the AE Creations blog

Panic Button 1.5 released!

2012-01-25T10:52:00.003-08:00

A new release of Panic Button is now available on Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

If you already have Panic Button installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Panic Button in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

What's New

New Panic Button action: "Hide and Replace." This hides all browser windows and replaces them with a browser window displaying a web page at a specific URL
Enhanced extension preferences dialog with descriptions of each Panic Button action
Fixed Panic Button toolbar icon image so that it appears in the correct size in Firefox 4 and newer on Windows and Mac
Miscellaneous behind-the-scenes cleanup

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

Clippings for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird

2011-12-27T16:58:00.004-08:00

Updated 7 January 2012: The Portable Edition of Clippings is now compatible with Portable Firefox/Thunderbird 9.

Unfortunately, the Portable Edition of Clippings, available from the Clippings website, is not yet compatible with Portable Firefox/Thunderbird version 9.0. I will have this problem resolved as soon as possible.

A retort to a Mozilla Add-ons review

2011-10-21T19:55:00.012-07:00

UPDATE 1 November 2011: The review of Clippings that I was retorting to has since been removed by the Mozilla Add-ons editors, at my request.

Hi gishpuppy,

I read your flattering review of Clippings which you left on the Mozilla Add-ons page. It is reproduced below for the benefit of the readers of this blog:

Lost (all) my clippings twice. Does not backup to file or cloud. May not even save your clippings in your profile folder, but somewhere else.

The interface and usability are very good, if you don't need your clippings saved.

Normally, I would sympathize with data loss complaints. There certainly have been reports from users of them losing their clippings data from time to time. There's no denying that. Unfortunately, it is hard to isolate the cause of the problem, which is why there is a backup mechanism available in the event of data loss, which I happen to have documented just recently. But I certainly don't sympathize with you, given your rather scathing, and very unhelpful, comments.

Have you made any effort to do a little troubleshooting to figure out WHY your clippings data isn't being saved? Did you check out the Clippings FAQ to learn where your clippings data is being saved to? I assume that the common clippings feature is enabled; that is the default for users since Clippings 3.0. Here's a hint: do you have permissions to the folder where your clippings data source file is located? Ever thought of that?

You allege that Clippings doesn't back up to a file. You are dead wrong. Have you checked out the blog post I just mentioned describing how to restore your clippings data from backup? As for backing up to the cloud -- well, there is no such feature. Not yet. Have you suggested that as an enhancement request in the AE Creations forums?

If Clippings was such an unusable piece of crap, as your so-called review implies, then why is it that over 32,000 Firefox and Thunderbird users around the world continue to rely on it every day at home, at work, and at school, to save themselves from repetitive typing and make their lives easier? And just how on earth would it have become a featured add-on?

And finally, I took the liberty of checking out your reviews of other extensions you left on Mozilla Add-ons -- most of them filled with similar hyperbolic garbage. I'll be happy to reproduce a few of them for my readers' viewing pleasure and amusement.

For Xmarks Sync (rated 4 out of 5 stars on Mozilla Add-ons as of the time of this writing), you wrote, "Horrible, awful, painful sh1ty crap erases your writings forever. Smoke a turd in he11!"

That extension seems to be your all-time favorite, eh? Here's another little gem of yours, again for Xmarks Sync:

xmarks kills the human spirit. It is so dangerous it should be banned. It is the worst functioning addon ever and can led to broken keyboards, monitors, and minds. xmarks is the Al-Qaeda of browsers, terrorizing the user with every possible review. Dangerous and immutably destructive.

Not bad for someone who lists his occupation as "Unsatisfied."

It also gives me even less of a reason to take any of your nonsense seriously. Either come back to me with helpful, pertinent troubleshooting information to help narrow the cause -- or quit spewing your asinine hate and move on. Don't worry, I won't feel bad if you uninstall Clippings.

Problems when going to My Account from the AE Creations forums

2011-10-05T21:56:00.001-07:00

Due to a recent, and clearly botched, Mozdev site upgrade, users going to their My Account page will see error messages, and are not able to do anything.

I have brought this to the attention of the Mozdev admins, and am awaiting word on resolution.

Data loss problem in Clippings after upgrading to Firefox 7.0 or Thunderbird 7.0

2011-09-28T20:11:00.004-07:00

I've received a few reports from users having lost their Clippings data after upgrading to Firefox 7.0 or Thunderbird 7.0, both of which were released yesterday.

If this has happened to you, you can try to rescue your Clippings data by doing the following:

Locate the folder where your Clippings datasource file is found. To determine this, please refer to the Clippings FAQ. The datasource file is named clipdat2.rdf.
Copy the backup files under the .clipbak subfolder to another location on your computer. Doing this ensures that your most recent, and hopefully pristine, backups are preserved.
From Firefox or Thunderbird, open Clippings Manager, then Options → Import. Locate the most recent backup file you saved from step 2.

Hopefully you will be able to recover your clippings.

If this fails, exit Firefox or Thunderbird and delete the clipdat2.rdf datasource file. Then restart the application and open Clippings Manager. This will generate a new, empty datasource file. Then repeat step 3 above.

If You Have Not Yet Upgraded

Your clippings are automatically backed up whenever creating a new clipping, editing them in Clippings Manager, and when closing the Clippings Manager window. But to be extra safe, you should export your clippings before upgrading Firefox or Thunderbird. Open Clippings Manager, click Options → Export, then choose the desired location to export your clippings data. Having this backup will be incredibly handy in case you ever lose your clippings after upgrading Firefox or Thunderbird.

Breakage in Delicious Post due to Delicious relaunch

2011-09-27T12:22:00.006-07:00

Delicious Post users take note: Due to changes introduced by yesterday's relaunch of Delicious, the Post to Delicious dialog doesn't save your tags correctly.

Until yesterday, you could specify multiple tags for a new bookmark by separating them with a space; for example, entering "aecreations extensions firefox" in the tag field would create a new bookmark with those three tags. Now, a single tag is created instead, named "aecreations extensions firefox".

A workaround to this is to separate each tag with a comma; for example, "aecreations, extensions, firefox". Spaces after the comma are allowed; they will be stripped out automatically.

A fix will be available shortly to change the instructions in the Post to Delicious dialog.

EDIT: This post has been corrected with information about spaces after the comma separating the tag names.

Send Tab URLs 2.1 released!

2011-09-23T20:27:00.004-07:00

Send Tab URLs 2.0 was released in 2008. Since then, Firefox 4 came out, which dramatically altered the browser UI for users on Windows Vista or Windows 7 by replacing the menu bar with a Firefox application menu (though it can be enabled if users could find the setting to do that). A new release was needed to improve usability for affected users -- and it's finally here!

Version 2.1 is now available on Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website. Current users should receive an update if automatic extension updates are enabled.

What's New

New option to add the Send Tab URLs command to the List All Tabs menu (usually located on the far right of the tab strip in Firefox 4 and newer); option is enabled by default
Removed experimental support for Yahoo! Mail
Added translations for German, Hebrew and Swedish. Thanks to the translators at Babelzilla for their contributions!

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

Clippings 3.1.7 released!

2011-09-20T22:25:00.005-07:00

A new version of Clippings is available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

If you already have Clippings installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Clippings in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

What's New

This release addresses the problems with the Swedish localization of Clippings that was introduced in version 3.1.6. This release contains the following fixes:

Updated Swedish translation
Bug fix: Shortcut key prefix is different on Swedish locale. This is fixed so that it is now CTRL+ALT+V, as advertised (bug 24375)

Many thanks to Lakrits at Babelzilla for addressing these issues quickly.

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

Clippings featured on Mozilla Add-ons!

2011-09-13T22:27:00.014-07:00

I just learned that Clippings has been added as a Featured Add-on on the Mozilla Add-ons website!

From the Mozilla Add-ons home page.

Clippings page on Mozilla Add-ons, displaying the "Featured" banner.

It is an honour to have one of my works featured so prominently. A huge shout-out to all the Clippings users for their support over the years. And special thanks to everyone who provided feature enhancements, assisted with troubleshooting bugs, and translated it into different languages, furthering my mission of creating cool, useful software used by people all over the world.

Problems with Swedish localization of Clippings

2011-09-07T11:49:00.002-07:00

There have been reports of issues with the Swedish localization of Clippings, which was added in the recent 3.1.6 release.

The shortcut key prefix, CTRL+ALT+V, does not work if using Clippings on the Swedish locale. It had been changed to CTRL+ALT+U. One user has reported problems with the translations of the text that is displayed in the Clippings user interface.

Clippings 3.1.6 released!

2011-09-05T21:27:00.001-07:00

Bug fix: Missing entries in chrome manifest for Danish and Swedish localizations (bug 24334)

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

Has anyone used Send Tab URLs with Google Apps Gmail?

2011-09-02T09:57:00.006-07:00

Send Tab URLs has had experimental support for Google Apps Gmail since version 2.0 (regular Gmail has been supported out of the box). Since I do not have access to any Google Apps environment, I haven't been able to test it, and so the UI for Google Apps support was not enabled by default. A past blog post describes how to enable Google Apps Gmail support.

Has anyone tried using Send Tab URLs with Google Apps Gmail? I would like to hear from those users who have. I'm interested in learning whether Send Tab URLs works with it -- and what, if any, issues were encountered. If there are many users that have enabled Google Apps support, I would consider exposing the user interface for Google Apps support in an upcoming release of Send Tab URLs.

Your feedback on experimental support for Google Apps Gmail in Send Tab URLs is most welcome. Please leave comments below. Also, please indicate if you would be willing to assist in testing. Thanks in advance.

Clippings 3.1.5 and Panic Button 1.1.6 released!

2011-08-19T21:26:00.004-07:00

New releases of Clippings and Panic Button are now out, and are available on Mozilla Add-ons and on the AE Creations website. These releases fixes a few bugs and adds translations for Swedish (Danish translations are added to Clippings).

Among the highlights:

Clippings 3.1.5: Fixes a problem where Clippings Manager doesn't remember its window size and position; also fixes broken dragging 'n dropping of text into Clippings Manager to create a clipping.

Panic Button 1.1.6: Fixes a bug (as described in this past post) where the custom toolbar button image doesn't get updated when adding the Panic Button toolbar button to the browser toolbar.

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

Delicious Post bug: Simplified Chinese translation is incomplete

2011-08-17T21:23:00.005-07:00

The Simplified Chinese (zh-CN) translation for Delicious Post is incomplete. As a result, users that are running the Simplified Chinese version of Firefox with this extension will see missing or blank text in the Delicious Post dialog boxes and menu commands.

I've requested the translator on Babelzilla to translate the missing Simplified Chinese translations. This fix will require a new release of Delicious Post. Apologies to those users who are inconvenienced.

Compatibility with Firefox 6 beta

2011-08-01T13:22:00.004-07:00

All AE Creations extensions -- Clippings (except for the special version for portable devices), Delicious Post, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs -- are now compatible with Firefox 6 beta. However, there is a minor issue with Panic Button which is noted below.

Panic Button Issue With Firefox 6 beta

If the Panic Button toolbar button is not added to any Firefox browser toolbar, and you change the toolbar button image (from Panic Button's extension preferences dialog), the toolbar button image is not updated until you add the button to a toolbar and then change the toolbar button image again. See the Bugzilla bug for more details.

Delicious Post 1.1.1 and Panic Button 1.1.5 released!

2011-07-21T16:33:00.010-07:00

New updates of Delicious Post and Panic Button are now available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website. The updates fix a few bugs and adds translations for Swedish.

Using Delicious Post 1.1.1 For the First Time After Upgrading

Delicious Post 1.1.1 fixes a bug where the Delicious password was incorrectly URI-encoded in Firefox's password manager.

As a result, if you are upgrading Delicious Post from an older version (1.1. or older), you will need to re-enter your Delicious password in the Post To Delicious dialog when posting a link or page for the first time after the upgrade. You won't have to do this again afterwards unless you change your Delicious password.

[Updated] Compatibility With Firefox 5

2011-06-22T12:37:00.011-07:00

Update: Clippings is now compatible with Thunderbird 5. Also, the portable edition of Clippings, available from the Clippings web site, is now compatible with Portable Firefox 5 and Portable Thunderbird 5.

Yesterday, Mozilla unveiled the newest version of Firefox. Firefox 5 is the first release from the new rapid release development cycle that aims to push out new releases more frequently.

All extensions from AE Creations -- Clippings, Delicious Post, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs -- are compatible with Firefox 5.

Future Firefox Releases

For now, the policy for extension compatibility with upcoming Firefox releases will remain unchanged. They will not be compatible with the nightly (Aurora) builds. Extensions will be made compatible with beta releases once they have been tested and confirmed to be working with the beta releases.

What About Thunderbird 5?

Clippings currently is not compatible with the beta release of Thunderbird 5. This will be fixed once it is tested and confirmed functional on that release.

The forums are back!

2011-05-28T07:09:00.004-07:00

Further to my last post regarding the outage in the AE Creation forums, I'm happy to report that the forums are now back online.

My apologies for the troubles the forum outage may have caused.

Forum posts not displaying

2011-05-22T23:28:00.003-07:00

Forum posts in the AE Creations forums have recently disappeared from view. Old postings do not show up when going to a forum.

This is reportedly a problem affecting all projects hosted on Mozdev, including the ones from AE Creations. The latest word I've received is that the Mozdev admins are investigating the issue.

In the meantime, feel free to leave general comments and suggestions for improvements to Clippings, Delicious Post, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs in the comments area in the Mozilla Add-ons page for the respective add-on. Bug reports should be directed to Bugzilla. Note that Clippings has its own Bugzilla database.

[EDITED] The Delicious Post Extension: Implications of Yahoo!'s Sale of Delicious

2011-04-27T16:10:00.006-07:00

Word came today that Delicious, the online social bookmarking website which Yahoo! acquired in 2005, has now been bought out by the founders of YouTube.

