The roads I take...

As I've mentioned here before, I have done some work on recreating the VB app from my high school thesis as a XULRunner application - esp. as I could need the coding practice and Mandelbrot set calculation can nicely show off TraceMonkey's speed.

XULRunner apps are cumbersome when it comes to packaging and delivering them to someone else, though, so I decided to "add-on-ize" this application, and I just finished that and submitted it to AMO. It's even nominated for public, but we'll see how that goes.

So, if you want to try it yourself, you can now get KaiRo.at Mandelbrot for Firefox and SeaMonkey!

In theory, it should even work on mobile Firefox, but I have only tested the XULRunner version on my N810, not the add-on version, and it's not really fit well for the UI. So, it's just experimental, but still nice to show off XUL+JS+canvas+TraceMonkey on a mobile device!


In related news, Data Manager is also available in a first version as an add-on on AMO. This version can now show all the data I want it to display for now, but has rough edges and doesn't let you edit or manage anything yet. Because of this raw state, this will not be "public" for now and versions will stay in beta. Still, I wanted to make it available for testing, so it's there.

Feel free to help testing and get Data Manager for Firefox and SeaMonkey!

NB: I wonder if I should rebrand this to "SeaMonkey Data Manager", just for the fun of Firefox people being able to have the same experience as we have with the Firefox Sync confusion.


With all that, my add-on developer panel on AMO now lists 10 add-ons.

Now, how cool is that?

The Firebug team just announced that their 1.5 version is now available from the addons-mozilla.org ("AMO") website - and this version even supports SeaMonkey 2.0 now!

You don't believe it? Look here:

Install Firebug 1.5 in SeaMonkey 2.0

I have already tried and installed it from their website before, and I have it just right in my browser windows now! I haven't tried it yet, but it has a few things that look interesting, I surely will dig into it when I have time, I already heard a lot of praise about this development tool from the Firefox world, and now I can even use it!

So, after Lightning, we have another one of the big Mozilla add-ons work in SeaMonkey 2.0 - I hope that's the real start for a solid success story now.

Once again, this has been enabled by someone from our great SeaMonkey community, in this case Jens Hatlak (InvisibleSmiley), thanks a lot for testing and writing up patches for this. Also a big "thank you" to the Firebug team for taking those patches quite fast and even convincing AMO that our application suite is really supported!

You might already have read about the release of Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 - maybe you even remember my earlier posts about SeaMonkey 2 and Lightning. And now here's the good news, right from the announcement the calendar team made:

You can install Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 from AMO and manage your calendars now directly from within the SeaMonkey Mail & Newsgroups component.

We have been working closely with the calendar team to make Lightning work as well as possible within SeaMonkey, but we're also sure things can be improved further, and any help is appreciated.
Also, both the SeaMonkey and calendar teams appreciate testing of this Beta and reporting bugs, so we can make your calendaring experience with SeaMonkey and Lightning even better in the future!

I've seen a stream of new comments on my older SeaMonkey and Lightning Calendar" post, so I think I should provide you with a bit of an insight of where we are with this now - after all the official SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 announcement mentions Lightning.

The good news is that you actually can install current Lightning 1.0pre nightlies in SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 and above and you will get a lot of calendaring functionality right in your suite install.

The bad news is that not everything works yet, see the open Lightning-SeaMonkey integration bugs for an overview.

The most notable problems are the invitation feature not working and no access to Lightning preferences.

We are working on solution for both of those and more, some work needs to be done in SeaMonkey code, some in Lightning code, but patches are coming up and we hope to have at least our side, hopefully also their side, fixed when we ship release candidates for SeaMonkey 2.0 and even more the release itself.

Note that all the general points I raised in the original blog post on this topic are still true, neither official Lightning releases with SeaMonkey support nor shipping SeaMonkey with this calendering functionality by default are planned right now, it's all about making it possible at all to install Lightning at all and making it work well enough that people can test that combination more thoroughly.

Working towards SeaMonkey 2, we're improving Add-Ons support tremendously, as you might know. This also includes more and better integration with Mozilla's SeaMonkey Add-Ons site.

I was just reminded by a few events that I need to get in closer contact with the "AMO" (addons.mozilla.org) team for making the experience of that service better for our users.

While I'm writing a mail about this, I thought it would be a good idea to become aware of any additional issues that I should bring into that discussion at a later stage (note that not everything might get resolved right away, but AMO folks are willing to help us make our experience better).

