thoughts on mozilla

Myk Melez – a Labs engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – announced the availability of the Jetpack SDK 0.5. This latest versino adds quite a few new APIs to Jetpack, giving developers even more control over their jetpacks.

From the blog post:

• Tabs API – Provides easy access to tabs and tab-related events.
• Request API – Lets you easily make network requests.
• Load/unload reasons – Add-ons can now find out when they are being loaded for the first time after being installed or enabled and unloaded because they are being uninstalled or disabled.
• Localization API – Provides simple localization functionality. It makes it possible to retrieve localized versions of the strings in your code. And it doesn’t require you to solicit localizations from localizers or bundle localizations with your code, as the module retrieves them automatically from a web service based on the strings your code is using.
• Selection API – Provides a means to get and set current text/HTML selections as well as observe new selections.
• And in case you have not been following the latest Jetpack developments, we also launched Page Worker, Widget, Simple Storage and Private Browsing APIs in previous releases. A complete list of APIs can be found in the core library reference.

More information about Jetpack is available on its project page.

Add-on authors might be interested in exactly what editor’s look for before publishing their add-on to the public addons.mozilla.org (AMO) repository. Jorge Villalobos – Add-ons Developer Relations Lead at the Mozilla Corporation – has published a brand new editor’s guide, which should allow insight into the process.

The guide will also allow the AMO team to spin up new editors quicker than they’ve previously been able to. From his blog post:

This guide should interest add-on authors, to better understand what we do and why. Also, if you’re interested in becoming an editor, this will give you a very good idea of what our day to day work involves.

If you have feedback on the guide, please respond in the AMO forum.

Mozilla Add-ons Workshops (MAOW) are a chance for web developers and extension developers to get together and learn more about creating extensions for Firefox.

On June 30, less than a week before the Mozilla Summit 2010, Mozilla will be hosting a MAOW in London at the Hub Kings Cross. Registration is required, but free.

The announced speakers for the London MAOW are:

• Brian King
• Tobias Leingruber
• Myk Melez
• Nick Nguyen
• Paul Roget
• Justin Scott
• Tristan Nitot

As always, check out the Mozilla wiki for more information on this event.

Justin Scott, Product Manager of Mozilla’s Add-ons site, today announced a few updates to AMO (addons.mozilla.org). Most of the updates won’t be user-visible, as AMO is in the process of rewriting its entire infrastructure using Django (project name: Zamboni).

Of the user-facing features are the ability to see all featured add-ons in a category and improvements to how Google crawls the site.