The roads I take...

If you're reading this, my web server, which is driving this blog and almost all my other web services as well as my mail account, is back in business.
Due to my business partner moving back to our state of origin and me following within the next months or years and due to a good offer, we decided to move the server those about 190km West from Vienna to Linz as well.
If you couldn't reach me via email and/or couldn't access any websites hosted by me today, you know know the reason.
And don't worry, the mails will still be delivered to me with some lag due to the good thinking behind the distributed email delivery system.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2009 (January 19 - 25, 2009):

• Build System:
  GLOBAL_DEPS are now working on comm-central, which also means that we rebuild code on changes to autoconf.mk and config.mk - we're too eager to rebuild right now on both Mozilla and comm-central, but we have an idea how to solve that.
  Once again, I did a number of build system ports to comm-central, split into a general and L10n Makefile part. Those are only ports for stuff in 1.9.1, I'll take a look at additional things in mozilla-central once we branch comm-central.
  Based on this, I also tried to work on easier default profile localization, there are a few obstacles in that though and the patch needs more work.
• Download Manager UI:
  Another new patch for the new download manager UI is here, it should be pretty final for this iteration, we now need to wait on the backend to see something actually work. Meanwhile, some followup bugs were filed on improvements to make once the initial UI has landed.
• Automated tests:
  Due to a new leak that had been uncovered by our XUL ID test, I tried porting this test to Firefox - even though our leak turned out to be SeaMonkey-specific, this test could help Firefox to not regress it main window, and even to improve their preferences window, as it's shown up as leaking in that test (and it has some string bundle IDs duplicated).
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Galician and Japanese have been added to the supported SeaMonkey languages, now we're trying to build 21 languages for SeaMonkey trunk daily and hope to ship all those and more for 2.0 final.
• German L10n:
  SeaMonkey strings was kept up-to-date with comm-central trunk most of the time.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, SeaMonkey vision, Lightning, toolbar customization, langpacks and release automation, bmo reorg part 2, newsgroup spam, etc.

While I'm still trying to get used to all the new eye-candy I'm working with now, I see more and more important pieces of SeaMonkey 2 come together - now even Windows/Linux browser toolbar customization has landed on trunk! Some things like history / location bar improvements and the better password management backend also have already landed for Alpha 3, others like session restore, feed preview, download manager improvements, OS X browser toolbar customization and tabbed mail are being worked on and we also hope to be able to ship those in that last alpha. There will be regressions and rough edges, that's why it's still an alpha, but we're trying to push all those features into that one so that we get them tested and have some room for finishing them up and smoothing the experience for beta before putting on the finishing touches to go for a final release later on. The plans for this seem to hold up well for now.

As I mentioned, I had planned to switch to KDE 4.2 on my production system as well after it worked pretty well on my laptop. Additionally, most people in our communities probably know about the value of testing development code in production or almost-production environments to find all kinds of bugs and get them reported upstream.
And so, I finally did update my openSUSE Factory system again - it's been a number of weeks since the last update, and that's probably not ideal in the case of such development distributions (but the state I had so long was fairly near to the 11.1 release).

The first problem came up right during the update/install process: package files were pulled out under my feet while I still needed to install them. I guess there is some room for improvement in the otherwise pretty good openSUSE Build Service (OBS) used to provide all those packages. After a restart of the install and another install/update run for more such problems with another OBS repo I've included, I finally had all the new packages on my system. I also had cared to replace the KDE 3 login screen with the KDE 4 one and install all packages I should need with the new desktop after the switch. So far, so good - it was about 4am and I decided to go to bed and continue today.

So, after some hours of sleep, I went up, not forgetting that I still would need to re"compile" the proprietary nVidia driver package (actually, it recompiles the kernel interfaces to load its binary blob with and installs all that). I couldn't help but notice my harddisk churning like mad though and realized an "old friend" from the last such update had come back - the logs were again filled with ATA errors, and writing a few of those every second to the on-disk log really slows down the system a lot. A few kernel reinstalls (trying different versions) and bug comment entries later, I found the only way I could stop this for now is by shutting down the syslog service and not logging any such info on disk for now. At least the engineer owning this bug should have more info now - that's what using development code is all about, right?