So if you know of problems with the SeaMonkey add-ons website that are about its interaction with or application to SeaMonkey specifically, please let me know in comments to this post, I'll forward the problems (ideally you can also provide an already-filed bug about this for tracking).

Yes, what the recent Calendar blog post says is true: I did enable the Lightning Calendar to be built with SeaMonkey.

But be warned: NO, it DOESN'T WORK - currently, at least.

Recently, when the way of integrating Lightning with Thunderbird has been changed, the integration with SeaMonkey broke heavily and we still need to work on fixing that.

There are a few other things to be aware of as well:

• Lighting does NOT work with SeaMonkey 1.x and never will. The Calendar team is very small and working on huge tasks (pun somewhat intended), so they needed to stop supporting the old, obsolete xpfe toolkit we are using in SeaMonkey 1.x - there is a privately maintained port of the old calendar extension that is said to work with SeaMonkey 1.x in the meantime.
  The work for making Lightning work with SeaMonkey does only affect the development "trunk" and SeaMonkey 2.
• Lightning is not at the moment planning to do any official release with SeaMonkey support at this point. Currently, Sunbird and Lightning releases are still done from and for the 1.8 branch to support Thunderbird 2.0 as well as possible, trunk support is some kind of a stepchild to the calendar team until Thunderbird 3 gets worth supporting.
• Someone needs to work on SeaMonkey-Lightning integration. While some members of the calendar team are eager to see additional users and testers due to SeaMonkey support, it's clear that their team is unable to work on Lightning's SeaMonkey integration themselves. We need to find someone from the SeaMonkey side, ideally someone strongly interested in calendaring support for SeaMonkey, to make this working and keep it going. I'm sure they'll accept patches though, esp. if someone comes up who wants to maintain that integration permanently. There's a special Bugzilla component in the Calendar product that deals with this integration now.
• The calendar team doesn't accept SeaMonkey-only bugs. If you encounter a bug with Lightning withing SeaMonkey, go and test if you see this in Sunbird and Thunderbird+Lightning before reporting it in Bugzilla. The calendar team can't work on SeaMonkey-specific issues at the moment and won't care too much for those. If the bug is about how Lightning integrates with SeaMonkey, feel free to report it in the specific component we now have for that, but don't expect someone to work on it. As I said, we are still looking for someone to work on this.
• We have no firm plans or decisions to ship Lightning with SeaMonkey yet. Even this is an interesting option for the future, we first need to see how well it works and if we can find someone working on the integration before seriously talking about this.

All that said, we are happy we can cooperate with the calendar project to get some kind of calendaring support for future SeaMonkey versions, as this is a frequently requested feature and an interesting prospect for addition to our suite. Still, there's lots of work to do and lots of experience to gather - we'll see how this all works out.

Thanks to the calendar team for enabling us to work with them on this.
And if you are interested in good integration of Lightning with SeaMonkey and willing to work on patches and maintaining them - we are looking for you!

As I mentioned here recently, the Mozilla Add-Ons site ("AMO") is currently being switched to a completely rewritten, new version (v3) nicknamed "Remora". And yes, it had been rolled back after a few hours of operation due to load problems. And it might even go back and forth between versions a few times until Remora is completely up to the task of taking over that high-traffic site. At the time that I'm writing this, the new version is online once again, we'll see if it stays that way or will turn back for more improvements again.

That said, the webdev folks are pretty responsive and fixing lots of bugs that are reported in that new version. For example, the wrong section descriptions I mentioned last time are fixed now. The list of bugs fixed since Remora went live the first time is also worth a read there. Today I discovered though that the "Recommended Add-Ons" listed on the SeaMonkey Add-Ons page are often not compatible with SeaMonkey actually. I guess the fix will also be done fast - filing a clearly described bug is once again the way of choice to get attention to such minor flaws.

