Tag Archives: mozilla

Starting Work on Mozilla Thunderbird

With the Winter holidays drawing to a close, I’m really looking forward to starting the next chapter of my life – namely, my new job at Mozilla Messaging working on the Thunderbird e-mail client.

In just a little under a week, I’ll be knee-deep in a code-base larger than any I’ve ever worked on before. And I’ll be working with some of the best software developers in the world.

I’m pretty stoked.

So, what exactly will I be doing for Thunderbird? What project will I be starting my work with? I’m so glad you asked…

Thunderbird + Unity = Badass

Ok, that’s not technically the code-name for the project, but I think it more or less conveys my feelings about the whole thing.

So here’s the story in a nutshell:

Ubuntu Linux is one of several operating systems that Thunderbird runs on (the other big ones being Mac OSX and the various flavours of Microsoft Windows). I use Ubuntu as my primary operating system – I’m comfortable with it, and I like it.

In the coming months, there will be a tectonic shift of sorts in Ubuntu. The graphical user interface that most Ubuntu users are used to (the GNOME Shell) will no longer be the default. Instead, Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, have created their own user interface to run on top of GNOME. That interface is called Unity, and will be made default in the Natty Narwhal release (due to come out on or around April 28th of this year).

Just to make sure we’re clear on this: Ubuntu is not dropping GNOME. The GNOME Shell is the icing on the whole GNOME Stack. Canonical has just decided to put their own icing on the cake.

So, anyhow, my job is to make Thunderbird work nicely with Unity in time for the April 28th release.

And by “work nicely”, I mean the following:

The Global Menu Bar

If you’ve never used Mac OSX, it’s likely that you don’t know what a global menu bar is. Here’s the idea: in Windows and Ubuntu, each window tends to have its own menu bar (File, Edit, etc…).

In Mac OSX, and the upcoming Unity shell, instead of having these individual menu bars, we have a single, overarching menu bar. This menu bar changes itself every time you switch application focus.

Here’s some guy demonstrating the global menu in Ubuntu Linux:

Currently, Thunderbird doesn’t “play nice” with Unity’s global menu bar, and just displays the menu within the Thunderbird window as it always has.

My job is to get Thunderbird to use the global menu bar properly. Click here to read more about Ubuntu Unity’s global menu bar.

The Messaging Menu

Ubuntu Unity also sports a shiny new messaging menu. The messaging menu aggregates all sorts of message-related information – and that includes e-mail messages, chat messages, social networking messages, etc. It tosses all of these into a nice, clean, simple notification interface, like this:

It’s up to messaging application developers to leverage this feature in Unity, and that’s where I come in. I’ll be getting Thunderbird to work nicely with this messaging menu. Click here to read more about Ubuntu Unity’s messaging menu.

The Task List

Ubuntu Unity also sports a new application launcher. The launcher is a panel that stretches down the left-hand side of the screen, and allows users to quickly find and execute their applications. It also lets users know which applications are already open. In a way, it is very similar to the Mac OSX dock.

Here is a Canonical designer demonstrating the new launcher:

Unity Launcher Introduction from Canonical Design on Vimeo.

Right-clicking on an item in the launcher brings up a context-menu for the selected application. For Thunderbird, we’ll probably want the context menu to allow users to do some common operations, such as fetching mail, and composing a new message. We’ll probably also want to display the number of unread messages. So that’s what I’m going to be looking into there.

I’m looking forward to tackling these problems! I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

MarkUs, Squad, How’s / Refactor My Code, Belated Happy Holidays, and Oh Yeah – I’m Not Dead

Belated happy holidays! My last post was over a month ago, and so my blog has a nice layer of web-dust on it right now. Well, here I am to ease your mind. I’m still alive!

But that almost wasn’t true.

I won’t bore you with the details – I’ll just give you the facts, and let you fill in the blanks.