So, with the logging off and the video driver installed, I finally logged into KDE 4.2 (or actually, because I'm livin' on the edge, 4.2.60, i.e. KDE "trunk", which is already on the way to 4.3) and started configuring it. I knew most things I needed/wanted from the laptop already, but I mainly ran into two issues: 1) Those nice semi-transparent effects wouldn't work and 2) I wanted different background images for my 8 virtual desktops but could only set one for all.
The first problem was explained in the settings panel with a missing XComposite extension and I could find out that the nVidia driver had set "Composite" "off" in the config file while editing that to "on" just made this work.
The second problem required some more searching, but I could find that the backend work was done as well as an option to turn it on manually - which worked far enough that the background I had set is now on only one virtual desktop, but all others are black and empty (i.e. no background, no icons, just the "plasma" panel) and don't have any context menu or such for configuring them. I guess I need to take some deeper look into manual config.

With that, I'm basically back on a usable system as long as I have syslog turned off and don't need desktop icons. Here's a useful piece of eye-candy I have enabled now: the window list overview I have set as a hot corner action (when moving the mouse out the corner) on the upper left corner works nicely and is quite useful:



All those images are live views and update with whatever's going on in those windows, clicking on the window in that view goes directly to it in the respective virtual desktop.

GNOME apps like GIMP or XChat, which I use a lot, don't look too well yet, and the latter can't do it's transparent background stuff yet which I like so much, all graphics are slower than before (I already noticed the same with my laptop, so it's similar on nVidia and Intel video drivers, probably something with the XComposite stuff) and there's a few other small things that aren't yet prefect, but it looks like I have a pretty decent way of "Ling On The Edge" here again.

Time to get back to work.

(Tomorrow, at least. Tonight it's time for my favorite bar and some Karaoke. )

I just read an interesting post by Aaron Seigo from the KDE team.

As you might know, that development team made the choice to release their new technology, which was built to be up to the challenges of the future, once the backends themselves were stable and a good base for building applications on it, about a year ago, with the KDE 4.0 release.

A lot of bad press followed, as the applications themselves weren't completely ready for the users and the 4.0 release didn't even nearly ship feature-parity with the 3.5 series that provided and still provides a complete and stable user experience for many people. Now the next public beating goes round as Linus Torvalds has apparently switched to GNOME in the absence of his distribution being able to provide him with a KDE version that is feature-complete and stable for production use. They shipped KDE 4 as its said to be the new stable version and didn't offer people to stay with the actually production-ready KDE 3.5 (unlike openSUSE, by the way), but thankfully offer GNOME, which is production-ready, even though it doesn't offer many of the more future-oriented eye-candy and development frameworks. Linus apparently determined he'd better use a production-ready system than cool technology that is incomplete, as many other users might have.

This somehow reminds me of Netscape 6, we saw very similar patterns there. Cool new technology, but unfit for daily use of many people. Netscape died, and Mozilla needed a shift in thinking to really gain strength again, and the suite will never be a mass product any more, even though we finally managed to make it survive and hopefully thrive again with SeaMonkey.

Now, if they wouldn't have released the new technology in KDE 4.0, people probably wouldn't have put so much development into getting the applications and the user experience up to speed and be able to ship a really mostly feature-complete and for sure production-ready KDE 4.2 this upcoming week (I've tested and used it on my laptop and will convert my main machine soon). In terms of getting more people to work with the new technology, the "release early" strategy helped quite a lot.

The real question will be if the project and the KDE 4 technology can egalize the bad reputation it has right now, gain strength and move forward again as a strong platform and come back as the leading free desktop system. KDE 4.2 surely has the power to do that, but bad reputation is hard to overcome. Let's see how this turns out.

(And yes, when we have a certain reluctance to releasing SeaMonkey 2 before it's really production-ready, we also have stories like this in mind.)