The biggest point of discussions around Remora is the Sandbox feature though. Oh, yes, it is a feature, not an easter egg - despite the time of year of its release
The idea of the Sandbox is actually that users can - with lots of warnings - access add-ons that are not yet approved for public use, test them and comment on them and therefore help reviewers with approving new Add-Ons before they go public. There's even a description of the sandbox feature and a policy for public vs. sandboxed add-ons available on the new AMO site. There's still the problem that the sandbox is hard to find (this is being worked on in the "easter egg" bug I linked here) - and the issue that many add-ons that previously were public have suddenly been degraded to the sandbox. Mike Shaver tried to bring some clarity into that: "we chose a threshold to start with to seed the public site". I guess this was a threshold by user comments, ratings and/or download numbers, and that probably works fine for a good number of Firefox add-ons, and they expected all others just get nominated for going public by their authors anyways. Just that the authors weren't directly informed (don't you have all their mail addresses anyways?) before this went public, so they didn't know. And then there are add-ons like dictionaries, which are usually shown on a page that doesn't link comments or ratings and won't get much of those, and which are probably only interesting for smaller local communities (like my Swiss German dictionary) and won't rank high in downloads. Additionally, there are add-ons for less widespread apps (SeaMonkey and Sunbird), which were badly visible before on the old AMO site, and therefore have less comments, ratings, and downloads - and they the download numbers won't ever be nearly as high as those of Firefox-compatible add-ons, just because of the difference in user numbers of Firefox and the other applications.
All that has probably led to widespread sandboxing of certain types of add-ons and confusion among authors, but I'm sure that situation will improve with time and communication.
Additionally, I think that, with the proper "unapproved, testing-only stuff" warnings and with asking people for commenting on the add-on as well as rating it, the sandbox can be made visible much easier - but again, let's see where the "easter egg" bug leads to in this matter.

The SeaMonkey project plans to only link AMO as the source for add-ons (e.g. on our main web page) in the future, first we need to be sure it works reasonably and we have enough available add-ons. My LCARStrek theme somehow already slipped from sandbox to public without me requesting it or me being notified, so we now have the first SeaMonkey theme listed, but I'm sure there are more themes and other add-ons out there. Please, SeaMonkey add-on authors, submit your work to Remora, and ask for it be shown on public pages!
We now have this good system, which is supporting our software well (and will also work fine with the Add-Ons Manager and its auto-update feature in future SeaMonkey versions), so let's use it!

Update (2007-03-27 03:00 CEST):
1) Mike Shaver has restored all pre-existing add-ons to public, only new extension will go through the new sandbox process.
2) Remora seems to stay alive as the new AMO now after some performance fixes.

The new addons.mozilla.org (AMO) version (v3, codenamed "Remora") finally is was online today, and it's it was quite promising. Unfortunately I still see some minor flaws with it - and one more serious issue. (And it has been temporary rolled back to the old version - for performance issues, as I was told on IRC. You can view it on the AMO preview site in the meantime.)

First, the positive sides: It really looks good, polished, professional and friendly at the same time. Then, it has sections for 4 applications, adding SeaMonkey and Sunbird to the previously supported Firefox and Thunderbird. And yes, I'm very happy to see that new SeaMonkey Add-Ons section there. Even more, AMO is now fully localized, available in 10 languages as far as I see, and I'm sure more will be added in the future. From a localizer's point of view, this is really great. Good work, web development team!
AMO has also gained a few features, such as localizable add-on descriptions, flags for pre-releases of add-ons, publicly viewable source, and similar stuff, it even can display add-ons of specific types that are compatible with a specific application - you don't see lots of Firefox-specific stuff on SeaMonkey pages now. And then, there's a sandbox (can be activated by registered users), where add-ons can be accessed that are not approved and made public yet.

And that's where the serious problem happened: Many add-ons that were public previously on AMO are now in the sandbox only and not shown to anyone - unless he's a registered user, has checked to see the sandbox in user prefs and actively clicks on the sandbox link he then gets to see. So, one thing is, it's really hard to get there. One reason for this may also be that once you're logged in, you have to realize that clicking on you mail address at the right top of the page is the link to "Edit user prefs". Another reason it that the sandbox is, as I said, pretty well hidden.
The biggest issue with that sandbox is not that it's hard to find though, but that many previously public add-ons are now hidden in there, including 3/4 of all dictionaries and all SeaMonkey themes! I don't understand why those add-ons, that already had been reviewed and approved for the old AMO site, are suddenly hidden in this sandbox and treated like they are insecure and not approved. (This includes my Swiss dictionary and both my SeaMonkey themes, BTW.)

There are some other flaws as well, but all of those are minor: The "Themes" and "Extensions" sections for SeaMonkey wrongly mention Firefox; once you're logged in, the site feels quite slow; the SeaMonkey themes section is missing almost all categories (only "Misc" is shown, but not all themes available [in the sandbox] have that category set); if you click a link to a listing that results in no add-ons to display (e.g. popular SeaMonkey themes) you get a page without any site decoration, only a "No add-ons in this category!" message that looks unprofessional. This may be just a page that forwards you to a normal one after a few seconds, but as empty as it is it looks strange.

I hope those issues, esp. the hiding of many previously public add-ons, will be fixed soon, as that new system really looks promising!