This caught my attention, since not only am I a loyal Delicious user, I am also maintaining a Firefox extension, Delicious Post, for adding bookmarks to Delicious. I was also interested to learn what this would mean for Delicious Post, because for quite some time I've been struggling to make it work with OAuth-based Yahoo! logins without much success. OAuth authentication is painful to implement, with so many steps to follow and a lot of room for errors, many of which are difficult to isolate given that they could originate from one's own code or from the code libraries being used (or unknowingly misused). The poorly-written Delicious OAuth documentation hasn't helped at all.

According to what I've read in a Delicious developer forum post, the old-skool Delicious logins will still function, but users with Yahoo! logins will have to migrate to using Delicious logins. So this means that I no longer have to worry about making Delicious Post work with OAuth authentication. Woo hoo!

What will this mean for current Delicious Post users? Since Delicious Post only supports the old-skool logins, current users can continue to use this Firefox add-on without any issues.

EDIT: Don't forget that you need to accept the new privacy policy and terms of service agreements in order to continue using Delicious beyond the transition from Yahoo! to AVOS, the company that is taking over Delicious. You should be prompted to do this when you visit your bookmarks on the Delicious website.

Clippings for Portable Firefox 4

2011-03-23T20:58:00.003-07:00

As promised, Clippings is now compatible with Portable Firefox 4. Follow the download link in the Clippings installation page to download it to your Portable Firefox browser.

About Clippings Portable Edition

This special release of Clippings is intended for Portable Firefox users. The difference is that the common clippings feature is disabled; the Clippings data is stored in your Portable Firefox profile directory -- typically on your USB flash drive or other portable media in which Portable Firefox is installed. This ensures that your Clippings data stays in your portable media.

Clippings Portable Edition can also be used with Portable Thunderbird. Simply use the same download link as given above.

Firefox 4 is here!

2011-03-22T19:28:00.002-07:00

The newest and the best-yet browser from Mozilla has just been released. Sporting a streamlined user interface, faster Web page display, and cool new capabilities for Web developers, Firefox 4 is now available from the Mozilla website.

All extensions from AE Creations are compatible with this new Firefox release. Some of the changes introduced by Firefox 4 necessitated new minor releases of Clippings and Panic Button.

Clippings for Portable Firefox Not Yet Available

The special portable edition of Clippings for Portable Firefox will be ready shortly. Watch this blog for further updates.

Compatibility with Firefox 4.0 beta 7

2010-11-11T21:15:00.006-08:00

The seventh beta of the upcoming Firefox 4 release was released yesterday (10 November 2010). Clippings, Delicious Post, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs have all been tested against this new beta release, and are now compatible with it. If you upgrade to Firefox 4.0 beta 7, no further action is needed to make these extensions work.

Missing status bar in Firefox 4.0b7

The first thing most users will notice when starting Firefox 4.0 beta 7 for the first time is that the status bar is gone. And as a result, the Clippings status bar icon is missing, and so is the Delicious Post progress icon (that cute little icon with the animation that appears when posting a URL to your Delicious account).

You can make the status bar UI for those extensions reappear by enabling the so-called Add-on Bar. To do so, choose View -> Toolbars -> Add-on Bar in the Firefox browser window. The Clippings icon and the Delicious Post status icon will appear in the same places on the Add-on Bar as they would have in the browser status bar in older versions of Firefox.

Please note that I am NOT responsible for the missing status bar in Firefox. Direct any comments about this Firefox UI change to the appropriate Mozilla forum discussion. See also this Mozilla Support forum post.

Support for Firefox 3.0 discontinued

Firefox 3.0 is no longer supported by Mozilla; therefore, compatibility with this older version of Firefox has been dropped. All AE Creations extensions now require Firefox version 3.5 or newer.

Extension compatibility with Firefox 4.0 beta 6

2010-11-05T02:05:00.003-07:00

With the sixth beta of Firefox 4 being out for some time, it was time to make my add-ons compatible with it. Clippings, Delicious Post, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs are now compatible with Firefox 4 beta 6.

Most of these extensions only needed to have their Firefox maxVersion values bumped up to 4.0b6. However, for Clippings and Panic Button, some minor work was needed to make them work as well as address a few bugs that surfaced in this Firefox beta release.

Thanks for your patience.

Clippings 3.1.3 released!

2010-10-27T22:41:00.002-07:00

A new version of Clippings is available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

Portable Firefox/Thunderbird users: Please note that the special portable version of Clippings is not available yet.

If you already have Clippings installed, you should receive the update if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, choose Tools → Add-ons from the main Firefox window, select Clippings in the list of installed extensions, right click and select Find Update.

What's New

Now compatible with Firefox 4.0 beta 6

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

[RESOLVED] AE Creations website problems

2010-10-02T01:27:00.006-07:00

Update: Web site problems have been resolved.

Recent visitors to the AE Creations website may notice that pages appear broken and some links are missing.

This is due to some unexpected changes made to project webpages hosted on Mozdev. I've put in a request to have this fixed. In the meantime, here are links to AE Creations extensions on the Mozilla Add-ons website:

Clippings - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1347/
Panic Button - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6990/
Send Tab URLs - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4437/
Delicious Post - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11753/

The AE Creations forums are still functional and can be accessed at http://aecreations.mozdev.org/drupal/forum.

HELP WANTED testing experimental bug fix

2010-08-10T13:07:00.003-07:00

As described in the previous blog post, some users have reported that the Clippings Manager window would not appear when invoking it, either through the web page textbox context menu or by double-clicking the Clippings icon on the status bar. This was caused by the Clippings Manager window being positioned outside the viewable screen area.

This problem seems sporadic, as I have not been able to reproduce it. I have entered this as bug 23103.

I have uploaded a test build of Clippings which contains an experimental fix for this bug. You can download and install it by clicking here.

If you are affected by the problem described above, please install this build and let me know by replying to this Clippings forum post if the Clippings Manager display problem is resolved.

Clippings, Clippings Manager, and Firefox 4 beta

2010-08-10T08:55:00.003-07:00

A few devoted Clippings users have been anxiously waiting for compatibility with Firefox 4 beta releases. Here is an update on that, as well as news about a recently-reported bug affecting the display of the Clippings Manager window.

Compatibility with Firefox 4 beta

There were some changes to Firefox 4 with the way XPCOM components are registered which affected Clippings. Clippings will not function as-is on Firefox 4, so this change will require a new minor release.

Clippings Manager display problems

Some users on Windows and Mac OS have reported in the forums that Clippings Manager would not appear on their screens when it is invoked, either from the web page textbox context menu or from double-clicking the Clippings icon on the status bar. If this happens to you, follow these steps to work around it:

In the address bar in Firefox, type about:config and press ENTER.
In the filter textbox, type clippings.clipmgr.window_position
Double-click on resulting row. In the dialog box that appears, enter 0,0 (without any spaces after the comma) and click OK.

A proper fix for this bug (Bugzilla 23103) will be included in the same release as the one to address Firefox 4 beta compatibility.

Delicious Post 1.1 released

2010-07-21T11:53:00.006-07:00

A new version of Delicious Post is now available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

If you already have an older version of Delicious Post, it will be automatically updated for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, choose Tools → Add-ons from the main Firefox window, select Delicious Post in the list of installed extensions, right click and select Find Update. If you still encounter difficulties in getting the latest version, uninstall Delicious Post, then install the new version.

What's New

Shortcut key, ALT+SHIFT+D, to invoke the Post to Delicious dialog
The first-focused field in the Post to Delicious dialog has been changed to the Tags textbox

Things You Should Know About

To use Delicious Post, you must have a Delicious account with an "old-skool" Delicious login ID. Delicious Post will not work if you use a Yahoo! ID to log in to delicious.com.

Please Note: AE Creations is not affiliated with Delicious.com. Inquiries specific to the Delicious online social bookmarking service should be directed there.

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Delicious Post should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

Clippings 3.1.2 released

2010-06-30T11:55:00.003-07:00

A new version of Clippings is available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

Portable Firefox/Thunderbird users: There is a special version of Clippings designed for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird. See the Download and Install page on the Clippings website for the download link.

If you already have Clippings installed, you should receive the update if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, choose Tools → Add-ons from the main Firefox window, select Clippings in the list of installed extensions, right click and select Find Update.

What's New

Added ability to adjust the Clippings Manager tree list width; click and drag the splitter to the right of the tree list to change the width
If a clipping contains multiple occurrences of the same placeholder, you will only be prompted once for the placeholder value

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

Changing the Clippings shortcut key prefix using Keyconfig

2010-06-15T10:27:00.007-07:00

Many Clippings users have asked for a different prefix shortcut key combination, replacing the current CTRL+ALT+V prefix (Mac users need to hold down the Control and Option keys while pressing V), to trigger keyboard insert.

There is an extension for Firefox and Thunderbird, Keyconfig, that lets you change shortcut keys. More information on Keyconfig is available in the Mozillazine forums. After installing it, go to Tools -> Keyconfig and look for "Insert Clipping" in the list of command names. Select that to change the shortcut key combination. Here's a screen shot:

Clippings 3.1.1 released

2010-02-01T23:10:00.006-08:00

A minor update to Clippings is released and is available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

Portable Firefox/Thunderbird users: There is a special version of Clippings designed for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird. See the Download and Install page on the Clippings website for the download link.

If you already have Clippings installed, you should receive the update if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, choose Tools → Add-ons from the main Firefox window, select Clippings in the list of installed extensions, right click and select Find Update.

What's New

Compatible with Firefox 3.6.x and Thunderbird 3.0.x
Minor bug fixes, including a fix for a bug described in this blog post

Please note that Firefox 2.0.x is no longer supported. Users must have at least Firefox 3.0 to be able to use Clippings.

For help and support, please go to the AE Creations forums.

Compatibility Status of Other Extensions

Delicious Post, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs are all compatible with Firefox 3.6.

Yahoo! IDs not yet supported in Delicious Post

2009-12-08T17:44:00.004-08:00

Delicious users who have recently signed up for a Delicious account with a Yahoo! ID have reported that a "Authentication failed" error message appears when they try to post a URL using the Delicious Post Firefox extension.

As it turns out, the authentication mechanism that is used in the underlying Delicious API is different for users with Yahoo! IDs. The so-called "old skool" Delicious logins still work, however.

A fix for this problem is in the works and will be released soon.

A strange Clippings bug

2009-07-18T00:05:00.002-07:00

On Firefox 3.5, dragging and dropping selected web page text containing a single word to the Clippings status bar icon will cause the browser to start loading a URL containing that single word. Normally, when dragging and dropping any text to the status bar icon, the New Clipping dialog box should appear.

This issue isn't happening when dragging and dropping a selection containing multiple words.

To work around this, use the other options available for creating a new clipping. They are described in the Clippings Quick Start guide.

Thanks to the reporter of this bug for bringing this to my attention. Readers interested in the details can refer to bug 21223.

AE Creations extension compatibility with Firefox 3.5

2009-06-26T20:17:00.003-07:00

Firefox 3.5, the next release of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, is now available as a release candidate for users and web developers eager to preview the latest and greatest. There is something new for everyone -- like private browsing, support for geolocation, a new JavaScript engine, native audio and video support and other cool features. To learn more, check out this post from the Mozilla Blog.

Status of extension compatibility

All extensions from AE Creations -- Clippings, Panic Button, Send Tab URLs, and the newest member of the lineup, Delicious Post -- are compatible with the Firefox 3.5 release candidates, and will be compatible with the official 3.5 release when it comes out.

Delicious 1.0 released!

2009-05-14T22:36:00.005-07:00

Version 1.0 of Delicious Post, a Firefox extension for posting a link or web page to the Delicious online social bookmarking service, has been released and is available for download.

Check out the Delicious Post page at the AE Creations website for details and download links. You can also find this information at Mozilla Add-ons.

Delicious Post is available in English (United States), Chinese (Simplified), French, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese (Brazil). Many thanks to the translators at Babelzilla for making it available in these languages.

Acknowledgement

Delicious Post is based on Patrick H. Lauke's del.icio.us post extension.

Delicious Post 0.9

2009-04-07T20:04:00.004-07:00

This is the third development milestone of Delicious Post. Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this milestone release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then don't install it.

» Download: Delicious Post 0.9 (17 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 3.0-3.1b3)

If you already have an older version of Delicious Post installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Delicious Post in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

What's New

Compatibility with Firefox 3.0 beta 3
Bug fix: Password not saved at first login attempt
Bug fix: Submit dialog always centered on 1st screen on dual-monitor system(bug 20750)
Bug fix: Submit dialog should work modelessly if background posting enabled (bug 20685)
Other minor bug fixes

Known Issues

For the latest list of bugs, please see Bugzilla.

XMLHttpRequest error handling when posting from the submit dialog isn't consistent with background posting (bug 20683)

Reporting Bugs

Post bug reports as a comment to this post. If you have a Bugzilla account on Mozdev, you can file a bug here.

Delicious Post 0.8

2009-03-12T23:55:00.005-07:00

This is the second development milestone of Delicious Post. Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this milestone release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then don't install it.

» Download: Delicious Post 0.8 (16 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 3.0-3.1b2)

Please note: This is not yet compatible with Firefox 3.1 beta 3.

If you already have an older version of Delicious Post installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Delicious Post in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

What's New

Post bookmarks in the background
"Do not share" checkbox
Auto-fill bookmark description from selected text in web page
Keep existing bookmark if URL already posted
New extension preferences dialog
Submit dialog can be modal or modeless (currently modal by default; can be changed via a hidden pref, extensions.aecreations.deliciouspost.modeless_submit)

Known Issues

For the latest list of bugs, please see Bugzilla.