My girlfriend Em, her sister Cassie, and myself, were up in Collingwood on New Years Day, enjoying a relaxing day at a Norwegian spa (the outdoor baths were amazing – how awesome is it to be in a boiling hot tub, while simultaneously, your hair is so frozen that it’s snapping off in your hands?)
The roads that night were treacherous. Snowy, un-plowed, and dark. I had borrowed my Mom’s car for the trip, and we took it realllllly slow.
After a tortoise-paced two hour ride back to Em’s place in Newmarket, and then another two hour drive from Newmarket to my home in Grimsby the next day, I was getting pretty sick of winter driving. On top of that, the brakes seemed to be acting funny. I found myself sliding a lot, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of resistance when I put my foot down.
The next day, my Mom takes the car to go to work. She doesn’t even leave the drive-way. The brakes hadn’t been acting funny: the brakes hadn’t been acting at all. Turns out we had a leaky brake-line for the entire trip…
Guts of the story: I think we drove home from Collingwood with about 35% brake power in one of the worst snow storms I’ve ever driven in.

Breakfast tasted especially good for us that morning.

Anyhow, now where was I? Oh yeah…

MarkUs

MarkUs 0.6 got kicked out a week or so ago. The MarkUs Team kicked the crap out of a bunch of tickets over the holidays, and I think we ended up with a pretty solid release. MarkUs is being used again at UofT this semester, and Byron Weber Becker is also piloting it at UWaterloo. I’ll cautiously say that things seem to be going well for this release. Great job, MarkUs Team!

I’m TAing the students working on MarkUs for Greg’s UCOSP course again. We had a fantastic code-sprint this past weekend! The new team members have already started working on tickets and submitting code to review. I think we’re on our way into another highly productive semester.

A Few More Web-Based Code Review Tools

Remember that big list of code review tools I put up a while back? I’ve got a few more to add:

How’s My Code

This is a pretty dead-simple code review tool that came about during a Rails Rumble a few months back. It has that “big friendly buttons and round corners” web 2.0 thingy going on. I haven’t gone so far as to actually try it out, but I did watch this web-cast:

Not bad if you just want to get your code out there, and get your team commenting on your changes…

A few things caught my attention:

It’s a web service, so you don’t install it…you sign up for it
It currently only supports Git. 🙁
There doesn’t seem to be any support for contextual per-line commenting…I think it’s just file by file commenting. I’d love it if I could comment on a single line of code…

Still, if I was working on a project hosted on a Git repo, and I needed a dead-simple code review service, and I needed it quickly, I could probably do a lot worse than this.

Click here to check out How’s My Code

Squad

Remember that time when I wrote about how it might be neat if somebody created a code review tool on top of Google Wave? (or Bespin for that matter – though I didn’t mention it, and should have)

Looks like somebody else was thinking the same thing. And a few months earlier. I guess it’s not easy to be super cutting-edge.

Anyhow, looks like something Wave-ish (yet simpler, more streamlined) has been developed. Check out Squad.

I just tried this thing out for free (with ads, features locked, etc), and it was pretty cool. I could see something like this being very useful for showing new MarkUs team members how to do things. Actually, I just used it to show a new member of the MarkUs team how to use Shoulda. Pretty useful. It sure beats coding through IRC and Pastie.org.

A few things to keep in mind:

Super simple to get going – open up a session, and send someone a generated link, and you’re both coding in no time
One person codes at a time…so while one person edits, the screen is locked for everyone else
Ads on the left are a little annoying
Sports syntax highlighting for a number of languages – though I noticed that Ruby wasn’t one of them. :/

I can see this becoming second nature, like Pastie.org.

Who knows – I might find more reasons to use Squad as the semester rolls, and MarkUs picks up speed. I’ll keep you posted.

If you missed the link I put in above, click here to check out Squad

Refactor My Code

This service crowd-sources code review requests, so don’t expect to get deep architectural feedback, because it’ll probably come from strangers who don’t/barely know your code base.

