Monday, December 2, 2013

GSoC Lessons: Part 1: Application Period

I briefly talked about my experiences at the Google Summer of Code 2013 Mentor Summit. I’ve been pretty remiss in sharing what was actually discussed there and for that I must apologize! This will hopefully be one of a few posts about what I learned and discussed at the …

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Sunday, October 20, 2013

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2013

Not only was I lucky enough to mentor a great student for this year’s Google Summer of Code, but Mozilla asked me to represent them at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit! This was located at Google’s offices in Mountain View, California this past weekend (Friday, Oct …

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Sunday, October 6, 2013

Yahoo Protocol Google Summer of Code Round-up

I have to apologize to my student, Quentin (aka qheaden on IRC), for taking so long to write this…but anyway: Google Summer of Code 2013 is over! Quentin has done a great job working at implementing the Yahoo Protocol for Instantbird (and Thunderbird) in JavaScript (henceforth called “JS-Yahoo …

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Friday, June 28, 2013

Mentoring Google Summer of Code 2013

I’m officially a mentor this year for 2013’s Google Summer of Code. I’m a bit late on posting this, but oh well! My student this year is Quentin Headen who is working on a Yahoo! Messenger protocol for the Instantbird chat/ backend (so it’ll also be …

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Monday, May 20, 2013

Instantbird 1.4 Released!

After a bunch of l10n build problems, we’ve finally released Instantbird 1.4, which includes updates to libpurple 2.10.7 and Mozilla 20. In particular this includes:

  • Updated Twitter code that uses v1.1 of their API (v1.0 will be disabled on June 11th, 2013).
  • Better character …
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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

JavaScript typed arrays pain

If you’ve ever tried to deal with binary data in JavaScript you know it isn’t much fun and you usually resort to using strings lots of charCodeAt and related functions. Typed arrays are supposed to solve this though! The typed array API consists of creating a buffer of …

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Friday, November 16, 2012

Instantbird 1.3 Released!!!

Well we finally got our release process down a bit better and were able to do a quicker release (from 1.2 to 1.3, compared to our previous few releases). This is great news, as it gives incremental changes to our users faster! There’s some new features available …

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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

On Status

Something that comes up often about Instantbird is why we only support three statuses: Available, Unavailable and Offline. (We do actually support a fourth one too, Idle, but that is set automatically, not chosen by the user.) Frequently this discussion is in the context of wanting an “Invisible” status, but …

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Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Instantbird 1.2 Released (with awesome new IRC features)!

If you haven’t seen the announcement… Instantbird 1.2 has been released! It’s got a ton of great new features that I’m excited for: better tab complete, a marker showing the last viewed messages, support for Bonjour and more. But the most exciting bits to me are …

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Monday, June 11, 2012

IRC Auto-Performs

There have been a few requests to support “auto-performs” (sending commands to the IRC server after connection that the user types into a box or whatever). Personally I find this to be:

  1. A fairly awful user experience.
  2. Confusing to new users.
  3. Unnecessary.

I additionally don’t like this idea since …

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