XMLHttpRequest error handling when posting from the submit dialog isn't consistent with background posting (bug 20683)
Submit dialog should work modelessly if background posting enabled (bug 20685)
Height of URL textbox in the submit dialog is too short (bug 20684)
Error message when attempting to repost URL needs to be more friendlier and easier to localize (bug 20682)

Reporting Bugs

Post bug reports as a comment to this post. If you have a Bugzilla account on Mozdev, you can file a bug here.

Panic Button 1.1.2 released!

2009-01-27T16:32:00.004-08:00

Firefox 3.1 beta testers can finally rejoice -- a new version of Panic Button has been released, and is compatible with the Firefox 3.1 beta releases! The new release is available for download from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

If you already have an older version of Panic Button installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Panic Button in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

What's New

Compatible with Firefox 3.1 beta 2
Added Danish, Polish, Slovak and Ukrainian translations

Help and Support

Send questions and comments to the AE Creations forums.

Clippings menu selection problems

2009-01-23T09:58:00.009-08:00

Some users have reported that the Clippings submenu on the browser context menu would often disappear when moving the mouse to select a clipping or folder on the menu. There have even been reports of crashes occurring when this happens.

This is caused by a bug in the Video DownloadHelper extension which causes problems with many context menus in Firefox. If you have this extension installed, upgrade it to the latest version (4.0.2 at the time of this post). This will resolve the issue.

Clippings 3.1 released!

2009-01-14T23:59:00.003-08:00

Clippings 3.1 has been released and is available for download from Mozilla Add-ons and the Clippings website.

NEW for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird users: There is a special build of Clippings designed for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird. See the Download and Install page on the Clippings website for the download link.

If you already have an older version of Clippings installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Clippings in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

Supported languages: English (United States), Chinese (simplified), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian.

What's New

Paste clippings without overwriting the clipboard
Paste clippings containing HTML tags as rich text. Users can choose to paste as rich text or plain text (with HTML tags and character entities intact).
New extension preferences dialog (Tools → Add-ons, select Clippings in the list of installed extensions → click Options)
Clippings icon now appears in the status bar of Thunderbird's message view window
Separate build for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird. In this build, the common datasource feature is disabled.

Help and Support

To learn more about Clippings, check out Clippings Help which contains helpful resources such as a Quick Start Guide for new users. Send your questions and comments to the AE Creations forums.

Clippings 3.1 release candidate 2

2009-01-11T09:04:00.002-08:00

This second release candidate adds a few minor last-minute changes.

» Download: Clippings 3.1 rc2 (192 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.1b2 and Thunderbird 2.0-3.0b1)

Because this is a pre-release, updates will not be available automatically.

Supported languages: English (United States), Chinese (simplified), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian.

NEW for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird users: There is a special build of Clippings designed for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird.
Click here to download and install the release candidate.

Changes from Release Candidate 1

Added Chinese (simplified) localization
In the portable app build, the Options → Common Clippings command in Clippings Manager is removed to prevent users from attempting to enable the common datasource feature.

Help and Support

Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations web site for instructions on where to submit feedback or bug reports.

Clippings 3.1 release candidate 1

2009-01-06T10:38:00.020-08:00

Happy New Year! And what better way to start off 2009 than by announcing the first release candidate of the next minor release of Clippings.

» Download: Clippings 3.1 rc1 (190 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.1b2 and Thunderbird 2.0-3.0b1)

Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

Supported languages: English (United States), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian.

NEW for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird users: There is a special build of Clippings designed for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird.
Click here to download and install the release candidate.

What's New

Here is a summary of new features in Clippings 3.1:

Paste clippings without overwriting the clipboard
Paste clippings containing HTML tags as rich text. Users can choose to paste as rich text or plain text (with HTML tags and character entities intact).
New extension preferences dialog (Tools → Add-ons, select Clippings in the list of installed extensions → click Options)
Clippings icon now appears in the status bar of Thunderbird's message view window
New -- separate build of Clippings for Portable Firefox/Thunderbird. In this build, common clippings is disabled by default, since the common datasource would reside in the user's home folder on the computer, thus posing a privacy risk to users running Firefox or Thunderbird from a portable device (such as a USB flash drive) on public computers. With common clippings disabled, the clippings datasource will reside in the Portable Firefox/Thunderbird profile folder, which is located on the portable device.

Changes From the Previous Beta Release

In Thunderbird's message compose window, the Clippings submenu in the context menu in the subject line has been removed. This feature was introduced in the beta release, but problems in making it work means that it will have to be deferred to a future release.

Help and Support

Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations web site for instructions on where to submit feedback or bug reports.

Clippings 3.1 beta 1

2008-12-14T13:39:00.005-08:00

There will be a minor release of Clippings to address a few common user requests and bug fixes.

This beta release is a preview of things to come. Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, consider waiting until Clippings 3.1 is officially released.

» Download: Clippings 3.1b1 (180KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.1b2)

What's New

Paste clippings without overwriting the clipboard
Paste clippings containing HTML tags as rich text
Window and dialog dimensions set in "em", not pixels; this allows windows and dialogs to be sized correctly on the screen
New extension preferences dialog (Tools → Add-ons, select Clippings in the list of installed extensions → click Options)
Clippings icon now appears in Thunderbird's message view status bar
The Clippings submenu now appears in the subject line context menu in Thunderbird's message compose window. This means that you can paste clippings into the subject line of a new message.

Known Issues

The Clippings submenu in the subject line context menu in Thunderbird's message compose window sometimes disappears (bug 20350)

Help and Support

Feedback on this beta release is welcome. Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.

Using Google Apps and Yahoo! Mail in Send Tab URLs 2.0

2008-12-06T21:59:00.001-08:00

Send Tab URLs 2.0 comes with experimental support for Yahoo! Mail Classic (not the so-called "all-new" Yahoo! Mail) and Google Apps Gmail (hereafter referred to as Google Apps, and not to be confused with regular Gmail, which already works out of the box). Support for those two web mail apps is disabled by default, but can be enabled if you wish to try it.

Why?

Send Tab URLs has not been tested with Google Apps, as I have not been able to gain access to any Google Apps installations to use for testing. If Send Tab URLs can't be tested with Google Apps, then there is no assurance that it will work with it.

As for Yahoo! Mail, the problem of not being able to use a quick compose URL in the so-called "all-new" Yahoo! Mail precludes support for that web mail app.

Nonetheless, testers and advanced users are welcome to try using Send Tab URLs with these two unsupported web mail applications. If that is you, then do so at your own risk.

To Enable Support for Yahoo! Mail (Classic)

Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.enabled to true.
Open a new browser window or tab and login to your Yahoo! Mail account.
Once you are viewing your Yahoo! Mail inbox, observe the URL in the Firefox address bar. Select and copy the URL up to, and including, the last slash character (/) in the URL. Be sure to include the "http://" prefix.
Return to about:config and edit the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.mail_url, changing its value to what you selected and copied in step 3.

After following these steps, you should be able to use Send Tab URLs with Yahoo! Mail Classic.

To Enable Support for Google Apps

Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.googleapps.enabled to true.
The first time you send the URL list to Google Apps, you will be prompted for the Google Apps domain. Consult your system administrator if you do not know this information. You can change it later from the extension preferences dialog (from a Firefox browser window, choose Tools -> Add-ons, select Send Tab URLs and click Options -> Google Apps tab).

Things You Should Know About

The URL list generated by Send Tab URLs won't display properly when the Yahoo! Mail editor is in rich text mode. However, you can switch from plain text to rich text in Yahoo! Mail's editor to compose and send the URL list as an HTML email.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 released!

2008-12-06T10:50:00.006-08:00

Send Tab URLs 2.0 has been released and is available for download from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations web site.

If you already have an older version of Send Tab URLs installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Send Tab URLs in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

Supported languages: English (United States), Chinese (simplified), Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portugeuse (Brazil), Spanish, Turkish.

What's New

Added support for Gmail
Added ability to send the URL list to the clipboard
Added support for the following email applications on Windows: Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, and Eudora 8
Redesigned extension preferences dialog, containing new configuration options

Acknowledgements

Web mail support in Send Tab URLs is based on Email This!, a Firefox extension by Lazyrussian Productions. The code for launching Gmail is derived from John Joseph Bachir’s Gmail compose bookmarklet.

Many thanks to the Babelzilla localization team for their work in translating Send Tab URLs.

New AE Creations forums

2008-12-04T15:47:00.013-08:00

Starting now, all questions, comments and feedback relating to Clippings, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs extensions should be directed to the new web-based forums.

Anyone can browse through forum posts and comments, but to create a new post or comment on existing posts, you must be logged in to the forums. New forum users can register for a new account.

All forum users are expected to abide by the forum rules.

The forums are a replacement for the mailing lists, which will be discontinued. The two mailing list archives (prior to December 2008) will remain available for browsing: AE Creations, Clippings.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 release candidate 3

2008-11-30T22:20:00.003-08:00

This is the third, and hopefully last, release candidate of the upcoming 2.0 release of Send Tab URLs.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 rc 3 (45 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0 - 3.1b1)

Supported languages: English (United States), Chinese (simplified), Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portugeuse (Brazil), Spanish, Turkish.

Changes from Release Candidate 2

Support for Google Apps has been dropped. It will still be available by enabling a pref in about:config, but this pref has been disabled by default; more details on enabling Google Apps support will be available shortly. For now, Google Apps support is considered experimental, and Send Tab URLs may or may not work with it.
Added Danish translation
Compatible with Firefox 3.1 beta 1

Help and Support

Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations web site for instructions on where to submit feedback or bug reports.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 release candidate 2

2008-11-07T23:49:00.004-08:00

Fixes to a few spit-and-polish bugs necessitated another release candidate.

If you already have a previous version of Send Tab URLs installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 rc2 (43 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0 - 3.0.*)

Supported languages: English (United States), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Turkish.

Changes from Release Candidate 1

Improvements to how Gmail/Google Apps are invoked so that you can do other tasks in Gmail after sending the URL list (like logging out).
Reworked the message box that appears when a long list of URLs to Gmail or Google Apps is being sent

Acknowledgement

Web mail support in Send Tab URLs is based on Email This!, a Firefox extension by Lazyrussian Productions. The code for Gmail/Google Apps invocation is taken from John Joseph Bachir’s Gmail compose bookmarklet.

Delicious Post

2008-11-05T13:10:00.005-08:00

A while ago, I came across del.icio.us post, a simple Firefox extension that lets you post a link or the current page to del.icio.us Delicious. It has just the basics you need to quickly create a del.icio.us Delicious bookmark to the current page, and while it lacked some features from the official Post to Delicious bookmarklet, it was still quite useful.

The author doesn't appear to be maintaining it anymore; but since the code is licensed under a Creative Commons license which permits modification of the work, I decided to start my own fork of this extension -- which, as it turns out, two others already exist (Post to del.icio.us and Jaggnito).

My version is named "Delicious Post" -- not only to distinguish it from the original extension, but to (grudgingly) reflect the new name given to this popular social bookmarking service.

» Download: Delicious Post 0.7.3 (10.5 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 3.0-3.0.*)

This release introduces compatibility with Firefox 3, and includes some behind-the-scenes code fixes to give it a stable foundation for future planned enhancements. There are no new features in this release. Full details of changes can be found in the changelog.

Why?

Because eventually, I want to add a few additional features that are missing in the original del.icio.us post -- such as allowing private bookmarks, tag name autocompletion, and automatically using the selected text in the web page as the bookmark notes. But most importantly, I want to be able to use it on Firefox 3.

But I like del.icio.us post the way it was!

I suppose that you, and many others, do. That is why the additional features I have planned will be configurable so that they can be disabled if you prefer the primitive UI.

Will Delicious Post be compatible with Firefox 2?

No. The Mozilla Corp. plans on ending support for Firefox 2 in December 2008 (that is next month), and there is no point in making it compatible with a version of Firefox that will be officially retired in a month. I also want to make use of some APIs and developer features that is only available in Firefox 3 and above.

If you are still using Firefox 2, you should install the original del.icio.us post extension.

I found a bug. How do I report it?

Send bug reports to the AE Creations mailing list; please mention Delicious Post in the subject line. If you have a Bugzilla account on Mozdev, you can file a bug here.

Menu Editor incompatibility in Clippings is resolved

2008-10-30T11:41:00.012-07:00

An update to Clippings was released yesterday to address the problem where clippings and subfolders on the Clippings submenu on Firefox's browser context menu were disappearing if Menu Editor is installed. (This issue was not occuring on Firefox 2.) A workaround exists for this bug -- but while it allowed users to be able to paste clippings, the workaround was rather awkward to deal with, and clearly was not the best solution.

The good news is that users no longer have to contend with this workaround in the new release. Clippings users having the Menu Editor extension installed should upgrade to this release, version 3.0.2, to be able to use Clippings the way it was designed.

The update can be obtained by either waiting for Firefox's automatic extension update to detect and install this new release, or going into Tools → Add-ons in the Firefox browser window, selecting Clippings in the list of extensions, then right-clicking and selecting Find Update in the context menu.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 release candidate 1

2008-10-25T12:57:00.005-07:00

The release candidate of Send Tab URLs 2.0 is now available for download. Barring any last-minute showstopper bugs, this release should resemble the official 2.0 release of this Firefox extension.

If you already have a previous version of Send Tab URLs installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 rc1 (40 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0.*)

Supported languages: English (United States), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Turkish.

What's New in Send Tab URLs 2.0

This list is a cumulative summary of all the new features introduced since the first beta release.

You can now send the URL list to Web-based email clients. Gmail and Google Apps are supported. There is also experimental support for Yahoo! Mail.
The URL list can be sent to the clipboard.
Added support for the following email applications on Windows: Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, and Eudora 8.
Works with up to 30 browser tabs (previously, the limit was 24). There is no limit if sending the URL list to the clipboard.
Redesigned extension preferences dialog, containing new configuration options.

