Tag: mozilla
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2018 March 01
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Fun with Themes in Firefox
Last year, I started work on a new Test Pilot experiment playing with themes in Firefox. [ ... 1864 words ... ]
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2016 September 26
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Firefox Test Pilot: The Flattening
Firefox Test Pilot is becoming a statically-generated site from content in flat files. We're moving away from Django and PostgreSQL, and it's been a bit of a journey. [ ... 1128 words ... ]
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2015 September 21
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Adding Android to a multi-platform React app
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2015 July 22
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Experimenting with a multi-platform app using React
I built a toy app using React for web and native to get a feel for whether this hybrid approach is worth using. I think the answer is "yes" - but mainly for apps whose business logic & data models are more complex than their views. [ ... 1648 words ... ]
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2013 February 23
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Looking for a Django app to manage Roles within Groups
I want to add some team-based features to django-badger. I was hoping that someone had already built a reusable app to do most of the work for me. This happens quite a lot when I’m working with Django. Unfortunately, I haven’t quite found what I’m looking for yet. Consider this blog post either the product of my thinking out loud toward a rough spec, or a long-winded lazyweb search query. [ ... 418 words ... ]
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2013 February 21
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KumaScript: Bringing scripting to the wiki bears
KumaScript turned one year old back at the end of January, and I’m sad to say no one celebrated its birthday – not even me. I’m pretty sure very few people outside of the core team at the Mozilla Developer Network even know what KumaScript is. So, I guess it’s about time I do something about that. [ ... 2394 words ... ]
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2012 November 15
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My experience in becoming a FirefoxOS contributor
Back in September, I wrote that I wasn’t leaving MDN. And, I’m not, really. But, it turns out that FirefoxOS needs some help to reach its first release milestones. So, some of us webdevs from around Mozilla are temporarily switching our daily efforts over to slay bugs on Gaia. That’s the layer of FirefoxOS which provides the overall system UI and core apps. [ ... 1651 words ... ]
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2012 October 01
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2012 September 27
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Freedom to Change Your Mind
I posted a few days ago about freedom of and from choice, but I think there’s something orthogonal to that spectrum: The freedom to change your mind, both figuratively and literally. [ ... 978 words ... ]
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2012 September 24
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Freedom {of,from} Choice
Freedom of choice and freedom from choice lay on a spectrum. And, in technology, it’s no coincidence that more choice tends to be messier and complex, less choice tends to be cleaner and simple. It’s a trade-off between what you choose and what you leave up to an expert. [ ... 1216 words ... ]
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2012 September 18
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Developing Open Web Apps: First, get it onto the web
I’ve been interested in developing open web apps (aka the single-page app) for years. But, it feels like the space is really on fire now, since the advent of HTML5 tech and the recent moves by Mozilla and Google toward truly “appifying” these things to compete with offerings from iOS and Android. Lots of pieces have come into alignment, and great things are coming together—never mind what the folks at Facebook say. So, I think I’m going to build a simple app and blog about it. And, these days, the first thing I think about when starting a web app is: How do I get it onto the web? [ ... 1502 words ... ]
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2012 September 17
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On the other end of a self-imposed death march project
So, I’m a couple of weeks back from a well-deserved vacation taken after the launch of a project well over 18 months in the making. I kind of overworked myself, voluntarily, and that needs to change. [ ... 527 words ... ]
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2012 July 10
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Note to self File a bug to get…
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How webdev is like space exploration
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How webdev has been getting better
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2012 May 16
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Please Do Learn To Code
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2011 October 02
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Putting clouds in boxes for webdevs at Mozilla
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2011 July 18
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2011 February 07
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Pay phones and Firefox features
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2011 January 27
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What should be done about feeds in browsers?
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2011 January 15
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How to use feed auto-discovery in Firefox 4
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What happened to feed auto-discovery in Firefox 4?
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2010 July 05
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Firefox Sync server on Google App Engine
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2010 June 22
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Case Study: Building a Bookmark Management UI for Mozilla's BYOB
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2009 July 15
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HTML5 drag and drop in Firefox 3.5
Oh hey, look! It's another blog post—and this one is cross-posted on hacks.mozilla.com. I won't say this is the start of a renewed blogging habit, but let's see what happens. Drag and drop is one of the most fundamental interactions afforded by graphical user interfaces. In one gesture, it allows users to pair the selection of an object with the execution of an action, often including a second object in the operation. It's a simple yet powerful UI concept used to support copying, list reordering, deletion (ala the Trash / Recycle Bin), and even the creation of link relationships. Since it's so fundamental, offering drag and drop in web applications has been a no-brainer ever since browsers first offered mouse events in DHTML. But, although mousedown, mousemove, and mouseup made it possible, the implementation has been limited to the bounds of the browser window. Additionally, since these events refer only to the object being dragged, there's a challenge to find the subject of the drop when the interaction is completed. Of course, that doesn't prevent most modern JavaScript frameworks from abstracting away most of the problems and throwing in some flourishes while they're at it. But, wouldn't it be nice if browsers offered first-class support for drag and drop, and maybe even extended it beyond the window sandbox? As it turns out, this very wish is answered by the HTML 5 specification section on new drag-and-drop events, and Firefox 3.5 includes an implementation of those events. If you want to jump straight to the code, I've put together some simple demos of the new events. I've even scratched an itch of my own and built the beginnings of an outline editor, where every draggable element is also a drop target—of which there could be dozens to hundreds in a complex document, something that gave me some minor hair-tearing moments in the past while trying to make do with plain old mouse events. And, all the above can be downloaded or cloned from a GitHub repository I've created especially for this article—which continues after the jump. [ ... 3204 words ... ]
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2009 January 23
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7 facts about me
So, it finally happened—I've been tagged by Stephen Donner. I've not been one to follow memes in this blog, but this one's been going around the Mozillasphere for awhile now and has been kind of interesting. I'm half-tempted to bookmark and tag all the entries I've caught so far. Anyway, the rules: Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. Share seven facts about yourself in the post. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. Let them know they’ve been tagged. Now, for your random facts, after the jump: [ ... 780 words ... ]
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2009 January 06
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Enter the LizardFeeder
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2008 September 07
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Improving my Delicious command for Ubiquity
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2008 September 01
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Writing a Delicious command for Ubiquity
In my last post, I got all fluffy about how cool Ubiquity is but didn't share any code to prove the point. As it happens, I have come up with at least one useful command that I'm starting to use habitually in posting bookmarks to Delicious. You can subscribe to my command or check out the full source—this post will serve as a dissection of the thing. Since this will be fairly lengthy, follow along after the jump. Oh, and it's been awhile since I posted something this in-depth around here, so feel free to let me know how this first draft works. And, bug reports and patches are of course welcome. [ ... 3181 words ... ]
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2008 August 31
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Ubiquity cracks open personal mashup tinkering
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2008 August 04
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Moz08: Rockslides and Blackouts and Bears - Oh My!
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2008 June 16
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Putting the Sexy into Firefox Theme Browsing
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Firefox 3 Download Day Mega Widget
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2008 May 23
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Week 3 at Mozilla
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2008 May 14
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Go Midwest, Young Man!
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