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2009 (January 12 - 18, 2009):

• Misc Development Work:
  I checked in the patch for an --enable-static --enable-tests compile failure and an automated test problem to the mozilla-central and 1.9.1 codebases.
  The improved throbber animation could also be checked in (to comm-central, of course) - it took me several hours though to blog about the process of creating those APNGs.
  We have been investigating an add-ons problem for some time this week, with some help of my memories and the original reporter, Mark finally found the problem and a fix.
• Password Manager:
  Finally, both SeaMonkey and Thunderbird switched away from old, unmaintained xpfe wallet code and adopted the toolkit LoginManager code instead, which we now share with Firefox, see Standard8's blog post for more details about the switch. The SeaMonkey-specific patches landed together with that work as well, that work by Neil, Serge and me should make people feel no real difference in terms of UI, except the switch away from modal dialogs and to browser notification bars for the "remember" prompts and autocomplete on the user fields in web forms instead of the modal dialog for filling in passwords when multiple logins are stored.
  I know a few very loud-voiced people like the modal dialogs better than the alternatives, but much more people like avoiding the modal dialogs better. The new UI, esp. for discovery/autofill of multiple saved passwords/accounts could be better (see the relevant bug), we know that. The fact is that keeping old code around without maintenance is worse in terms of stability and security than adopting maintained code with known flaws, but at least have someone work on the code. Patches for improving that code are not just welcome, but will likely even be reviewed by someone - something we couldn't guarantee for the old code.
• Places History:
  A change in the toolkit code for the matchOnlyTyped preference caused test failures and non-working UI, which I created a patch for. It got reviews, but I needed to wait until after the weekend for checkin.
  By the way, we realized that the autocomplete.enable pref doesn't work right now, but the toolkit code will be changed in a way that it will work again, along with the existing SeaMonkey UI, and Firefox UI will be changed to use it as well.
• Download Manager UI:
  Some more addressing of review comments for the new download manager UI, but more to be done here.
• German L10n:
  German SeaMonkey strings was updated for trunk checkins, including the above mentioned password manager code.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, test leaks, SeaMonkey vision, Lightning, toolbar customization, etc.

In this week's status meeting, we have decided to give SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3 another week of development compared to the previous schedule, so that we can keep our code freeze in sync with Thunderbird. We will now take code changes for this last alpha until February 5 and hope to make builds, test them and get them out to the public soon afterwards. This won't change the schedule we have in mind for final as we only have rough dates even internally so far - and there's not much secrecy about what we have in mind: After this alpha, we're planning on only one beta before the final release so far, with about one and a half months of development/testing time between milestones, it's an easy guess where rough planning takes us. I stated previously that we target the second quarter of 2009 for the final release, I hope we really won't slip those rough schedules as far as to not make that - as you can calculate, we have some flexibility for this to still stay withing the range of that quarter.
This summer, we should have a stable toolkit-based SeaMonkey release for everyone out there!

I have been writing about the APNG hassles surrounding the SeaMonkey throbber a few weeks ago already. This Tuesday, I fixed the bug about this by checking in newly created APNGs (16px and 32px sizes) into the SeaMonkey trunk tree, and current nightlies should contain it. Those animations are not the ideal solutions and were quite hard to do, though, and I was faced with multiple problems while doing them.

First, I couldn't just use the frames of the animated GIFs we had as they are 256 colors (which would probably still be acceptable by itself) with 1-bit transparency (which was the actual problem I needed to solve in the beginning) and we needed (8-bit) alpha transparency, which is non-trivial to generate from those GIF image frames. The GIFs are coalesced animations though, with each frame only containing the pixels that need to change compared to the frame before, which is an elegant space saver. Still, we couldn't use those, so I needed another image source.

That brought me back to the original work of the author who created both our SeaMonkey logo and the "bubble" throbber we are using - in an SWF format (yes, the one used by Flash). Now that format is not known for being open or easy to edit. He provided us with the GIF version and also gave us an SWF showing the original animation in some SeaMonkey window mockups. So I took that original SWF and tried to get some tool that would allow us the extract that animation and convert it into some format that would allow me to convert frames to PNG and assemble them into APNGs.

