I've made a few changes to freshen things up a bit around here and to help keep them fresher. Or digitaler, if you will. First some explanation. It probably seems like there is no activity going on; the last post is over a month old. While that's true—pretty much—it's not the whole story.

My LCD theme for Firefox has grown stale, and i've been slowly chipping away at updating it. Nearly all of those updates will be ported to this Flock version, as they share many of the same bits. I jumped into this Flock version quickly at first mainly to prove it was possible and a worth-while venture. It works. But Flock brings with it a whole new set of unique theming issues. And those are best dealt with after i bring the base LCD theme up to speed.

So i've added a feed of LCD-related posts to the sidebar so you can scope development on the Firefox version. There's also the Flickr feed, which i intend to use more for screenshots, as well as recent posts and comments—all in the sidebar. Check 'em out.

Unfortunately, this came at the cost of the Hemingway theme that i really liked. It had a very non-blog-like newspapery front-page look. Alas, ironically, its unique layout does not support the sidebar widgets that it inspired (it has no sidebar). So now i'm sporting the similarly clean but slightly more colorful Simpla theme.

Well, i abandoned Firefox temporarily because my huge history file takes forever to load and it was getting to the point that it was just not working as a browser on my weak system.  So i figured i’d give Flock another try as a near-Firefox alternative.  I hesitated at the import screen, but chose not to import all my Firefox cruft and started with a clean slate.  It was fine for a bit.  But as soon as i enabled my del.icio.us account Flock started burning at near-100% CPU and was frozen for several minutes.  And it did the same everytime i restarted it.  So i ended up with pretty much the same problem after all.  I was hoping this would have been fixed—the very first time i tried Flock, that same online-bookmarks hang put a bad taste in my mouth.  Not sure if i’m doing something wrong, but this integration just isn’t worth it if gets in the way of browsing.

Just had an idea that might help readability of Flock’s tab labels when you have a lot of tabs open.  I have a window open with enough tabs that no labels are shown on any of the tabs, and i realized it was odd since there was still plenty of space next to the close button (don’t get me started on those things).  I remembered that XUL label elements get a lot of horizontal margins by default, and i just checked the tabs with DOMI and saw that there’s even more padding added to the tab.  I think a lot of this can be cleaned up to allow more room for labels and still maintain a pleasing appearance.  There’s a couple of tweaks that would help, but the clincher would be removing some of the left-padding from the tab and left-margin from the label and putting it on the icon.  That way the space disappears with the icon when not selected, leaving more room for the label.  That alone would add maybe 10px of horizontal room to each tab.  And every pixel counts—especially when you multiply that by a dozen or more tabs open at once.  Bug and patch when i have time.

Hey, in 0.5.12 they fixed the "bug" where when you searched from the Search Bar it always opened in a new tab.  Not sure if it was intentional and overruled, or a proper bug fix—but that was really annoying to me.

I’ve known about this for a while, but just checked it out again, and it looks like there are now several ways to get your Firefox extension fix in Flock with Flock’d.

• You can install the search plugin for drag-and-drop conversion on the search bar.
• Install the extension to convert by right-clicking on a link to an extension.
• Or just paste the URL to an extension right into the form on the Flock’d page.
• Or just pick from one of the recently converted extensions.

And it looks like Ferrite also released the whole thing as Open-Source—whatever that means. Which maybe is a good thing since there’s a note from a few days ago that says: “I will permanently take down Flock’d as of Febuary 28th,” which was today. Wonder what all that’s about.

The Flock crew just put out their first new release in a couple months. I haven’t touched Flock in a while since i shifted my focus to the more tangible (and easier) updating of LCD for Firefox 1.5. So though it may look like nothing’s going on over here, almost all of the work that goes into fixing up the Firefox 1.5 version can be translated to Flock. After that, when Flock is standing on a more sturdy theme, i’ll be able to more easily jump into the heavy customiztion for Flock-specific features. Not to mention that in its current state, Flock still has bugs that limit certain theming endeavors; attempting to hack on them now would almost certainly mean having to redo them post-fix.

A little tabs clean up. Fixed a few oddites introduced by the way Flock does some things. I think i mostly got them looking like they look in LCD for Firefox. But many questions remain in regard to Flock’s tab behavior—the browser tab close buttons, the icon-only-on-selected-tab style. Not sure how closely i want to follow the default Flock theme instead of doing things how i think they should be done. I don’t really like close buttons on every tab. I think it’s a waste of space. I’m a middle-clicker. Also not sure about leaving icons off the non-selected tabs. Sure, it frees up tab bar real estate, but those icons are about the only thing you have to identify tabs at a glance. And when you have a ton of open tabs squished on there is when you need that most.

technorati tags: Flock, theme, LCD, Firefox, themes, Flock themes, UI

Thanks to some help from the Flock crew, Bug 1582 was fixed in rapid fashion, and i just stamped it with a WFM after checking it out in the “1134521712″ hourly build from Dec 13 2005 19:55:12 GMT-0500.

What’s next?

technorati tags: Flock, bugs, themes

[In response to Extensions Strategy Feedback Request]

Basically what Lloyd said. Leave it up to the people, and the good (useful and/or popular) stuff floats to the top. And if something “hot” is not quite up to Flock quality standards, by then it’ll have had enough eyes on it that someone should be able to help polish it up. I’ve seen it with many Firefox extensions—if someone drops the ball for whatever reason, there’s almost always someone else that picks it up and continues development or forks their own “plus” version or whatever.

Rating systems can be gamed, so that might be tricky. Downloads are probably a closer measure of what’s actually popular.

I’ll admit that i pretty much never go to addons.mozilla.org to get extensions for Firefox. Of course, i hardly ever just browse for extensions—i’m usually looking for something specific. I’ll Google first, then maybe hit extensionsmirror.nl, and ultimately try to find the author’s/extension’s homepage. With so many extensions to browse through at the big “portal,” it becomes too hard to find stuff.

As a used-to-be theme developer, i was turned off by the ridiculous submission process that Mozilla Update began with (leaving comments in their Bugzilla system) along with some of the early quirks associated with updating extensions. I know things are better since then, but i never gave it a second chance.

Forked the LCD code the other day because i didn’t know how much would be changing from Firefox. Plus that was for pre-1.0 Firefox, so there are going to be a lot of changes regardless. I’ll just have to backport updates to LCD for Firefox.

Got the Stop-Reload button linked up with some images, which was pretty simple. There’s a red border around it in the reload state, but didn’t take any time to look into that yet. Also added the Blog and Favorites buttons to my browser toolbar button rules set so they’re styled properly. They just need icons. I’ll probably recycle the old Bookmarks icon for favorites. Though not sure what to do about the Blog one yet.

Also not sure what to tackle next. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and i’m still trying to get into the XUL/CSS hacking mode i was in when i cooked up the original LCD.

technorati tags: Flock, Themes, LCD, Mozilla