Changes From the Previous Beta Releases

Bug fix: Problems when sending the URL list to Yahoo! Mail in a new browser window. On Firefox 2, a blank window appears; on Firefox 3, a window appears with an error message (bug 20050).
If you have used the previous beta releases of Send Tab URLs, please note that if Yahoo! Mail support is enabled, you must now include the "http://" part of the Yahoo! Mail URL in the about:config preference sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.mail_url.

Things You Should Know About

Windows users: Send Tab URLs will work with Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey Mail, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, MS Office Outlook and Eudora 8. Send Tab URLs may not work with other Windows-based email programs not listed here, especially if the URLs of the individual browser tabs are long. There is no such limitation on Linux or Mac OS X.
If you have multiple Firefox profiles, and you are running Firefox using a profile other than the original default profile, and Thunderbird is set as the default email client, you may receive the following error when invoking Send Tab URLs: "Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Thunderbird process, or restart your system." To resolve this problem, close Thunderbird and try again; OR, exit Firefox and restart it using the original default profile.

Help and Support

Feedback on this release candidate is welcome. Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta 2

2008-10-09T12:06:00.004-07:00

This is the second beta release of Send Tab URLs 2.0. Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then you should wait until version 2.0 is officially released.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta 2 (30 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0.0.* - 3.0.*)

If you already have a previous version of Send Tab URLs installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

What's New

Redesigned extension preferences dialog, containing new configuration options.
Warning message when sending a very long URL list to Gmail or Google Apps; Gmail and Google Apps may raise an error (HTTP code 400) due to very long mailto: strings. The warning message describes a workaround.

Known Issues

Problems when sending the URL list to Yahoo! Mail in a new browser window. On Firefox 2, a blank window appears; on Firefox 3, a window appears with an error message (bug 20050)

Help and Support

Feedback on this beta release is welcome. Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.

Using Yahoo! Mail in Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta

2008-10-02T15:30:00.006-07:00

In the previous post, I alluded to experimental support for Yahoo! Mail in Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta. For those of you who are familiar with the Email This! Firefox extension, the instructions for enabling support for Yahoo! Mail are very similar.

Please note that Send Tab URLs will work with Yahoo! Mail classic, not the "all-new" Yahoo! Mail.

To Enable Support for Yahoo! Mail (Classic)

Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.enabled to true.
Open a new browser window or tab and login to your Yahoo! Mail account.
Once you are viewing your Yahoo! Mail inbox, observe the URL in the Firefox address bar. Select and copy the URL up to, and including, the last slash character (/) in the URL, and omitting the "http://" prefix.
Return to about:config and edit the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.mail_url, changing its value to what you selected and copied in step 3.

After following these steps, you should now be able to send the browser tab URLs to Yahoo! Mail.

Things You Should Know About

As stated above, this will only work with Yahoo! Mail classic, not the "all-new" Yahoo! Mail.
The URL list generated by Send Tab URLs won't display properly when the Yahoo! Mail editor is in rich text mode. However, you can switch from plain text to rich text in Yahoo! Mail's editor to compose and send the URL list as an HTML email. (Remember to switch back to plain text mode afterwards.)

These two points are the reasons why support for Yahoo! Mail is considered experimental.

Acknowledgment

Web mail support in Send Tab URLs is adapted from Email This!, a Firefox extension by Lazyrussian Productions.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta 1

2008-10-01T15:14:00.005-07:00

This is the first of two planned beta releases of the next version of Send Tab URLs.

Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then don't install it.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta 1 (25 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0 - 3.0.*)

If you already have a previous version of Send Tab URLs installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

What's New

You can now send the URL list to Web-based email clients. Gmail and Google Apps are supported. There is also experimental support for Yahoo! Mail; more details to come in a later post.
You can also send the URL list to the clipboard
Added support for the following email applications: Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail

Known Issues

The same issues of email application compatibility on Windows apply (Linux and Mac OS X users are not affected). With this release, Send Tab URLs will work with Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey Mail, Outlook Express, MS Office Outlook, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail. Send Tab URLs may not work with other Windows-based email programs not listed here, especially if the URLs of the individual browser tabs are long.

Things You Should Know About

The maximum number of browser tabs that Send Tab URLs can handle has been raised to 30. The about:config pref that specifies the limit has been removed. This limit doesn't apply when sending URLs to the clipboard.

Help and Support

Feedback on this beta release is welcome. Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.

Updates to the AE Creations website

2008-09-23T20:52:00.005-07:00

With Panic Button out of the way for now, I took some time to do some much-needed updates to the AE Creations website. Content was rearranged and some cosmetic tweaks were made. CSS style rules were moved out of the <head> element of the HTML document structure and into the site's CSS file, and redundant rule sets were pruned. As a result of these updates, the website largely follows the frequently-preached web design philosophy of separating content (HTML), appearance (CSS) and behaviour (JavaScript, though that's not used here), and is now much easier for me to maintain.

What's Changed

The home page has undergone the most dramatic transformation. Clippings is promoted as a "Featured Extension," while maintaining links to its own website. The space dedicated to Panic Button and Send Tab URLs has been substantially reduced by replacing its bulky thumbnail graphics with simpler 24 × 24-pixel icons and shortening their verbose extension descriptions to brief one-sentence summaries. The result is a far cleaner layout, making efficient use of space and allowing almost all of the home page content to appear without the need to scroll down, even on 1024 × 768 monitors.

Using table-less CSS layouts, the "Other Extensions" list sits side-by-side with a new list containing the three most recent posts from this blog. It is automatically generated from my own, lovingly-crafted PHP script which reads this blog's XML-based Atom feed and dynamically creates the HTML content.

The pages for Send Tab URLs and Panic Button have also changed. The Download and Install links (the ones users would click on to install the extension in Firefox) have moved to the top of the page, and the installation help content have moved into a separate page to cut down on redundancy.

Website Branding

The general appearance of the site (the "theme" or "skin") has been mostly untouched. It would take too much time to do a complete makeover of the site, which I don't believe is necessary right now. And I wanted to keep most of the default branding to recognize the Mozdev.org organization that is hosting my extensions.

The most notable modifications to the default Mozdev branding are the removal of today's date and the strange "Do you want fries with that" message on the page header, replacing them with links to the home page, this blog and the help-and-support contact page to make it more useful. The left navigation sidebar was heavily revised to link to content in the AE Creations website, rather than to general Mozdev pages.

Panic Button 1.1.1

2008-09-19T14:54:00.007-07:00

This minor release fixes a bug where the customizations to the Panic Button toolbar button image and label aren't automatically applied when adding the toolbar button to the Firefox window (bug 18954).

Because Panic Button is in the AMO sandbox, automatic updates are not yet available. If you have a previous version already installed, you will need to upgrade it by uninstalling it, restarting Firefox, then installing this new version. You can download the new version from the Panic Button page on AMO, or from the Panic Button page on the AE Creations website.

Panic Button 1.1 released!

2008-09-10T22:08:00.004-07:00

A new version of Panic Button is now available from Mozilla Add-ons. Because it is in the AMO sandbox, you will need to log in first to download and install. To skip this step, you can download and install it from the Panic Button page on the AE Creations website.

If you have a previous version already installed, you will need to uninstall it, restart Firefox and install this new version. Automatic updating currently doesn't work due to Panic Button being in the sandbox on AMO.

What's New

New option in the extension preferences dialog (Customize tab) to choose an image file on your computer as the Panic Button toolbar button image
Bug fix: Clicking OK in the extension preferences dialog didn't close the dialog box if the Panic Button toolbar button wasn't added to the browser toolbar (bug 19774)
Other minor improvements

Help and Support

Send your comments and bug reports to the AE Creations mailing list.

Google Chrome

2008-09-02T12:54:00.016-07:00

I am typing this from Google Chrome, the new web browser that was announced yesterday (after news of it were accidentally leaked) and released about two hours ago. It is blazingly fast! And even without maximizing the browser window, there is so much screen area for viewing the web pages, due to the minimal space used by the tab bar and the "omnibox" (a combined address and search bar) -- and there's no menu bar or status bar to clutter your view. You can drag tabs out of the browser window to view the web page in a separate window -- now that's something I'd like to see in Firefox! Although only a beta release, it appears that the Google Chrome team has already fulfill their goal of creating a fast, responsive and simple-to-use Web browser.

Each browser tab in Google Chrome runs in its own process, and the implications of this is huge. It means that it's easy to isolate which web pages are using up excessive memory and CPU cycles (there is a task manager that lets you see performance stats on all open browser tabs), putting the onus squarely on the web developer to make their web pages more leaner and efficient. And from a stabililty standpoint, if a misbehaving web page crashes a browser tab, it won't take down the whole application with it.

There's lots more to it about Google Chrome: a new and powerful JavaScript engine, V8; anti-phishing and anti-malware protection; a special "Incognito" privacy mode where you can view a web site in a separate tab that won't record any cookies or add to your browsing history; all browser tabs operate in a "sandbox" security model; built-in Google Gears; ability to create shortcuts to web apps like Gmail so that they can be launched in their own windows, mimicking desktop apps; and of course, support for web standards, made possible by WebKit, the same rendering engine used in Safari. Basic features like searching, bookmarking, text zoom, download manager, etc. are all there, as one would expect in any modern web browser.

Screen shot of Google Chrome

Check out the incredibly cool comic book, with characters resembling the members of the development team explaining Google Chrome and all of its features in depth. The beta release, initially for Windows only, is now available for download.

There are a few missing features that, I think, needs to be added, like spell checking in web page form fields, and print preview -- but overall, the quality of the product is surprisingly high for such an early beta release.

Classic del.icio.us Bookmark Viewer: for those of you who miss the old del.icio.us

2008-08-15T10:30:00.011-07:00

I've been using and adjusting to the "new Delicious" user interface for the past two weeks (it was unveiled to the public on 31 July).

There are a few things I like about it. Minor improvements such as:

Being able to switch between three different bookmark viewing modes (regular, title and full viewing modes)
Having the option to sort my bookmarks alphabetically.
Ability to navigate to specific pages in my bookmark list instead of having to hit the "earlier" or "later" links repeatedly.
Drop-down list of matching tags and auto-completion of tags when entering them in the tag filter box at the top of the page.

The latter two are the most significant improvements that I find useful. But other than those minor improvements listed above, I hate it. How do I hate it? Let me count the ways:

The new layout doesn't make efficient use of space; there is too much wasted white space in each bookmark item in the new UI while in the old version everything was neatly compact, yet readable. Also, the placement of the bookmark date stamp for all bookmarks created on the same date results in an unnecessary and useless blank margin on the left-hand side of the bookmarks page.
Tab completion of tags in the Add Bookmark UI wasn't working at all (that problem has since been fixed).
The '+' operator to filter bookmarks by combining two or more tags in the tag filter box is now treated as part of the tag name!
Some of the subtle grey colours in the UI (like those on the background of tag names for each bookmark) are simply bad choices, as they barely show up on LCD screens.
The Delicious team has done away with time stamps of, for example, "5 minutes ago" or "2 hours ago" on recently-added bookmarks.

Here is a screen shot of the "new Delicious" UI, taken on 15 August 2008. Compare this to the screen shot from a past posting.

The "new Delicious."

There was supposedly a "limited" preview of the new UI, but I don't believe that it is a sufficient means of gauging user reaction and feedback to the new UI if it's so limited (users have to sign up for it and hope to get an invite to join) and not well publicized (I knew nothing about the "limited" preview until the day before the "new Delicious" went live).

Introducing the Classic del.icio.us Bookmark Viewer

I dislike the new user interface so much that I felt compelled to do something. So I put together a simple tool that sort of resembles the look and feel of the old del.icio.us.

The "classic del.icio.us bookmark viewer" can be found at http://aecreations.mozdev.org/delicious/bookmarks.html. It was created by combining a linkroll and a tagroll into a single page, and using CSS styling to give it a somewhat familiar look and feel. Simply enter your del.icio.us user name, choose how many recent bookmarks and how many tags to display, then click Get Bookmarks.

The Classic del.icio.us Bookmarks Viewer

By no means is this tool meant to be a complete replacement for the "new Delicious." It is missing significant capabilities of the old del.icio.us site, like editing bookmarks and filtering by tags (the latter isn't working with linkrolls), but I hope that many people would find it useful.

Send Tab URLs 1.0 released

2008-07-31T16:27:00.004-07:00

Send Tab URLs 1.0 has been released and is now available on Mozilla Add-ons. This version is currently in the sandbox; you need to be logged in as an AMO user to install it. Otherwise, you can download and install version 0.4.1, which is still available to all users.

What's New

Automatically detect the title from web page content if no title appears in the browser tab
Added support for Turkish locale

What Happened to Webmail Support?

I know lots of readers will be asking about this. In my list of stuff to do for this release, I had wanted Send Tab URLs to be able to invoke Gmail or some other web-based email client for composing the email of browser tab URLs. But I ran into Gmail errors when attempting to send the URL list to it when I wasn't logged in yet to my Google account.

This would be a great feature to have in Send Tab URLs, and I've received many requests for this. Unfortunately, I will need to do some further research into getting around this error without making it so painful for the user to use, and will therefore have to defer this feature to a later release.

Update: Send Tab URLs 1.0 is now a public release on Mozilla Add-ons. You do not need to be logged in to download and install it.

Upcoming changes to del.icio.us -- er Delicious

2008-07-30T13:26:00.017-07:00

I'm an avid user of del.icio.us, the online social bookmarking service where you can organize your bookmarks into tags and share them with other users. It's convenient and addictive -- more so if you've got the del.icio.us browser bookmarklets and the Firefox extension installed. I've become so dependent on it for bookmarking interesting links that I rarely post to my browser bookmarks anymore. And the web-based nature of del.icio.us lets me share my bookmarks across multiple machines without the need to resort to tools like Foxmarks or Google Sync (the latter is no longer available for download).