So I looked for tools to do that. SWFExtract from the SWF Tools collection sounded promising by its name, so I tried it. It didn't lead me very far, as it only extracts elements from the SWF into SWF format again (except for bitmap images, but I learned we're dealing with vector drawings here), but at least I now had both a non-animated SWF of the SeaMonkey logo only and an SWF movie of the bubble throbber animation only.

Again, I looked for tools, this time looking closer for something that might make it possible to get vector data out of an SWF, ideally in SVG format. After some searching and some unsuccessful tests of other tools, I found the command line version of and swf2svg tool called Flash Exploit that would run on my Linux machine and be able to extract single frames of SVG data when specifying the sequence number of the frame. I had an SVG of the original vector data of our logo in no time - if we'd only have had that from the beginning, CTho (Chris Thomas) wouldn't have needed to redraw it in SVG. In case of the animation, I found out it was completely vectorized as well, and frame 50 was the same as frame 20, i.e. it was building up to that point and then looping those other 30 frames (the GIF had 30 frames as well, so that looked reasonable). I exported all 50 different frames into SVGs, so that I hopefully will never need to extract stuff from the SWF again. So far, so good.

Now, I tried to take a look at the SVGs. They all looked fine and high-quality in Gecko and Konqueror but Inkscape had a problem displaying the bubbles. GIMP could render them nicely as well, which should help with creating PNGs, but I found out that there was a white background in all the frames, and when I rendered them in a size that would make the logo roughly 32x32px, I needed to use 512x512px as import setting. A look at the source (yay for open formats!) of the SVG provided me with the info to remove the background rectangle and reduce the reported size of the frames from 512 to 32, which I both did in mass-edits for all frames using MySQL's replace utility.

Now I could render an SVG to a bitmap in GIMP and save it as a PNG, but repeating that at least 30 times for the 32px version and again as many times for the 16px version didn't sound like something I'd like to do, a manual process is tedious and with the additional cropping to get the ideal image format it would also be somewhat error-prone. So I looked into batch-processing with the GIMP and found a tutorial on doing it with their language called Script-Fu, which is based on Scheme. It took some fiddling with an unknown language but I could get a script up that goes through all SVGs, loads them into GIMP in a specified size, crop them to the correct target size and save them as PNG images. This way, I could generate all frames I needed - and more: I actually did 128px, 64px, 32px and 16px versions of all 50 frames.

So, then for the assembling. APNG Edit sounded like a good choice, but I realized that I could only adjust delays between frames for single frames there, and I needed to decrease from the default 250ms to 100ms on all frames, so I also tried Animat, which can do that more easily. I edited the XPIs of both to let the install.rdf accept SeaMonkey (I know I could use extensions.checkCompatibility=false for that, but I wanted it cleaner) and also edited their overlays to make the caller menuitem available in SeaMonkey's menus as well (I'd be happy to contribute those changes back tot he original authors if they want to). With that, I could generate APNGs for all the four sizes I mentioned before.

Due to the animations not being coalesced, the images are quite large, the 128px version takes up ~530KB and the 64px one ~210KB, so I won't publish them right now, the 32px and 16px images are in nightlies now and look like that (the exact same images are shown on different CSS-set background colors):

(You need an APNG-capable browser to view the animations, of course, else you just get a plain logo image.)

The animations are not completely perfect, as I said in the beginning - they consist of full frames, no coalescing (though I'm unsure how it would work with alpha transparency), and the bubbles are cut off hard at the edge of the image rect. I have the SVGs and the GIMP script, maybe I'll improve on them some time again, but I think they are pretty usable and much better than the GIFs even in their current state.

I thought I might dodge this newest 1337 meme striking our community, but now I've finally been tagged by marcoos, and I need to share seven things you may (not) know about me. You have been warned.

