Archive for the ‘MDC’ Category.
24th March 2007, 10:40 am
Since there seems to be a trend starting, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and blog (about work stuff) for the first time in ages.
So what’s new? Since my departure from the Mozilla Developer Center project, it seems to be whizzing along like a well-oiled machine, producing docs and excruciatingly cute posters at top speed. Basically, the whole thing is doing just fine without me, which means either I did something very right, or I was excess baggage the whole time. I’m sure opinions vary.
While no longer working on MDC, I’ve been scrabbling around madly trying to figure out how to do my new job which involves a bewildering array of meetings, email, various documents, and a strange mix of Firefox 3 and Mozilla Labs.
Most recently, Mozilla Labs has had an extreme web makeover to jazz up its look and feel to be more unique, happier, and brighter. Hopefully it reflects the spirit of play and exploration with which we want to infuse all things related to Mozilla Labs. We have also launched the new Mozilla Labs Community Forum where everyone is welcome to participate and help drive the future of web innovation and invention. There’s also a new Labs IRC channel at #labs on the irc.mozilla.org server, so feel free to drop by and chat. A good time will be had by all.
In Firefox 3 news, the requirements document is shaping up nicely and we’re hoping to get it under a formal change request system in the near future. If you have any comments about the draft change request system (see link), feel free to comment on the Talk page, or in the dev.planning thread I just started for this very purpose.
Soon I’ll be heading to lovely Boston for the Mozilla Developer Day where apparently I’ll be chatting about Mozilla Labs. I’ve never spent any time in Boston at all (in spite of knowing a bunch of people there), so I’m looking forward to finally seeing the city. Fun times. Later, in mid-April, I’ll be heading down to Mountain View for a week of meetings and planning and etc etc. Etc.
2nd August 2006, 10:46 am
According to our (admittedly unreliable and incomplete) statistics, the Mozilla Developer Center’s English wiki received its 20,000,000th page view some time in the past day or so. This means that since initially launching on March 15, 2005, that wiki has seen an average of 40,000 page views, 70 page edits, and 5 new pages added per day.
These statistics don’t include the huge amount of incredible work the localization teams have been doing, of course, and I would like to thank them (a thousand times over) for all their help and contributions. And thanks to everyone else who has ever contributed to the project in any way. Clearly none of this would be possible without you :)
10th July 2006, 09:03 am
XUL Reference
The initial XUL Reference migration has been completed. We do need some help in improving this reference in several ways:
- More examples
- Screenshots of the various widgets (ideally taken in Windows or Mac)
- More cross-linking within the reference and between the reference and the XUL Tutorial
- Links out to the LXR source where appropriate
- Improved and expanded text for any page within the reference
Sheppy will also be working on copy-editing and other improvements when he has time.
Discussion about replacing “Talk” pages
At the Mozilla all-hands meeting it was suggested that we begin exploring possible replacements for the Wiki “Talk” pages, as the existing pages are poorly suited to actual discussion as they lack threading, structure, editorial control, and any sort of guaranteed permanence. After a long discussion Brion Vibber let us know that the Mediawiki group had a Summer of Code project underway that sounds like it will do exactly what we need. You can read more about the LiquidThreads project on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki.
Suggested new feedback system
Another suggestion from the all-hands meeting is that MDC create a system that would allow users to quickly and easily send feedback from any given page of the MDC site without having to deal with Talk pages, registering on the wiki, or looking up email/list addresses. The system we’re currently planning to implement is simply a new, open mailing list with a mailto: link on each page of the wiki (either in the footer or sidebar).
Content additions and improvements
Localizations
As always, the localization teams have been doing a fantastic job, with recent significant activity on the Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese wikis.
If you have any questions about anything here or anything else related to the MDC, please ask on the MDC discussion list, the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org, or mail me directly (deb-at-mozilla-dot-com).
8th June 2006, 11:32 am
One of the major projects I’m hoping to have more-or-less completed by the end of June is the addition of Neil Deakin’s XUL Element Reference content from XULPlanet into the MDC wiki. This project has been underway (primarily in discussion/planning phases) for the better part of a month, but we’re in the process of finalizing the final structure and formatting now.
To make the process go a lot more quickly, I could use some help in sorting the attribute, property, and method lists for each element. We will be including an alphabetical list of these on each element page, including all those that are inherited from the XUL and DOM elements. So each element needs to have three separate lists (attributes, properties, and methods) and the things inherited from the DOM element need to be marked as such (the linking for DOM items will be different than XUL).
If you could help with the creation and sorting of those lists, please find me in the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org. Any help would be appreciated here, because it can be a bit time consuming. Thanks!
Update: after a somewhat agonizing (and ongoing) debate over a few things, it turns out that this is largely unnecessary. If you started working on these lists, you have my eternal gratitude, but it turns out we’re not going to need them. Thanks!
19th May 2006, 11:08 am
Brendan Eich’s keynote presentation from this year’s XTech conference is now available at the Mozilla Developer Center: JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web.
Other XTech presentations, including Layout Algorithm Improvements for Web User Interfaces, Microsummaries for Firefox and on the Web, SVG and Canvas: Graphics for Web Apps, and Converging Rich-Client and Web Application Development with Mozilla XULRunner are available here: XTech 2006 Presentations.