Screen shot of my del.icio.us page, taken on 30 July 2008

Today, as I was visiting my del.icio.us bookmark page, I found a notification at the top of the page informing me that I will need to remember my login info because the permanent del.icio.us browser session, which eliminates the need to log in to that site every time I start Firefox, will expire when the "new Delicious" is rolled out in the coming weeks.

New Delicious? And with a capitalized "D" with no dots?

That piqued my curiosity enough that I had to read more about it in the del.icio.us blog. Turns out that a new version of del.icio.us has been under development for over a year. There is little mention about it, despite the claim in a post penned by the founder of del.icio.us, dated 1 February 2007, that the del.icio.us team would provide regular updates to keep users informed:

I feel that during this very exciting time for the team I’ve personally had less capacity for talking more openly to the delicious community about what’s been going on. Given that we’ve undergone a lot of changes and have a lot more in store in the future, I want to resolve to be better about communicating.
. . .

Going forward, we’re going to be talking much more about what’s changed, where the bugs are, and in general, more explicit about what we’re doing.

But over a year later, only four posts after this one made any reference to the new version of del.icio.us.

I wish I was in on the limited preview, but I doubt I'll get an invite now since I signed up so close to the launch date, which is supposed to be very soon. It would have been a good chance to see what the upgrade would be like, and to offer my feedback as a regular del.icio.us user. For now, the closest thing to a preview are these screen shots on TechCrunch.

Based on what info I could find on the upgrade, as well as what I've learned whenever a small Internet company is gobbled up by a larger corporation, I have a few concerns:

Will the old del.icio.us URL, http://del.icio.us, co-exist with the new URL, http://delicious.com? If not, this change will most certainly break a lot of users' bookmarklets.
Despite the takeover by Yahoo! in 2005, del.icio.us users have continued to use their own IDs, and new users can sign up without opening a Yahoo! account. Will this continue -- or will we be forced to merge our accounts with Yahoo!, similar to what happened with Flickr? Many readers will remember that the Flickr-Yahoo merge faced harsh backlash by so many loyal Flickr users.
The current del.icio.us UI is fast and responsive, even on 56k dial-up. Will the upgraded del.icio.us be slow and heavy with AJAX doodads and JavaScript-driven eye candy for even the most trivial functionality?
And while on the subject of user experience, I've always admired the simple, yet elegant, design of the del.icio.us UI, and even tried to incorporate elements of it in a prototype del.icios.us client I wrote a while back. I think this is a unique characteristic of del.icio.us that helps it to visually stand out from the millions of websites out there on the Internet -- and any move to detract from its present design would be a shame, in my opinion.

And finally, what's with the recent move to eliminate the dots and referring to it as Delicious?

Update: The new Delicious launched on the morning of 31 July 2008. Details in this TechChrunch blog post. The Delicious blog explains, in their announcement of the transition to the new version, why they got rid of the dots in their name, and claims that the old URL will continue to work.

Panic Button 1.0 released!

2008-07-08T16:02:00.004-07:00

Panic Button 1.0 has been released and is now available for download from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations web site.

The only change from the release candidate is a minor adjustment to one of the toolbar button icons.

A reminder to users upgrading from the previous beta releases: You may notice that the Panic Button toolbar button image is reverted back to the default image. You will need to go into extension preferences and set the toolbar button image again.

Panic Button is available for these languages: English (United States), Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish. A heartfelt thanks to the translation team at Babelzilla for localizing Panic Button.

Panic Button 1.0 release candidate 1

2008-06-30T13:42:00.004-07:00

This release candidate should resemble the 1.0 release of Panic Button, barring any last-minute showstopper bugs. It is now available for download from Mozilla Add-ons.

Changes from the previous betas

There are now twenty toolbar button icons to choose from to make the Panic Button - er, button - less conspicuous to whomever you're trying to hide your web surfing from. =)

If you installed any of the previous beta releases, you may notice that the Panic Button toolbar button image is reverted back to the default image. You will need to go into extension preferences and set the toolbar button image again.

This release adds support for these languages: English (United States), Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish.

Help and Support

Send your comments and bug reports to the AE Creations mailing list. If there are no serious showstopper bugs, the 1.0 release will be pushed out in a week.

Clippings 3.0.1 released

2008-06-27T20:46:00.008-07:00

A new version of Clippings has been released and is now available for download from Mozilla Add-ons.

If you already have Clippings installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Clippings in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

Please note that Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5 are no longer supported.

What's New

This release fixes several bugs. Improvements include:

On Linux, the Clippings Manager window position is saved. Previously, Clippings Manager always appeared at the top left corner of the screen
On Mac OS X, the instructions in the New Clipping dialog and Clippings Manager on how to paste a clipping using shortcut keys has been clarified
Fixed a Clippings Manager bug that caused an error when creating a new clipping if there were no clippings and common clippings was enabled
Also in Clippings Manager, users are now prevented from exporting clippings to a datasource file of the same name in the same folder. This is to prevent a bug where clippings are appended to the data in the existing Clippings file if the user had chosen to overwrite it.

Help and Support

Send your questions, comments and bug reports to the Clippings mailing list.

Panic Button compatibility with Firefox 3

2008-06-23T14:54:00.004-07:00

I wrote that all three extensions by AE Creations are compatible with Firefox 3 which was released last Tuesday. Turns out I was wrong -- at least for Panic Button. I don't know if this has something to do with the fact that Panic Button is in the Mozilla Add-ons sandbox, but changing the target application max version to 3.0.* didn't have any effect for that extension.

To get around this, I quickly built and uploaded a new version of Panic Button, numbered 0.9.3.1, to Mozilla Add-ons. The only change to it is in the install manifest, where the maxVersion was incremented to "3.0.*".

This update is now available on the Panic Button page on Mozilla Add-ons. I will no longer be providing download links here on this blog, as I've been finding releases to be harder to manage when I have them linked from three different places and uploaded to two different download servers.

Workaround to Clippings and Menu Editor conflict

2008-06-18T10:52:00.003-07:00

I wrote about a problem that was experienced by many users who also have Menu Editor installed. The problem was that if Menu Editor is installed, the clippings and folders on the Clippings submenu of the browser context menu would disappear.

I discovered a workaround using a new feature of Clippings Manager that I totally forgot about. In Clippings 3.0, you can paste a clipping by double-clicking a clipping in Clippings Manager's tree list. Here are the steps:

Click on the text box where you want to paste a clipping.
Right-click to invoke the context menu, then choose Clippings → Organize Clippings. This will open Clippings Manager.
Find the desired clipping in the tree list and double-click on it. The selected clipping will be pasted into the web page text box at the cursor position.

This alternative method of pasting a clipping essentially lets you do so without using the browser context menu.

Firefox 3

2008-06-17T13:30:00.006-07:00

Firefox 3 is now officially released. Among many, many improvements, this new version contains end-user improvements in performance, enhanced bookmark and history system, and a more intelligent address bar (nicknamed the Awesome Bar).

The latest versions of the three Firefox extensions by AE Creations -- Clippings, Send Tab URLs and Panic Button -- are compatible with Firefox 3. If you are upgrading Firefox to this new version, and the AE Creations extensions you have are not the latest versions, you may be prompted to update them when Firefox 3 starts after the upgrade.

Clippings not compatible with Menu Editor on Firefox 3

2008-06-03T09:47:00.009-07:00

Many users have reported that on Firefox 3 with Menu Editor installed, the Clippings submenu on the browser's context menu won't display any clippings and folders. This problem is reportedly reproducible on Firefox 3; this problem is not occurring on Firefox 2.

This conflict occurs once Menu Editor is installed and its extension preferences dialog is invoked from Tools → Add-ons in Firefox.

There is presently no workaround to this bug. Disabling or uninstalling Menu Editor appears to be the only way to bring back your clippings and folders in the Clippings submenu on the browser's context menu.

Send Tab URLs to-do list

2008-05-27T12:50:00.002-07:00

The next version of Send Tab URLs will be numbered 1.0 to reflect its stability and maturity (i.e., few new features needs to be added to this extension). Here are a few items left to tackle:

Need to handle the situation where there is no title for a web page displayed in a tab (bug 18641)
Remove trailing space at end of web page title (bug 18663)
Make Send Tab URLs work with Gmail or other default, web-based email clients

Panic Button to-do list

2008-05-27T12:40:00.004-07:00

Here is a list of items to be completed before I release version 1.0 of Panic Button:

Add a few more Panic Button icon choices.
Further tweaking of the available Panic Button icons, including creation of another set of similar toolbar button images that appear when hovering over them with a mouse.
[Restore Session toolbar] Get rid of the useless disabled close button on the title bar.
[Restore Session toolbar] Automatic repositioning of the floating toolbar if switching to text and icon view, and the toolbar is at the far right of the screen. Currently, part of the floating toolbar disappears into the right edge of the screen if the toolbar layout is changed.
Localization.

Currently, Panic Button is in the sandbox on Mozilla Add-ons. Once version 1.0 is released, I will nominate it to have it changed to a publicly-accessible extension. This would mean that a Mozilla Add-ons user will not have to log in to download and install it, as is the case today.

Lost messages to the Clippings mailing list

2008-05-26T13:10:00.002-07:00

It has been brought to my attention that some emails to the Clippings mailing list haven't been getting through. After some digging around, I found that the mailing list spam filters I had set up were too restrictive, and were automatically discarding legitimate messages. I have made some adjustments to the spam filters; legitimate messages should no longer be flagged as spam.

If you tried to email a message to the Clippings mailing list in the past few weeks, and can't find your message in the list archives, try emailing your message again.

Mozilla Add-ons T-shirt

2008-05-13T21:56:00.005-07:00

Finally, I have something to show for all the effort, the long hours and sleepless nights, the blood, sweat, tears and raw passion I put into my Firefox extensions -- a free T-shirt!

The front.

The back.

These were sent to Mozilla Add-ons developers who submitted their Firefox 3-compatible extensions early. This T-shirt arrived by UPS last week, and I now have it proudly hung on the wall by my desk at work. I haven't put on the T-shirt yet. But I consider this to be an article of memorabilia that is simply too precious to wear -- although it could use some ironing....

Yet another Panic Button beta release!

2008-05-10T12:15:00.001-07:00

Fixes for several showstopper bugs on Mac OS X necessitated another beta release.

Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then you shouldn't install it.

» Download: Panic Button 0.9.3 (25 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0b5)

If you already have the previous release of Panic Button installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release.

What's New

Improved default toolbar button icon.
Several platform-specific bug fixes for Mac OS X and Linux. The bug fixes are detailed in the previous post.

Known Issues

The Panic Button action option to hide all windows doesn't work if a system native file picker dialog box (Open, Save As) is open in any of the browser windows at the time the Panic Button action is invoked (bug 18629). This bug doesn't occur on Firefox 3.
Any preferences in the extension options dialog that are set will be applied to all browser windows that are open after clicking OK, except for the option "F9 key invokes Panic Button action" -- changes to this option will take effect in new browser windows only or when exiting and restarting Firefox. (On Mac OS X, the option will be labeled "Command+F9 key invokes Panic Button action.")
Customizations not being remembered between host app toolbar button changes (bug 18954)

Help and Support

Feedback on this extension is welcome. General comments and bug reports may be submitted by going to the AE Creations home page and clicking Contact. If you have a Bugzilla account on Mozdev, you may file a bug report here (please make sure you specify Panic Button on the bug summary field).

Panic Button fixes for Mac OS X and Linux

2008-05-08T16:08:00.006-07:00

Ah, the joys of cross-platform development....

Several bug fixes have landed to fix a few issues found on Mac OS X and Linux. The fixes were tested on Mac OS X 10.5.1 ("Leopard") and Ubuntu 8.04 ("Hardy Heron"). For the latter, testing was performed using Gnome 2.22.1 and KDE 4.

The bug fixes, summarized below, will be included in the next beta release.

Mac OS X fixes

The extension preferences dialog (in Firefox, Tools → Add-ons, select Panic Button then click Preferences) is no longer blank (this was bug 19025).

The Restore Session toolbar is now working. Previously, the floating toolbar couldn't be moved properly, and clicking on it didn't do anything (bug 19026).

Firefox will really quit if Quit is set as the Panic Button action. And if Hide All Windows is the Panic Button action, Firefox will really quit if you clicked Exit on the Restore Session toolbar. Previously, all application windows would close, but you would still have to manually quit Firefox by choosing Firefox → Quit Firefox or pressing Command+Q (bug 19027).

The shortcut key to invoke the Panic Button action on the Mac is now Command+F9. The F9 key as used on Windows and Linux conflicts with Exposé (bug 19024).

Linux fixes

The extension preferences dialog only had a Close button; there was no way to apply changes to settings (bug 19051). This has been fixed so that it now has OK and Cancel buttons.

Panic Button beta on Mac OS X

2008-04-26T00:05:00.004-07:00

Since I don't have a Mac machine of my own, I went to a university computer lab to test Panic Button on Mac OS X. The bugs I found are numerous; in particular, the default Panic Button action "Hide All Windows" is unusable.

Mac OS X bug list, in decreasing order of severity:

Restore Session toolbar doesn't work (bug 19026)
Extension preferences dialog is totally blank (bug 19025)
F9 key conflict with Exposé (bug 19024)
Quit action doesn't quit (bug 19027)

Click on the links to see the Bugzilla bug report.

Changing the Panic Button action to "Minimize All Windows" is the best workaround for now -- as well as avoiding the F9 key. Since the extension pref dialog is broken, Mac OS X users would need to change the integer pref named panicbutton.action in about:config. Use an integer value of 1 to specify the "Minimize All Windows" option.

Next, I will need to test Panic Button on a Linux box, preferably using the KDE and Gnome desktop environments. More to follow.

Another Panic Button beta release!

2008-04-08T20:47:00.007-07:00

This new beta release offers new customization options to make the Panic Button toolbar button less conspicuous to whomever you want to hide your web browsing from. =)

Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then you shouldn't install it.

