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!

I was recently disturbed when AMO announced that the only communication channel with them I could routinely use would be shut down - the mozilla.dev.amo newsgroup was obsoleted by some web forums. While newsgroups flow naturally along with what I can glance over quite fast in my mailnews client, i'd need to open a website and log in and do several clicks and wait for page loads to read a web forum, which just takes up too much time in my busy daily life.
It made me somewhat angry to split their communication channel away from what most of Mozilla is using usually, but I accepted that because I rarely needed that channel anyhow. But, of course, once you accept a thing like that, you immediately get reminded of why it made you angry:

As you might know, I'm maintaining the package for the German dictionary on AMO. When I uploaded a new 2.0 version of that package to support the newer HunSpell spellchecker which we have in Mozilla since some 1.9.0 alpha state, I realized that AMO wouldn't tell Thunderbird 2.0.x any more that the 1.0.1 dictionary version was compatible with that product, as the developer dashboard settings are only reported through the version check for the latest add-on version.

Because of that, I uploaded a 1.0.2 version with just an updated install.rdf so that everything should be fine again. Of course, I made that only report compatibility for Firefox/Thunderbird 2.0 and SeaMonkey 1.x, as for the newer versions the 2.0 version of the dictionary fits perfectly well.

But now for the real killer: At least since the last update of AMO, 1.0.2 is shown as the "newest" version because I uploaded it later than the 2.0 version. And now people with a current Firefox or SeaMonkey don't see the fitting dictionary for them any more!

And what's even better is that the "older versions" link at the bottom of the page does reveal the list of versions, but you can't get to any of those versions any more!

What the hell are the AMO developers thinking? Has anyone of them ever thought about testing such things on their preview/staging server before rolling it out to the public and f**king up add-ons developers' and users' experience and ability to work with the site?

I have been quite patient though a number of problems I've seen with AMO over time, as I knew a number of my problem were with the SeaMonkey-oriented things and those are a niche affecting a lot less people than cool new features for Firefox add-on stuff. But now I'm really badly pissed off.
Supporting versions of add-ons usably and somewhat correctly is no niche issue, it's a major f**k-up of the site - and when I posted this in mozilla.dev.amo, I of course got no reaction at all for multiple days, as usable communcation channels just get ignored by the AMO team.
On the other hand, I of course got angry messages from users who can't reach a usable German dictionary any more - and if you look at user number of that add-on, you can understand how many people this affects (German is the most-used Mozilla localization, so just guess the impact - it was among the 5 or 10 add-ons overall last I saw statistics of daily users).

(For now, I've upped the versions of the old myspell-based 1.0.2 version so that people have at least something installable, but it's more than suboptimal.)

Thanks to AMO for messing everything up and giving me and a good number of users a hell lot of trouble.

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).