yule Heibel have already blogged about the event, so go check out their blogs too (Tris has some photos up as well).

Thanks again to Yule Heibel and Dave Chard – without you there would be no DemoCamp downtown! Thank you so much! I look forward to seeing you all at the next DemoCamp! woo

Adventures moving to a Macbook Pro

Mark Lise — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:08:40 +0000

One of the reasons why I wanted a Mac was so that I didn’t need to VNC into a Mini to do development of Flock. My previous machine was an IBM TP60 – a decent machine which I had setup for dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu. Originally Linux was Edgy then I dist-upgraded to Gutsy – big mistake as dual-head screens no longer worked, but I digress.

It was a love-hate relationship with that machine. It had a docking station which is something that I think is missing from the Macs. Then again all I really need is just a few more USB ports so a hub will suffice. The 4:3 screen sucked, however IBM has a new version that has a wide screen so it’s a bit better. Linux was absolutely awesome – super fast, snappy response, no crashing… developing Flock was a breeze.

Windows was a whole different set of apples! The performance was absolute garbage, taking anywhere from 1-2 hours for an fbuild_all (neat little script that automatically updates subversion and builds from the root source dir). Linux was no more than 45 minutes. Now this is largely due to ccache being broken under cygwin, but even loading Thunderbird/Flock/Firefox/Pidgin/Skype makes the machine crawl. I stayed mostly in Linux because I wanted to actually get *some* work done. This created problems tho every time I booted into Windows because inevitably the tree would be so out of sync that I’d be spending a minimum of 1.5 hours just building before I could do anything. Occasionally during the build my machine would hang when it was linking large object files.

Enter the new intel Macbook Pro: As soon as I got it I immediately got my hands on a Gutsy and WinXP disc. I got my machine triple booting in probably less time than it took to do a full rebuild of Flock under my old machine. I still needed to setup the build environments on each OS, but that wouldn’t be so bad. I spend most of my time in OSX and I love it. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for all these years – nice eye candy with standardized installation of software (read: drag program into Applications folder) and a shell to interact with. Performance of WinXP is actually better than what I was getting about of the IBM – so I’m happy there.

Having triple boot on the Mac is great – I think anyone developing cross-platform software targeting the big-3 definitely need to consider Mac.

Featured Projects

Mark Lise — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:00:30 +0000

Featured Projects on Mozilla’s site now shows Flock under Featured Mozilla-Based Applications. Thank you Mozilla! If you’re a developer you’ll want to check out Open Komodo – the IDE is really good and has support for many different languages (using plugins). There was a recent extension added that allows you to interact with a Komodo application on the fly, using either Javascript or Python!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Mozilla, Development, Flock, Web 2.0, Firefox, Browser

Your MySpace Web Browser Is Coming

Mark Lise — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:50:44 +0000

Flock, the Mozilla-based social web browser has made the announcement that everyone has been waiting for: they will now integrate with MySpace. Building on the MySpace Developer Platform, Flock will allow users to surf the web with their MySpace friends in their sidebar. This integration will expose all of the . . .

Writing auto-updaters

Mark Lise — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:34:02 +0000

I was presented with a problem to solve last week – how do you get a Mozilla product to automatically suggest and download another product? The method I came up with was use the extension updater to our advantage: We can push an update via the browser’s autoupdate mechanism to install and extension which does all the work for us!

1) Built-in update manager downloads and installs a custom xpi.

2) This extension will load on next start, so all we need to do is overlay the browser.xul and we’ve got startup on every instance from that moment forward. All of our intended logic is encapsulated and run with privileges inside the chrome.

3) Use the hidden window trick to limit launching of the code to once-per-session.

4) Use the “@mozilla.org/download-manager;1″ CID to initiate the download and then monitor all downloads using the observer service (watch for dl-start/dl-done etc).

5) Once that is complete, you can then call downloadedFileObject.targetFile.launch() and your installer will run!

More details will follow when I can release the code.