» Download: Panic Button 0.9.2 (21 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0b5)

If you already have the previous release of Panic Button installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release.

What's New

You can set the Panic Button toolbar button caption and image (six toolbar image choices to choose from; more will be added later). These customizations can be set in the extension options dialog (Tools → Add-ons from the Firefox browser window, select Panic Button in the list of extensions and click Options).
Bug fix: On Firefox 3.0b3 and newer, hide all windows didn't work if an XUL dialog is open (bug 18637)
Compatible with the latest Firefox beta release: 3.0b5.

Known Issues

The Panic Button action option to hide all windows doesn't work if a system native file picker dialog box (Open, Save As) is open in any of the browser windows at the time the Panic Button action is invoked (bug 18629). This bug doesn't occur on Firefox 3.
Any preferences in the extension options dialog that are set will be applied to all browser windows that are open after clicking OK, except for the option "F9 key invokes Panic Button action" -- changes to this option will take effect in new browser windows only or when exiting and restarting Firefox.

Clippings shortcut key prefix on Mac OS X

2008-03-31T14:22:00.007-07:00

I've been getting reports from a few Mac OS X users of problems with the shortcut key feature introduced in Clippings 3.0.

Instead of CTRL+ALT+V as is advertised, Mac OS X users have to press Ctrl+Option+V and simultaneously hit the shortcut letter or digit assigned to the desired clipping. That means that a user would have to press four keys on the keyboard at the same time!

And at least one Mac OS X user has reported that CTRL+ALT+V or Ctrl+Option+V doesn't work at all.

The requirement of having to press so many keys at once is strange, and is inconsistent with the behaviour on Windows and Linux where users would press CTRL+ALT+V that would bring up a dialog box prompting the user to enter the shortcut key of the desired clipping to paste:

I've entered this Mac-specific issue as bug 18879. Any helpful reports of further observations on this issue are most welcome, and should be reported in that bug.

Clippings 3.0 released!

2008-03-17T14:10:00.003-07:00

The wait is finally over. Clippings 3.0 has been released and is now available for download.

» Download: Clippings 3.0 (175 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0b4 and Thunderbird 2.0-2.0.0.*)

Supported Languages: English (United States), Chinese (simplified), Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Slovak.

If you already have Clippings installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled in Firefox. Otherwise, open Extension Manager in Firefox, then right-click on the entry for Clippings in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

Please note that Clippings 3.0 is, and will not be, compatible with Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5. These versions are obsolete and Mozilla Corp. is no longer supporting them.

What's New

Common clippings data for Firefox and Thunderbird. This much-requested feature allows your Clippings data to be created, accessed and modified from both Firefox and Thunderbird. (More info.)
Shortcut keys. You can now assign a shortcut key to a clipping at the time of creation or by editing a clipping in Clippings Manager. Shortcut keys can be any letter (A-Z) or digit (0-9). To paste the clipping into a web page form field in Firefox or a new email message in Thunderbird, press CTRL+ALT+V, then the shortcut key.
Clipping placeholders. You can define placeholders inside a clipping that you will be prompted to fill in when you paste the clipping. Built-in placeholders for the date, time, clipping name, user agent, etc. are also available. (More info.)
Default clippings. System administrators and redistributors can bundle a default Clippings datasource file into a customized Clippings XPI to pre-populate their users' datasources when they install the customized XPI. (More info.)
Improvements to Clippings Manager's automatic save functionality, including on-the-fly updating of clipping edits/changes.
Double-click on a clipping in Clippings Manager to paste it into the most recent host app window
Numerous bug fixes.

Known Issues

On Firefox 3, it is not possible to adjust the width of Clippings Manager's tree list.
Shortcut key assignments are lost after migrating to the common data source.
Exporting Clippings data to a Clippings file that already exists may cause the data to be appended to the existing content in the file instead of overwriting it.

Help and Support

A Quick Start Guide is available, and is recommended reading for first-time users.

Support requests should be emailed to the Clippings mailing list at clippingsmozdevorg. Bug reports should also be emailed to the Clippings mailing list. If you have a Bugzilla account on Mozdev, you may file a bug report at http://clippings.mozdev.org/bugs.html.

Clippings Editor beta

2008-03-03T12:19:00.013-08:00

Clippings 3.0 will have the ability for system administrators and redistributors to customize the Clippings XPI (the redistributable file that users download to install into Firefox or Thunderbird) with default clippings data. This new feature prompted the need to have a utility to simply the task of creating, editing and viewing default Clippings datasource files, eliminating the need to either do this in Clippings Manager (and disturb one's personal Clippings data in the process) or manually editing the Clippings RDF file (which is too easy to corrupt and is therefore not recommended).

So here it is, a beta release of Clippings Editor -- a standalone utility that makes creating, viewing and editing Clippings datasource files easy.

» Download: Clippings Editor beta for Windows (6.9 MB; English (United States))

WARNING: This beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that doesn't sound like you, you should wait for the official release, which should happen at the same time as the official release of Clippings 3.0.

Installation Instructions

Click on the above download link and save the zip file to a desired location on your system, then unzip it to a folder of your choice. There is no setup program to run.

To uninstall it, simply delete the folder where the zip file was unzipped to.

Sorry, Clippings Editor is currently available for Windows only. This utility will be available for other systems (Linux, Mac OS) in the near future.

Starting Clippings Editor

To run Clippings Editor, locate the folder where it was installed to, then double-click on the file clippingseditor.exe.

To simplify things, you may want to create a shortcut on the Start menu or the Desktop to point to the executable.

Things You Should Know About

If creating a new Clippings datasource file, you must give it a file name and desired folder location before you can begin editing it.

The datasource file is automatically saved when exiting the application. The Save command in the File menu is available if you wish to save the currently-open file at any time.

The Save As command doesn't work if saving to a different folder. This is a known bug.

Clippings Editor can only edit a single file at a time (this is an SDI application). For now, if you want to edit two or more files simultaneously, simply run another instance of Clippings Editor.

Clippings Editor doesn't natively handle the old Clippings 1.x series format files. Clippings 1.x files can be opened, but a new Clippings file must be created to edit it. Also, Clippings Editor cannot save a file in Clippings 1.x format -- use the Export command on the File menu to export to Clippings 1.x format.

Do not use Clippings Editor to modify the Clippings datasource file in the user's Firefox or Thunderbird profile folder (or the user's home directory if the common Clippings datasource is enabled). Doing so may result in data corruption. Instead, invoke Clippings Manager from the host application and export the Clippings data using Options → Export. You can then edit the exported file using Clippings Editor.

And Finally... Some Fun Trivia

Clippings Editor is a standalone application that is based on Mozilla's XULRunner platform. The astute reader may notice in the above screen shot that Clippings Editor's user interface is remarkably similar to the Clippings Manager UI from Clippings (the extension for Firefox and Thunderbird) because both windows share the same code -- except for several modifications, e.g. removal of integration with Firefox and Thunderbird, new menu bar, and minor changes to the toolbar.

More about Clippings 3.0 features

2008-02-25T22:17:00.003-08:00

Here are more details on the new features introduced in Clippings 3.0.

Common Clippings Data for Firefox and Thunderbird

This much-requested feature allows your Clippings data to be created, accessed and modified from both Firefox and Thunderbird. That means that a clipping created in Firefox will be visible in Thunderbird; a clipping created in Firefox that is modified in Thunderbird will be updated in Firefox, too; etc.

This feature will be enabled by default for users who have never had Clippings installed in Firefox and Thunderbird. If you are upgrading from a previous version of Clippings, you can choose to keep your Clippings data separate in Firefox and Thunderbird, or you can enable common clippings by running the Common Clippings Wizard (Clippings Manager, Options → Common Clippings) from both Firefox and Thunderbird.

Placeholders In Clippings

You can now define placeholders inside a clipping that you will be prompted to fill in when you paste the clipping. Placeholders are essentially variables that appear in the clipping text in the format $[variable_name]. Valid variable names can contain letters (lowercase or uppercase), digits (0-9) and underscores. Example clipping with placeholders:

Hello, $[YourName], I'm glad you're coming to the club meeting at $[meeting_time]. See you $[2nite]!

When you paste a clipping with placeholders, you will be prompted to fill in the value for each placeholder in the clipping. If you want the placeholders in the clipping pasted exactly as they are, with no prompting and substitution, the clipping name should be prefixed with [NOSUBST].

There are six predefined placeholders you can use in your clippings; these predefined placeholders will be automatically substituted with their expected values when you paste the clipping.

$[NAME] - the name of the clipping
$[FOLDER] - the name of the folder the clipping belongs to
$[DATE] - the current date, expressed in the format defined in your system's locale settings
$[TIME] - the current time, expressed in the format defined in your system's locale settings
$[HOSTAPP] - the name and version number of the host application you're pasting the clipping in
$[UA] - the user agent string of the host application

Default Clippings

System administrators and redistributors can bundle a default Clippings datasource file into a customized Clippings XPI to pre-populate their users' datasources when they install the customized XPI. To create a customized XPI, do the following:

Download the Clippings 3.0 XPI and save it to a location on your system.
Unzip the XPI using a ZIP client such as WinZip. Make sure that the directory structure in the XPI file (actually a ZIP archive with an .xpi file name extension) is intact.
Copy a Clippings datasource file containing the default Clippings data to the defaults directory and rename it clippak.rdf.
Re-zip the XPI archive; the directory structure and all files that were in the XPI must be preserved.

When the user installs the customized XPI, the default Clippings data will be automatically imported when starting the host application (Firefox or Thunderbird) after the installation.

Hint: Create and organize the default clippings using Clippings Manager, then export the data to a Clippings file. A new, standalone utility is in the works that will let you view and edit Clippings files without disturbing your personal Clippings data.

Other Things You Should Know About

If, before migrating to the common Clippings data source, you have a large number of clippings and folders in the root Clippings folder, migrating from Firefox and Thunderbird may result in a larger number of clippings and folders in the common data source, resulting in a rather lengthy Clippings submenu in the host application's context menu. Consider organizing your clippings (deleting unneeded clippings from the root folder and moving clippings to folders) before running the migration utility.
Sometimes, if the common Clippings data source is enabled and you make changes to a clipping from Clippings Manager invoked from one host app and then switch to another instance of Clippings Manager from the other host app, the update from the first host app may not be reflected in Clippings Manager from the second host app. Use Options → Reload to update the display.
The Redo (a.k.a. "Undo Undo") function key in Clippings Manager has changed as of milestone release 2.99.3; the function key is now F2.

Clippings 3.0 Release Candidate 1

2008-02-25T11:50:00.009-08:00

This is the first release candidate of Clippings 3.0. Barring any last-minute showstopper bugs, this release should resemble the final 3.0 release.

» Download: Clippings 3.0 RC 1 (175 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0b3 and Thunderbird 2.0-2.0.0.*)

Supported languages: English (United States), Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak.

If you already have a previous release of Clippings installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release.

Please note that Clippings 3.0 is, and will not be, compatible with Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5. These versions are obsolete and Mozilla Corp. is no longer supporting them.

What's New

This is a summary of all the new features introduced in the past development milestone releases. More details about some of the features are described in another post.

Common clippings data for Firefox and Thunderbird. This much-requested feature allows your Clippings data to be created, accessed and modified from both Firefox and Thunderbird. (More info.)
Shortcut keys. You can now assign a shortcut key to a clipping at the time of creation or by editing a clipping in Clippings Manager. Shortcut keys can be any letter (A-Z) or digit (0-9). To paste the clipping into a web page form field in Firefox or a new email message in Thunderbird, press CTRL+ALT+V, then the shortcut key.
Clipping placeholders. You can define placeholders inside a clipping that you will be prompted to fill in when you paste the clipping. Built-in placeholders for the date, time, clipping name, user agent, etc. are also available. (More info.)
Default clippings. System administrators and redistributors can bundle a default Clippings datasource file into a customized Clippings XPI to pre-populate their users' datasources when they install the customized XPI. (More info.)
Improvements to Clippings Manager's automatic save functionality, including on-the-fly updating of clipping edits/changes.
Double-click on a clipping in Clippings Manager to paste it into the most recent host app window
Numerous bug fixes.

Known Issues

On Firefox 3, it is not possible to adjust the width of Clippings Manager's tree list.
Shortcut key assignments are lost after migrating to the common data source.

Feedback Welcome

Please send bug reports to the Clippings mailing list, or file a bug report on Bugzilla (requires Bugzilla account on Mozdev). You can also leave a comment below this blog post.

Panic Button 0.9.1 (beta 2 release)

2008-02-13T12:57:00.014-08:00

This release contains some improvements to the first beta release of Panic Button.

Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then you shouldn't install it.

» Download: Panic Button 0.9.1 (16 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0b3)

If you already have the previous release of Panic Button installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release.

What's New

The Panic Button action is configurable through the extension options dialog (Tools → Add-ons from the Firefox browser window, select Panic Button in the list of extensions and click Options). The Panic Button action options are: hide all windows (the fastest option; a Restore Session toolbar appears after all Firefox app windows close so that you can bring back the browser windows later), minimize all windows (slowest option -- but all windows, including ancillary app windows like Help, View Source, Bookmarks/Places, etc. can be restored), or quit (close all windows and quit Firefox).
Windowing shortcut keys (for minimize, maximize and restore commands on the browser window) and CTRL+Q (the quit key) are no longer included with Panic Button.
The F9 key for invoking the Panic Button action can be disabled; it is enabled by default. This is useful if you have another extension installed that uses that key.

Known Issues

The Panic Button action option to hide all windows doesn't work if a system native file picker dialog box (Open, Save As) is open in any of the browser windows at the time the Panic Button action is invoked (bug 18629).
If a dialog box (e.g. Options, About) was invoked from browser window A, clicking the Panic Button on browser window B won't hide browser window A. This is only happening on Firefox 3.0b3 if the Hide All Windows action on the Panic Button is set (bug 18637).