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

The 53V3N 7H1NG5 you may (or may not) know about me:

1. The first computer I worked on was an Olivetti 8086 with 12 MHz, 640K of RAM, a 20 MB harddisk drive and MS-DOS 3.2 installed, back in the late 1980s (I was in primary school back then). It was some time back then that I got DOS and GW-BASIC reference books as a birthday or Christmas present and started writing my first small programs in that language. Yes, I still remember LIST and RENUM commands - and what fantastic news it was when MS-DOS 5.0 was released with QBASIC included.
2. When it comes to "home", I feel like having two hearts pounding in my chest: One beating strong for my actual home in Austria, or to be more exact, Steyr, a town right in the middle between Salzburg and Vienna - the other one is beating about as strong for the southern US (I don't manage to locate it more specifically). For a European, I probably have an unusually deep appreciation and fondness for "downhome Dixie". That ain't no joke, y'all.
3. Some time in the early 1990s, when I was in secondary school, I started writing song lyrics and even complete songs, even though I didn't play an instrument. Because of that, I made my fingers hurt by taking a chords manual and my daddy's western guitar and teach myself some basics on how to play it. Meanwhile, I have my own guitar, which I'm touching way too rarely and can play way too badly, and I've written about 280 songs, none published, but most lyrics are available online.
4. I've been involved in politics since I realized in school that talking to others to change stuff that multiple people want differently can actually achieve something, esp. if you get to know the right people and perhaps are even in the right committees or such bodies. I call myself a "progressive conservative", being deeply rooted in string values but always seeking to explore new frontiers, believing that constant evolution is the only way nature shows to keep good things well. And I found that working for the common good is a tremendously effective contribution to the glorified vision I have of a possible future. 'nuff said, I guess you see what I mean.
5. Only after starting to study physics next to chemistry I grew strongly attached to Star Trek, and both science fiction as well as space exploration in general. I had some interest in space vehicles and science, esp. those from NASA, starting in primary school, but it's never been as strong as in this last decade - nowadays I'm following every single Space Shuttle mission as well as some ISS and other coverage on NASA TV streams and I've seen every minute of Star Trek series and movies expect the animated classic series. I always liked the original series (with Kirk and Spock) least due to less thought-through science and characters - but then, this grew easier to do with more money and newer technology.
6. I started localizing Mozilla back in 1999 due to my fascination with that technology that gave me the power to understand the construction of the UI with my HTML, CSS and slight JS knowledge I had through creating some web pages. It was simply cool that I could change the strings in those .dtd files to German ones and have that reflected in the UI of this experimental application. When I asked in the newsgroup how to preserve this fun test work for others, I was informed I had been added as the first contributor for German Mozilla, and so I released a complete L10n of Mozilla M12 on January 1st of 2000. The rest is history.
7. I'm not much interested in Soccer, the football I watch is NFL. I haven't settled for any team I strongly support yet, I just like good, interesting games, including defense battles (the recent divisional playoff game of Eagles vs. Giants was a good example) - one of my best friends is a strong Dolphins fan and I'm usually with him when I come around to watch Sunday afternoon/night football (whatever one should call it, depending on "their" vs. "our" timezone). I also enjoy watching the NBA, supporting the Spurs (at least since visiting San Antonio and seeing the Alamo Dome where they still played back then) even though I loved the legendary Bulls trio of Pippen, Jordan and Rodman back when I was younger and my even younger brother played Basketball in a national league here in Austria. And while we're on Sports and Austria, of course I also like skiing and ski jumping, I even had the privilege of both being there at a ski flying competition day at the "Kulm" in Bad Mitterndorf as well as standing up on the jump there (with shoes, not skis) on a non-competition day, looking and later walking/slipping down the landing area.

