The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 33/2009 (August 10 - 16, 2009):

• Build and Release Machinery:
  The last step for release automation is done - after the move of CC* release factories to buildbotcustom, we have all the tooling for comm-central-based releases in shared code. We share those classes completely betwen SeaMonkey and Thunderbird release automation in the future, and also share as much as possible with the Firefox process. Because of that, any fixes in the process benefit all of us at once, and we all have the same tools for verification of updates, etc. There should be quite some mutual benefit in this.
• Build System:
  I reviewed more patches from Serge for porting build system changes to comm-central and next to this worked with my new tool described here last week to filter out those changes that still need porting. From about 350 changes last week I could filter the list down to about 230 right now, and that list still needs a bit more work to eliminate changes that we actually don't need to port after all. When I get to finish that filtering, I'll post a link publicly, until then, links are available on personal request.
• Download Manager:
  I did another pass on the "Properties" view patch and now included a test that actually calls it, checks that indeed a progress window comes up and that it correctly gets the end time for finished downloads. The patch got review and could land on Sunday. This patch also fixed the wrong icon on the download manager window, it displays its own icon again now.
• German L10n:
  As reported in a bug, German SeaMonkey 2.x builds had strings overflowing multiple panels in the account manager. I fixed that by both increasing the account manager width and shortening a number of strings. While I was at it, I took care that preference panels fit as well.
• Various Discussions:
  2.0b2 and 2.0 final scheduling, 1.8.1.23 security release, tabmail, new Mac theme, SMILE, QA team rebuilding possibilities, AMO and SeaMonkey, www.mozilla.org planning, Mozilla Camp Europe, Community Store contacts, etc.

Two great features landed this week in the SeaMonkey tree: SMILE and the new Mac theme. While I still hope we'll hear a bit more about them in blog posts on the official SeaMonkey blog, here's a small description of what makes those two items special enough to be highlighted:

SMILE is the SeaMonkey Interface Library for Extensions and is the same as FUEL for Firefox and STEEL for Thunderbird - a collection of APIs or access points that make work tremendously easier for add-on developers and. Starting with nightlies this week, SeaMonkey provides the Application object (as a smileIApplication instance) implementing the common extIApplication functionality and a bit more. Any add-on that uses those functions in Firefox or Thunderbird already is now much easier to get to run in SeaMonkey as well. Jorge Villalobos did the initial implementation of SMILE, Philip Chee finished it up so we could add it now - thanks to both of them for this work! We're still looking for someone who can write up documentation for it on MDC - are you willing to help there?

The new Mac theme is important for completely different yet creatively similar reasons, the common thread is consistency. While SMILE makes add-on interfaces more consistent with Firefox and Thunderbird, this new default theme on OS X make SeaMonkey's look not only consistent with those but also practically all of the modern Leopard desktop. The unified look of the window title bar and the toolbars, their dark look, the look of tabs in the page info dialog, thin vertical splitters and a lot of other things were tuned by Stefan Hermes to make SeaMonkey fit as well with the Leopard style as reasonably possible, even if he says that there's still a few things he can improve even more. I hope he'll do a post with a few screen shots soon so everyone can see how much better SeaMonkey 2.0 looks in Mac style now.

We have about two weeks left until feature freeze for the 2.0 series and we're coming along nicely. Let's use the remaining time and make it even better!