Things You Should Know About

Any downloads in progress will continue in the background if clicking the Panic Button to hide or minimize all windows. If Quit was selected in extension preferences as the Panic Button action, downloads in progress will be cancelled.

Help and Support

Feedback on this extension is welcome. General comments and bug reports may be submitted by going to the AE Creations home page and clicking Contact. If you have a Bugzilla account on Mozdev, you may file a bug report here (please make sure you specify Panic Button on the bug summary field).

Translations of Panic Button are not yet enabled due to the enhancements that required adding more UI strings. Panic Button will be resubmitted to Babelzilla when it is stable for final release. Thanks to the Babelzilla translation team for their efforts so far.

Send Tab URLs 0.4.1 released

2008-02-06T00:12:00.000-08:00

This minor release adds support for a few languages (made possible by the awesome translators at Babelzilla) and is compatible with Firefox 3.0 beta 2.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 0.4.1 (21.1 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0b2)

If you already have Send Tab URLs installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled in Firefox. Otherwise, open Extension Manager in Firefox, then right-click on the entry for Send Tab URLs in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

What's New

Compatible with Firefox 3.0 beta 2
Removed support for Firefox 1.5 series, which is no longer maintained by Mozilla Corp.
Added support for Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Polish and Spanish locales

Known Issues

On Windows, Send Tab URLs has been confirmed to work with Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey Mail, Outlook Express and MS Office Outlook. Send Tab URLs may not work with other Windows-based email programs not listed here, especially if the URLs of the individual browser tabs are long. No such limitation have been found on Linux or Mac OS X.
On German and Russian locales, the toolbar button caption may appear in English.

See the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.

Yahoo + Microsoft?

2008-02-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

I remember Yahoo! as being one of the first few Web sites I visited when I walked into the library at my high school one day to work on a research assignment. There was only one computer with Internet access (through this big, noisy external 28K modem with little red blinking lights), and Netscape Navigator 3, considered the most advanced Web browser at the time, was my window to the World Wide Web.

Those early days of the Web were simpler times, and Yahoo! was a reflection of that. Its home page had only a few, grainy images, and almost all text was rendered in Times Roman font. It was merely a vast directory of links to Web sites, not a true search engine like what Google presently is. It was simple, yet elegant -- and it was the tool I used to conduct my very first Web-based research.

At the beginning of my first year of university, I was so dissatisfied with the university's email service which was accessible only through a primitive, character-based Lynx browser that I decided to open a Hotmail account (all of my classmates seemed to have a hotmail.com address, so I followed the crowd). Back then, the company behind Hotmail was bought out by Microsoft just a few months earlier, so the original Hotmail UI was still intact. But after Microsoft overhauled the Hotmail interface in their gradual efforts to make it resemble an MS Office application, I bailed out -- and looked again to Yahoo!.

By this point, Yahoo! had grown bigger. Its home page continue to retain the simple yet elegant look, but by then it had various other Web-based services such as online shopping and email. Its email service was appealing, and so I signed up for a yahoo.com email address.

As time progressed, Yahoo! had grown and changed dramatically. Eventually it did away with the spartan, text-oriented home page and it became a graphic-heavy, commercialized, advertising-driven portal, presenting users with links to news, sports, video, autos, finance, travel, relationships, movies, TV shows, celebrities, jobs, classifieds, shopping, games, instant messaging and many, many other services. Its roots as a Web directory is all but forgotten, its link buried somewhere in its massive patchwork of services. Yahoo! went on a shopping spree of its own, buying up companies like GeoCities and eGroups, and assimilated their products into its own growing collection. Meanwhile, Yahoo! Mail has been transformed into a Web 2.0 app, trying desperately hard to appear and act like a desktop application. While its message preview feature is a major benefit for me, its bloated, extraneous features have annoyed me so much that I have since defected to Gmail -- although I still use my Yahoo! email account for personal messages (I have recently switched back to Yahoo! Mail Classic because the new Yahoo! Mail won't work on Firefox 3.0 beta 2). And Yahoo! Briefcase, the only other Yahoo! service that I use occasionally, has remained fairly static in this sea of change -- probably because it's been neglected while the company focuses on its other, more profitable, online offerings.

Despite weathering the dot com bust, Yahoo! has recently fallen into hard times. Even with Jerry Yang, its co-founder, at the helm again, Yahoo! has been performing poorly in the eyes of investors and mass layoffs are imminent. Its weakened state has now left it vulnerable to a takeover bid by Microsoft, which it has been eyeing for some time in its ongoing battle to outdo Google for Internet dominance.

It's inevitable that a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo! will succeed, one way or another -- because in the end, its shareholders are only interested in making a profit, and Yahoo! executives and employees with stock options would be eager to cash in and make a few quick bucks... indeed, both are strong incentives to see the deal go through. That leaves the question of what to do with all that overlap between MSN and Yahoo!. But as far as Microsoft is concerned, it could care less about Yahoo! Mail, Briefcase or all of those other services, because its only interest is in Yahoo!'s search engine and advertising businesses.

I view this prospect with some degree of sadness. As one of the early members of the Internet generation, I practically grew up on Yahoo!, and it would be shame to see it disappear into Internet history along with other relics like Netscape. But the stark reality is that many are seeing these events as a golden opportunity to profit from the misfortune of others.

Clippings milestone releases not localized

2008-02-01T22:19:00.000-08:00

For those early adopters interested in installing Clippings 3.0 milestone releases (numbered 2.99.x) on a non-English Firefox installation, please note that these releases do not yet have any of the new UI strings localized. This is the cause of the error messages reportedly appearing below the Firefox or Thunderbird application windows.

This problem has been documented in bug 18572 which will be fixed before the Clippings 3.0 release candidate. In the meantime, the solutions that I can suggest are to either stick with Clippings 2.6, or wait until the release candidate is released.

(With thanks to the reporter of bug 18572 for the heads up.)

Improvements to Panic Button

2008-01-31T14:02:00.000-08:00

I've played with Panic Button a bit more since I released a beta version of it earlier this month. There are a few things I've observed with it; one of them is an annoyance, the other is something that seem out of place for an extension that fulfills a relatively narrow, specific purpose.

First off, minimizing all windows isn't exactly instant -- in fact, it's painfully slow, on Windows at least. When hitting the Panic Button, the windows animate one by one as they shrink themselves to the taskbar. If you have a lot of open Firefox windows, this can last a few seconds. And by then, the boss will have already noticed that, at which point he would then stop by your desk and demand to know what you're up to....

The shortcut keys for window operations (minimize, maximize, close all) don't fit in with Panic Button's sole purpose of hiding all browser windows and concealing your Web surfing. They are especially redundant when users could configure them using the handy Keyconfig extension.

What to do

The minimize window behaviour is platform-specific and cannot be changed from within the Mozilla environment. So that leaves me with the following options:

Leave it the way it is
Use the session API to save the state of each open browser window, and then close all of them. That means the browser windows will truly be hidden instead of merely being minimized to the system taskbar. Have a toolbar appear that allows the user to click on a button (after the boss walks by) to reopen the browser windows and restore the browser session.
Give the user the option to configure the behaviour of the Panic Button: minimize all, hide all windows (with the toolbar appearing so that they can be reopened later), or exit Firefox entirely.

The redundant shortcut keys will be eliminated -- except for F9, which is a useful alternative to the Panic Button button. Another reason for eliminating them is that some of them may already be mapped to other system functions on the user's desktop environment -- in particular, ALT+F5 and ALT+F10 are system keys in Gnome which perform the same window actions as Panic Button.

And yes, I know... the Panic Button icon is ugly and needs improvement.

Clippings 2.99.5 development milestone released

2008-01-26T19:45:00.000-08:00

This is the fifth development milestone release leading up to Clippings 3.0, intended for early adopter users who crave the latest and greatest. Users not comfortable trying out pre-release software and tolerating its many bugs should stick with Clippings 2.6 for now.

Clippings 2.99.5 is a feature-complete release. This milestone release will, for the most part, contain all the great new features that you will see in Clippings 3.0.

» Download: Clippings 2.99.5 (146 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0b2 and Thunderbird 2.0-2.0.0.x)

If you already have a previous release of Clippings installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a development snapshot, no automatic upgrades to this release will be available to current Clippings users.

What's New

Removed support for Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5. These versions are obsolete and Mozilla Corp. is no longer supporting them.
Added support for Firefox 3.0 beta 2.
Clippings' first-run initialization has been improved.
Bug fix: No auto reload after migration completed (bug 18197)
Bug fix: Common Clippings command should be hidden after migration is completed (bug 18368)
Bug fix: "Clippings Error" command on Clippings menu not removed after successful automatic recovery on Thunderbird

Known Issues

Regressions occurring when Clippings is installed on Firefox 3.0 beta 2:

In Clippings Manager, it is no longer possible to adjust the width of the tree list.
Export as HTML from Clippings Manager doesn't work (bug 18519)
Many message boxes from Clippings will have the oddly generic title bar caption "[JavaScript Application]"

Other issues outstanding:

Clippings Manager status bar item count isn't updated if Clippings with packaged datasource is installed on to another host application (bug 18552)
Shortcut key assignments are lost after migrating to the common data source.

Help and Support

Send your questions to the Clippings mailing list at clippingsmozdevorg. Enter a new bug here (Bugzilla account on Mozdev required - or you can just post your bug report to the mailing list). Remember to check the bug list first to see if an issue you want to report has already been filed.

Stay tuned for a release candidate of Clippings 3.0.

Introducing Panic Button

2008-01-07T20:41:00.000-08:00

After searching in vain for an extension that hides all browser windows to prevent the boss from snooping in on your Web browsing, I quickly put together Panic Button... a cool, useful Firefox extension that adds a toolbar button to the browser window -- literally called "Panic Button." Now you can minimize all browser windows -- as well as any open Firefox windows such as the help viewer, Bookmarks Manager, View Source, Error Console, etc. -- with just one click on a toolbar button!

You can also invoke the same action as the Panic Button, um, button, by pressing F9.

A beta version of Panic Button is now available for download. Support for languages other than English will be available soon.

» Download: Panic Button 0.9 (4.7 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 2.0 - 2.0.0.*)

After installing Panic Button, add the Panic Button button to the browser toolbar by choosing View → Toolbars → Customize on the Firefox menu bar, and then dragging the Panic Button to the desired location.

What Else?

Panic Button also introduces a few additional shortcut keys for the browser window. The shortcut keys are summarized in the following table.

Action	Shortcut Key
Minimize All	F9
Minimize	ALT+F9
Maximize	ALT+F10
Restore	ALT+F5
Close All	CTRL+Q

Note that pressing CTRL+Q will function the same as if File → Exit was selected from the browser menu bar.

You can change the shortcut key bindings using a Firefox extension called KeyConfig.

Known Issues

The Restore key binding (ALT+F5) conflicts with a system-wide shortcut key on KDE that displays the desktop window list (bug 18411).

Looking ahead to 2008

2007-12-31T19:10:00.000-08:00

The hours and minutes are ticking as the end of 2007 approaches. There are a couple of new year's resolutions that I hope to fulfill in 2008. Here's a list.

First off, writing more frequently on this blog about projects as I work on them. I find that writing about them helps to brainstorm ideas, contemplate solutions to problems, and solicit feedback on them.

Finish up Clippings 3.0 development, and make it work in Firefox 3.

Send Tab URLs needs an update. Since its first release, there have been new localizations created for it, thanks to the translators over at Babelzilla. The new update will include the new localizations.

Develop a few extensions that I've got on my idea list:

Panic Button - minimizes all windows using a shortcut key or a toolbar button. Great for quickly concealing your Web surfing when the boss walks by your desk.
Bookmark Keys - inspired by shortcut keys for Clippings and also by a coworker's annoyance, I want to extend Clipping's shortcut key concept to work with Firefox's bookmarks. That is, pressing a shortcut key like CTRL+ALT+B, and then a letter or digit, will point the browser to the bookmarked Web page. (The name "Bookmark Keys" has already been taken by another extension that does something similar, but only for bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar.)
Further development of XULicious, the del.icio.us tag browser. This isn't an extension - it's a stand-alone application that uses the XULRunner platform. The prototype that I introduced over a year ago is languishing, and its usefulness at present is rather trivial.

Finally, there is a Web 2.0-style application that I'm thinking about working on - but I'm still thinking about ideas on how to make it useful because as it is right now, it really isn't. Once I have my ideas clarified I'll write more about them in this blog.

Happy New Year!

Clippings 2.99.4 development milestone release

2007-12-29T19:07:00.001-08:00

This is the fourth development milestone release leading up to Clippings 3.0, intended for early adopter users who crave the latest and greatest. Users not comfortable trying out pre-release software and tolerating its many bugs should stick with Clippings 2.6 for now.

» Download: Clippings 2.99.4 (147 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 1.5-2.0.0.x and Thunderbird 1.5-2.0.0.x)

If you already have a previous release of Clippings installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a development snapshot, no automatic upgrades to this release will be available to current Clippings users.

What's New In This Release

Common Clippings Migration utility (Clippings Manager, Options → Common Clippings) to enable the common clippings feature and migrate your clippings data from the data source in the host application profile directory to the common data source. This eliminates the tedious, manual set up that was necessary in past milestone releases to enable and initialize the common clippings data source.
Double-click on a clipping in Clippings Manager to paste it into the most recent host app window
Mini-help appears when starting Clippings Manager for the first time, and when clicking What's This in the Shortcut Key field.
Clippings toolbar (disabled by default due to usability problems; see this post for details)
The Clippings button for the host application toolbar has been removed, as it is not very useful.
Bug fix: Clippings menu missing if clippak.rdf (the packaged data source file) is corrupted or invalid (bug 17898)
Bug fix: resolve confused UI state after migration to common datasource (bug 17939)
Bug fix: incorrect status bar count after new clipping/folder or import from other host app (bug 17871)

Known Issues

For the most up-to-date list of bugs, please see http://clippings.mozdev.org/bugs.html.

