status on Oxymoronical

What is Jetpack here for?

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 18:27:17 +0000

Who are the Jetpack team? What are they here for? A lot of people in Mozilla don’t know that Jetpack still exists (or never knew it existed). Others still think of it as the original prototype which we dropped in early 2010. Our goals have changed a lot since then. Even people who think they know what we’re about might be surprised at what our current work involves.

Let’s start with this basic statement:

After an awesome Jetpack work week

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:54:40 +0000

It’s the first day back at work after spending a great work week in London with the Jetpack team last week. I was going to write a summary of everything that went on but it turns out that Jeff beat me to it. That’s probably a good thing as he’s a better writer than I so go there and read up on all the fun stuff that we got done.

All I’ll add is that it was fantastic getting the whole team into a room to talk about what we’re working on and get a load of stuff done. I ran a discussion on what the goals of the Jetpack project are (I’ll follow up on this in another blog post to come later this week) and was delighted that everyone on the team is on the same page. Employing people from all around the world is one of Mozilla’s great strengths but also a potential risk. It’s vital for us to keep doing work weeks and all hands like this to make sure everyone gets to know everyone and is working together towards the same goals.

Where is the updated Nightly Tester Tools?

Mon, 17 May 2010 02:39:00 +0000

Many of you nightly testers may have noticed that Nightly Tester Tools’ compatibility override feature doesn’t work with the new add-ons manager and may be wondering when I’m planning to issue an update to fix that. The more astute of you may have noticed that there hasn’t actually been a real code update to Nightly Tester Tools in 2 years, barring a couple of simple app compatibility fixes. Those with a sharp memory will remember that I said just under 2 years ago that I was ceasing work on my extensions in my spare time. I suggested that Nightly Tester Tools might still receive the odd update but obviously that hasn’t happened and the truth is that I can’t see it happening anytime soon. I’m too busy with that whole real life thing to even be able to work on projects I do enjoy, let alone maintain old stuff that no longer really interests me.

Add-ons manager re-landed

Mon, 10 May 2010 23:36:46 +0000

A little sort of coincidental performance regression forced us to back out the new add-ons manager last week. It has now been re-landed with added bug fixes and should be in tomorrow’s nightly.

Long Time No Post

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 21:52:13 +0000

Wow, it’s been a month to the day since my last post here, and quite a lot’s happened in that time. Those of you that keep up on Mozilla things might realise that I have changed jobs and I’m now working for Mozilla on the Firefox team under Mike Connor. I’m going to be putting work into the addons side of Firefox 3, in particular taking some of the main requirements as well as tackling some of the really irritating issues that have lain dormant for a little too long for my liking. Most exciting stuff for me right now (yes I know, I’m sad!) is that I’ve been working on doing unit tests for the extension manager component which makes testing new patches far easier to my mind as well as of course allow us to start catching regressions.

Extension Updates

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:30:59 +0000

Obviously for those keeping up with this rather minimal blog I’m somewhat behind where I hoped to be since my last post. Still no new release of Nightly Tester Tools so I thought it worth giving a quick round-up of the few extension’s I’m still working actively on and what’s happening with them:

Nightly Tester Tools is getting the main development work right now. My previous few weekends have been spent working on coding zip support so that it can update an extension’s compatibility info on the fly in the xpi file. This will allow the Mozilla extension manager to do it’s job, which is handling the safe install of the extension itself. Right now I’ve slowed down because I’m about to start talking to Mozilla about getting the zip writing component into the Mozilla platform which will undoubtedly require some API changes. That and I don’t have a Linux or Windows platform to do a build of the component on. If anyone wants to volunteer to assist (you need to already have experience of building a mozilla app) then please get in touch.