Weekly Status Report, W40/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 40/2008 (September 29 - October 5, 2008):

• Build System:
  Another sync patch for the comm-central build system to pick up mozilla-central changes could land, switching us to use the new python JarMaker for comm-central-based jar files as well, among other things.
• SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 1:
  On Sunday, we could finally release our first preview of SeaMonkey's next generation for public testing - and reports from people are quite positive so far!
  Before that, I went through a complete rewrite of the release notes, based a lot on what Firefox 3 has and throwing out a lot of cruft compared to the 1.x release note pages. The download page was overhauled as well, but there will be more changes as we're moving to localized builds in the future.
  We're still happy about feedback on the Alpha and those website reworks, please just tell us how we can improve even further!
• Places History:
  After asking again and again for someone looking into UI (sidebar panel and history window) for places-based history and nobody replying, I decided to take matters into my own hands and ported a number of files from Firefox to SeaMonkey to make this work.
  As we only have plans for switching over history to the new SQLite-backed places framework but will bookmarks with the old code for the moment (we don't know if and when we might switch those), I needed to cut out a number of code parts dealing with non-history stuff in that code - but I got a working version and could give a patch into review now.
  I also needed to get things moving on supporting a few more JS functions from Firefox' "API", but I think those will ease dealing with a number of things in our code as well.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Thanks to gozer from Mozilla Messaging, the L10n dashboard for Thunderbird now also supports SeaMonkey (sea2x)!
  The calendar team, which got their locales also added there, has posted a few details on what status is displayed there.
  As slight changes to bookmarks files made compare-locales choke heavily, I disabled compare-locales for bookmarks for now.
• German L10n:
  For SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 1, we're able to feature an experimental German language pack, please report bugs you find with that in Bugzilla!
  For trunk, I fixed a number of access keys following some editor access keys cleanup in our main code by Vlado from the Slovak team.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, leaks, www.mozilla.org planning, OS X 10.4 testing, etc.

Now that Alpha 1 is out, we're concentrating on moving development further for Alpha 2, and a lot of interesting stuff is in the works: places history featuring a smarter location bar autocomplete, new download manager backend featuring cross-session pause/resume, new password manager backend featuring popup-less password save and fill-in, session restore, toolbar customization, making the Modern theme complete again, better feed support - to name just the big things people in our team are working on. There's also work going on for a lot of smaller items, and this doesn't include anything happening in the Gecko, platform or general mailnews areas.
We're planning on more regular preview releases in the future, and there's still a lot of interesting improvements to come until we can finalize SeaMonkey 2, giving everyone out there the best Internet suite every produced!