The idea is – slap a piece of code that you’d like refactored up on the site, and then others swoop in with brilliant suggestions (assuming of course, you asked your question properly…check this out…what the…?)

This is the sort of thing that CS instructors probably wouldn’t want their students using too much…it’d then become solve-my-CS-programming-assignment.com.

Still, I think it counts as peer code review. And it’s way different that anything else I’ve been looking at. Nice.

Click here to check out Refactor My Code

Anyhow, I just thought I’d mention those.

alertCheck Grows Up

Remember that Firefox add-on I wrote up a while back – the one that allows you to suppress annoying alert popups?

Some updates:

alertCheck just went public on Mozilla Add-ons after being reviewed by an add-ons editor
As of this writing, alertCheck has 740 downloads
As of this writing, alertCheck has 4 reviews – all positive

Not bad for my first add-on!

wordCount.xpi – Part 1

So, if you recall, I was asked to write a Firefox extension that would do word counting on websites.

Originally, when I started this project, I set a goal for myself: I copied the text from Project Gutenberg’s First Folio version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into OpenOffice Writer, recorded the word/line/character count statistics, and set that as my projected goal for my first iteration of my extension.

But there’s a problem with this approach: I’m supposed to be copying the behaviour of Unix’s wc, not OpenOffice Writer’s word count. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem – a word count is a word count, a line count is a line count, and Writer should pump out the same numbers as wc.

Not so.

In my last post, I wrote:

According to OpenOffice Writer, this text has 32230 words, 173543 characters, and 4257 lines.

However, upon passing the same text (saved in the textfile “count.txt”) through wc, I got the following output:

5302 32230 178845 count.txt

Writer and wc agree on the number of words, but disagree on the number of lines – 5302 (wc) vs 4257 (Writer). It’s a disagreement of about a thousand lines.

Brutal.

Anyhow, I’m going to focus on wc’s approach to line counting – simply returning the number of newline characters in the file.

And guess what…it works. For Hamlet, my extension pumps out:

Document statistics:

Word Count: 32230
Line Count: 5302
Character Count: 178845
Character Count (no spaces): 142368

Nice.

Hamlet’s just the simple case though. There are plenty of other cases to consider, but this is a start.

Anyhow, download here.

In this version, I’m using Mozilla’s TreeWalker implementation to stitch together the page text. So far it seems to be working alright, but if it somehow ends up falling through, I might end up using something like Andrew Trusty’s code with the jQuery library to do the text stitching.

So there it is. Maybe I’ll keep working on this, pretty it up a bit, etc. However, work starts on Monday, and that’ll probably take up most of my technical attention.

We’ll see though.

For my next trick…

It didn’t take long for another Firefox extension idea to come along.

Prof. Greg Wilson recently sent me an email, saying the following:

I’d like a Firefox plugin that does ‘wc’, i.e., counts characters, words, and lines on the current web page, and displays the results in the status bar.

Cool, I thought. No problem. That doesn’t sound too hard.

But I’ve been mulling and chewing this around in my head, and it’s actually a harder problem than it first sounds.

“wc“, short for word-count, is a small, simple, yet extraordinarily useful Unix utility that reads in some file, and spits out the number of words, characters, and lines for that file.

So what’s the problem? What’s so hard about coding something like this for web pages?

Well, for starters, users of this proposed extension are probably only interested in the visible, readable text on a web page. That means filtering out all of the HTML tags, all of the JavaScript, etc. Also, many modern web pages make use of IFRAME’s, hidden DIV’s, etc. Not to mention, most browsers do automatic word-wrapping, which could throw off the “line” counting. How should I treat these cases?

I certainly don’t think this is an impossible task, just harder than it first sounded.

So here’s what I’m going to do:

First, I’m going to take care of the base case. I’m going to take care of the case where users are viewing a page of all text, with almost zero HTML.

My test page will be an “etext” copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (first folio), hosted by Project Gutenberg.