The poor souls that I'm tagging and need to continue this meme:

1. Justin Wood (Callek), who just created his blog and need to really start blogging (and a reason the file a bug to get onto planet) anyway.
2. Mark Banner (Standard8), our SeaMonkey "export" to Mozilla Messaging - I hope the suite hasn't yet lost this great guy yet.
3. Joshua Cranmer, for being a young genius who dares touching mailnews code people have avoided for ages.
4. Mitchell Baker, the awesome woman who has been leading the Mozilla project as Chief Lizard Wrangler since even before it officially started (I know, Tristan tagged you already but I wanted to do so even before reading his post).
5. Simon Paquet, long-time L10n coordinator for calendar and recently also Thunderbird
6. Wolfgang Rosenauer, for making SUSE the first Linux distribution to ship with SeaMonkey and now preparing SeaMonkey 2 prereleases in the openSUSE Build Service - and probably now infecting Planet SUSE with this meme.
7. J. Paul Reed, who took me and one of my best friends (yes, the Dolphins fan) on an amazing plane tour over the San Francisco Bay area last year.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 02/2009 (January 5 - 11, 2009):

• Places History:
  Making tests even more robust against different default prefs as well as adding UI prefs for places have landed now, so we now have graphical preferences that determine if we match website titles as well or just URLs, where in the title/URL we find matches - and even the minimum of days to save history for.
• Misc Development Work:
  When I investigated how well the Lightning calendar extension will work with SeaMonkey once tabbed mail lands, I saw the error console filled with messages related to a status bar progress difference we had compared to Thunderbird, Firefox and Sunbird - for which I whipped up a patch, got it reviewed and checked in. With this, showing the status bar progress indicator works the same way in all our 1.9.1-based applications now - and Lighting doesn't come up with any error any more when the tabbed mail patch is used with SeaMonkey (there are still missing items in the UI due to unsuccessful overlays, but they don't result in errors).
  I also filed a bug and patch on a recently introduced automated test problem with SeaMonkey - it doesn't make much sense to port failure workaround hacks for specific failures to tests about something different.
  While I was looking into tests, I created a patch for the --enable-static --enable-tests compile failure that has been seen in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey for some time - even though I saw we have certain problems with actually executing tests in that configuration in any case.
  In addition to that, I spent a number of hours on the weekend on improving the throbber animation, which involved extracting an swf movie from a larger swf with the original throbber work from our logo designer, then extracting SVGs for all its frames from that swf, batch-editing those SVGs, then writing up a GIMP batch script for converting the SVG frames to alpha-transparent PNGs, and finally assembling those into APNG images. Not to mention the mass of documentation I read to get this done and the search for tools and testing them to finally find some that could do what I wanted. I'll probably do another blog post on that work soon.
• Organizational Tasks:
  When our website failed, I filed a bug and contacted Mozilla server admins, who recogized what had happened and fixed the problem.
  Something very similar needed to be done for a nightly symbol upload failure.
  As hgweb has been configured meanwhile to not need ugly "index.cgi/" chunks in the URLs, I could remove those from a number of places in our buildbot configs.
  Finally, I also found the time to write up a proposal for the future vision of the SeaMonkey project based on the comments on the threads I started in newsgroups about that. I mailed this proposal to the SeaMonkey Council and some additional core developers, and we hope to have at least a signed-off official draft very soon. Watch this blog and the SeaMonkey newsgroups for more news about that.
• Download Manager UI:
  I continued work on the new download manager UI, mainly by addressing the first batches of review comments and fixing a few bugs. We also figured out a few things to work on in followup bugs once this UI rewrite has landed - and all that before anyone has even tested that work in SeaMonkey itself.
• German L10n:
  Once again, German SeaMonkey strings were kept current, additionally, a de help update was landed.
• Various Discussions:
  Login manager, tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, etc.

FOSDEM is coming around in a few weeks once again, once again with a Mozilla presence (this time including a main-track opening keynote by Mozilla's Mark Surman!) and I also will be attending yet again. I hope I'll meet a good number of Mozilla and even SeaMonkey folks there, as well as people from other projects (I'm esp. interested in maemo, openSUSE and KDE - depending on what/who is present there). My plans include a talk about "SeaMonkey 2 and the vision beyond", which will show off a bit of a demo of where SeaMonkey 2 is headed (probably with a heavily patched build unless all the great stuff actually lands before then) and present the (draft of the) new long-term vision of the SeaMonkey project. Hopefully this will be able to give the crowd there some new insights, as this is what I also want to take with me from this event when it comes to other projects.

I'm looking forward to this classic experience once again - if you have the time it's really worth traveling there for a weekend with a mindbogglingly big number of geeks in one single place (and also interesting insights into what's going on in the free and open source software world)!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 01/2009 (December 29, 2008 - January 4, 2009):

• Places History:
  As we'll be using a different, new pref for telling places to only look at history for urlbar autocomplete, we also need to make test even more robust against different default prefs, which I created a patch for.
  Additionally, I also created a patch for adding UI prefs for places, including the change to that other default pref.
• Password Manager:
  I got new reviews on the patches for switching SeaMonkey to LoginManager, and Mark is nearing fully reviewed state for the (mailnews) backend switch, so expect SeaMonkey (and Thunderbird) to be throwing away wallet and also turn password management over to toolkit really soon now.
• Download Manager UI:
  As already mentioned in this blog, I did a lot of work on creating a tree-based manager window for the toolkit download manager so that SeaMonkey can have a download manager that is similar to its current one, but evolved into an even improved version, once the backend switchover has been done.
  Before the holidays, I had a rough proof-of-concept done, this week I involved it into an actually working download manager window with a good set of functionality, and in the end even produced a first patch on the newly filed bug for the new UI. Some small pieces may not yet be perfect when the first version lands, but it will already feature a number of improvements over the old one as well as having a familiar look and feel.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Venkman gained Polish L10n this week, and localized ChatZilla is now also available in Brazilian Portuguese SeaMonkey builds.
• German L10n:
  Updates a number of German SeaMonkey strings in both hg repositories, and also cleaned up superfluous newlines caused by a bug in my beautify_mt_output script used for transforming MozillaTranslator output into localized files that match en-US as closely as possible.
• Various Discussions:
  Temporary failures in automated tests, tabmail, feed preview, CA activities and policy modules, comm-central Bugzilla components, etc.

Sorry for being quite late with this update, going home and mostly offline for my dad's birthday early this week made me push out writing this up.

This year is still very young, but the list of things going on in SeaMonkey code is impressive: tabbed mail, a new password manager backend, a reworked and improved download manager, session restore, feed preview, and customizable toolbars for the browser all have patches up for review currently and we hope to get the majority of those into Alpha 3, the reworked history and urlbar autocomplete backend has already landed in time for that next milestone. It really seems like SeaMonkey 2 is finally taking shape - count on a final release this year (our target for it is in Q2/2009 currently)!

A Happy New Year from and with the SeaMonkey project!

As I mentioned before, I started working on the SeaMonkey UI for the toolkit download manager backend.

In the last few days, I have progressed a lot on that, as one can easily see from the pushlog on the hg repository I created for backing up that work (and having the code out there if someone wants to test).

Here's a current screenshot of my work:



All the commands in the context menu are being activated and deactivated as they should and they are also all working as they should (that is, in SeaMonkey they probably are, opening the home page fails in Minefield, as SeaMonkey's utilityOverlay functions apparently can't open Firefox tabs). Also, the download progress is updated as it should, in the tree as well as the download manager window title.
What's not working yet is the toolbar commands (i.e. search and clear list) as well as sorting. Those are convenient and will of course be implemented before this can go into SeaMonkey (well, we haven't even switched the backend itself yet), but even without those, the download manager is already pretty usable.

If you want to test, just pull the repository, move/copy/symlink the dlmgrui@kairo.at directory in your Firefox profile's extensions/ directory and make sure the symlinks in its communicator/ subdir point to the right SeaMonkey files (or place copies of comm.jar, classic.jar and en-US.jar there).
Having done that, you should be able to launch your Shiretoko or Minefield copy and get this tree-based SeaMonkey download manager whenever the toolkit download manager should else be launched.

Of course, this is an add-on I'm only doing for development of the new SeaMonkey UI, I have no intention of making this a real Firefox add-on but to merge it into SeaMonkey code in the future - once we have the toolkit backend and this isn't WIP but a reviewed patch instead.