Common clippings is still disabled by default; however you can now enable it by running the Common Clippings Migration utility, described above.
Clippings Manager does not automatically reload the clippings tree after the migration is completed; workaround this by closing and then reopening Clippings Manager (bug 18197)
Shortcut key assignments are lost after migrating to the common data source.

Things You Should Know About

To migrate your clippings data to the common data source, you must run the Common Clippings Migration utility (Clippings Manager, Options → Common Clippings) from both Firefox and Thunderbird.
If, before migrating to the common data source, you have a large number of clippings and folders in the root Clippings folder, migrating from Firefox and Thunderbird may result in a larger number of clippings and folders in the common data source, resulting in a rather lengthy Clippings submenu in the host application's context menu. Consider organizing your clippings (deleting unneeded clippings from the root folder and moving clippings to folders) before running the migration utility.
Sometimes, if common clippings data source is enabled and you make changes to a clipping from Clippings Manager invoked from one host app and then switch to another instance of Clippings Manager from the other host app, the update from the first host app may not be reflected in Clippings Manager from the second host app. Use Options → Reload to update the display.
The Redo (a.k.a. "Undo Undo") function key in Clippings Manager has changed as of milestone release 2.99.3; the function key is now F2.

The twin floating toolbar predicament

2007-12-27T21:07:00.000-08:00

Hope everyone had a great Christmas! With the holidays winding down, and me not being in much of a mood to participate in the Boxing Day consumerism frenzy, it's time to dive back into Clippings.

Earlier, I wrote about the problem where it's impossible to determine which host application the floating toolbar palette is originating from, if both Firefox and Thunderbird are running and the toolbar was invoked from both host apps.

The ideal solution is to make the floating toolbar disappear whenever the host application window loses focus, and make it reappear, if it was hidden, when the user restores focus to the host app window. This behaviour is the same as that found in Microsoft Word. Another idea is to put an icon in the floating toolbar's title bar to indicate which host app the toolbar was invoked from. But trademark concerns would prevent me from using the official Firefox or Thunderbird logos in Clippings, and any kind of substitute would be unrecognizable by most users. Plus, the latter idea didn't address the issue of two floating toolbar windows appearing simultaneously if the toolbar was invoked from both host apps -- and that just looks silly, as the following screen shot illustrates:

The rather silly result of invoking the Clippings floating toolbar from both Firefox and Thunderbird.

The first solution was clearly the ideal, and one I tried to get it to work. The key to it is to be able to determine when the host app window loses or gains its focus so that the floating toolbar can be hidden. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine if the host app window has lost focus. The activeWindow property of the nsIWindowWatcher interface always refers to an open window -- even if that window doesn't have focus! Another approach was to hide the toolbar if the blur event on the XUL window is fired, and show the toolbar (if it was hidden) when the focus event is fired. While it is possible to handle a focus event, that isn't the case with the blur event; I tried putting an onblur event handler on the XUL window element, as well as using addEventListener() to register a blur event handler, but to no avail. A seemingly promising newsgroup discussion that I found only lead me to a dead end.

Rather than hiding the toolbar when the host app window loses focus and restoring it when the host app window regains focus, why not hide it when the user moves the mouse out of the host app window, and show it again when the mouse moves into the host app window? Seemed like a great idea... except that the mouseout and mouseover events are fired not just on the window, but on any element contained in it that can trigger mouseout and mouseover events. And when I say this, I don't just mean the XUL elements that define the host app window UI -- but the HTML elements in the Web page displayed in Firefox's browser content area, or the content area of Thunderbird's message compose window! There was no pattern that I could find to help me filter out unwanted event invocations, and at this point I knew that this wasn't going to work, either.

Sadly, the Clippings toolbar isn't ready for prime time, and having worked on this for some time with no results that's really usable, I decided that it's time to move on. The toolbar is still there, but it is now disabled by default. The boolean preference "clippings.toolbar.enabled" needs to be created and set to true in about:config to make the Clippings Toolbar command visible in the Clippings status bar icon menu in the host app.

Users itching to try it out now can do so by downloading and installing the latest experimental snapshot release from http://downloads.mozdev.org/clippings/experimental/. Look for the XPI file named clippings-2.99.3+_20071227.xpi.

Creating the Clippings Toolbar

2007-12-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

Finally I've got the Clippings toolbar to work reasonably well. It can be invoked by right-clicking on the Clippings icon on the host application's status bar and choosing the Clippings Toolbar command. It is a floating palette toolbar (or "windoid" as the Mac folks say), so it appears above all windows.

You can try it out now by going to http://downloads.mozdev.org/clippings/experimental/ and downloading and installing the XPI file named clippings-2.99.3+_20071215.xpi (there is another XPI file in the same directory with the word "toolbar" at the end of its file name; it is an older, buggy build, so ignore it). Note that it hasn't yet been tested on Firefox or Thunderbird 1.5 series, and thus it isn't guaranteed to work on those versions.

A few challenges had to be overcome in order to implement the Clippings toolbar:

The features string in the window.open() call which invokes the floating toolbar window includes the unknown string "popup" - this makes the window appear as a popup window which UI elements like menus and tooltips render as. However, this results in a chromeless window, lacking the title bar and borders. I had to style my own window border and title bar, resulting in a floating toolbar window that, as you can see from the above screen shot, won't necessarily match the appearance of floating toolbar windows in the user's desktop environment.

The toolbar was invoked in this fashion to satisfy the criteria of a floating toolbar palette -- specifically, that it floats above all windows and that a taskbar button (in Windows) should not appear for the floating toolbar. Invoking the floating toolbar as a modeless dialog would satisfy the criteria, but on the Mac it may be rendered as a dialog sheet.
The toolbar needs a reference to the most recent host application window so that it will perform its operations (insert clipping, new from selection) in the context of that window. This was made possible through the very useful XPCOM interface nsIWindowMediator.
Moving the floating toolbar window by dragging its title bar was painful to implement. After over a week of trying to get it to work I gave up and searched online for drag-and-drop DHTML code, hoping that I could somehow adapt it to work with dragging an XUL window to move it. In the end, I figured it out on my own.

In a nutshell, the drag start and stop can be initiated from the onmousedown and onmouseup events, respectively, on the toolbar palette's title bar (actually an XUL <vbox> element) -- but the actual move event handling needs to be invoked from the onmousemove event from the XUL <window> element. Handling the mouse move from the title bar (the <vbox> element) works only as long as the mouse stays within that element during the move operation; if the mouse is moved at a great distance on the screen, the mouse cursor jumps out of the title bar rather than moving the floating toolbar window. I still haven't figured out exactly why, although I suspect it has something to do with the DOM event flow as explained in the W3C's DOM 3 Events specification.

There's another problem: if the Clippings toolbar is invoked from both host applications (Firefox and Thunderbird), and both are open at the same time, two Clippings toolbars appear on the screen, and it's nearly impossible to distinguish which of the two is from which host app. More about this in another post.

A toolbar for Clippings

2007-11-18T19:36:00.000-08:00

Many users have asked for a quicker, easier way to paste clippings as an alternative to right-clicking on a web page text box (or a new email message), pointing to Clippings in the context menu, and then picking from the submenu that appears. Shortcut keys, which was introduced in the first milestone release leading up to the eventual 3.0 release, is one answer to this request -- albeit for keyboard-savvy users.

There were several ideas that were suggested, all of which I considered:

A new sidebar UI
A new toolbar UI
Double-clicking on a clipping in Clippings Manager to paste it
Clippings "smart tags" -- like the Smart Tags in MS Office applications
Make the Clippings menu detachable
Placing the Clippings menu on the status bar icon. (This is actually the original placement of the Clippings menu in a very early, pre-1.0 release.)

A new sidebar UI seems like a sensible idea, but I don't like how it would narrow the viewable browser content area just so a user can paste a clipping from a list that's always visible (until the sidebar is closed). Obviously not a problem for people with large screens -- but remember that not everyone has the luxury of a large monitor (for example, I still use a 17" CRT at home). And if the user's collection of clippings in the "root" (a.k.a top level) folder is not that many, then all that empty space in the lower part of the list is just wasted screen real estate.

Smart tags are a great idea -- until you actually experience them. They can be annoying, especially when they follow you everywhere in its futile attempt to be overly helpful to you in every single use case scenario. I've turned off Smart Tags in Microsoft Word for that very reason.

While double-clicking on a clipping in the Clippings Manager tree list might seem convenient, the question is, if multiple browser windows/message compose windows are open at the same time, where does the double-clicked clipping go? Should a double-click action display a popup menu or a dialog box asking which window to paste the selected clipping into? Sure, let's suppose that by default the clipping will be pasted into the previously-focused host app window... but what if the user wanted it pasted in a different window?

That leaves the toolbar UI idea. The advantage of a toolbar is that it only needs to appear when when user wants it to, and that it can either be docked to the host app window, or floating (as a floating toolbar pallete). Not only can the user quickly access the Clippings menu with just one (left) click, but other commands (New, New From Clipboard, etc.) can be readily available. Here is what I have in mind:

Clippings toolbar, docked to the host app window.

Floating toolbar.

The toolbar idea seems to be the best option. It uses up only the screen space it needs (well, the floating toolbar at least), and the user can show or hide it as he pleases. And the floating toolbar can be moved anywhere on the screen -- where the user wants it to be -- so that its within easy reach, as opposed to a fixed sidebar UI, and without the annoyance of a "smart tag" that follows you everywhere. Now that I think about it more, is a docked toolbar really that necessary?

Edit: I just realized that my arguments against adding clipping pasting capabilities from the Clippings Manager are baseless. If one could insert a clipping into the current host app window from the toolbar, one should be able to do so from Clippings Manager, too. Silly me.

Discovering the wonders of stringBundle.getFormattedString()

2007-11-07T11:42:00.000-08:00

Localization in an XUL-based app or extension is accomplished by putting all UI strings into DTD or .properties files and bundling them into a Mozilla XPI. The latter type of file is used for storing UI strings that will be programmatically assigned to XUL elements like <label> and <description>, etc. during run-time. In this situation, one would need to define a <stringbundle> element in the XUL document and set its src attribute to the chrome URL of the .properties file containing the localized UI strings. Then to get the UI string, one would do the following in the JavaScript source:

// Get the <stringbundle> element in the XUL document
var strBundle = document.getElementsByTagName("stringbundle").item(0);

// Get the UI string
var theString = strBundle.getString("foobar");

The variable theString will then contain the localized string defined in the XUL document.

A problem for which I've discovered a solution only recently is how to embed another string within a localized string. This typically happens when the UI string contains one or more substrings that are only determined at run-time, such as file I/O error messages that gives the name of the file or folder.

Somehow I overlooked a method of the <stringbundle> object that can accomplish what I needed: getFormattedString(). The idea is that the UI string contains placeholders that will be substituted at run-time with another string that is provided in an array parameter. Each n^th element in the array parameter corresponds to the n^th placeholder in the string -- basically, the same idea in the C library function printf().

After reading the documentation on XULPlanet, I tried it out. I modified the UI string that defines the error message that appears if the user attempts to import an invalid Clippings file:

alertImportFailed = Cannot read file: \"%s\"\nThe selected file may not be a valid Clippings file.

Then in clippings.js, which contains Clippings Manager's UI logic, I modified the code that gets the error message as follows:

// gStrBundle is a global variable referencing the <stringbundle> element defined in clippings.xul
// path contains the full path of the file the user attempted to import
var err = gStrBundle.getFormattedString("alertImportFailed", [path]);
doAlert(err);

But it didn't work: only the first character in path was returned. So I did some searching on Google and came across the documentation on Devmo that indicated that an uppercase "S" is needed in the placeholder.

alertImportFailed = Cannot read file: \"%S\"\nThe selected file may not be a valid Clippings file.

Now it works. Armed with this knowledge, I even made the effort to point this out to a developer who had written a "bug fix" to work around the lowercase "s" problem.

And one other hint on the subject of localizing strings: to embed a non-breaking space in a UI string in a .properties file, use the hexadecimal Unicode escape character \u00A0.

Musings on Thunderbird's future

2007-10-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

Over the summer, it was announced that the Mozilla Thunderbird project would be spun off into a new, separate organizational structure. Then, earlier this month, the lead Thunderbird developer, Scott McGregor, suddenly announced his departure from the Mozilla Corporation. This unexpected announcement was then followed two days later with news from David Bienvenu, another prominent Thunderbird developer, that he too was leaving.

In their respective blog postings where they briefly announced their resignations, both have stated that they will continue working on the Thunderbird project. Nonetheless I'm skeptical of their ability to retain their focus on the continued development of the Thunderbird email client, especially since they're moving on to other endeavours. With them pursuing their new venture (according to David Ascher's open letter to the Thunderbird community), how could they possibly maintain the same level of effort on Thunderbird like they used to? Unless their new "venture" somehow involves Thunderbird, but very little has been revealed as to what they'll be pursing next.

I've read a lot about these recent events with great interest, and it's interesting to read the speculative reasons for the departures and the negative "doom and gloom"-type predictions; case in point: right now Mozilla Links has a reader survey up, asking if the two key departures signify "the end of Thunderbird." While I can't help but wonder if there is a deeper, undisclosed reason for these two developers leaving, perhaps these departures -- as well as the spin-off from the Mozilla Corp -- is an opportunity for the Thunderbird project to reinvigorate itself with fresh ideas and evolve further from what it is right now.

How? Being the open source project that it is, there are people all over the world either volunteering their time, efforts and talents into the ongoing development and testing of Thunderbird, or are paid to do so by other companies (Red Hat, Google, IBM, et. al.) that hire them to do their work. As long as there is interest and motivation in improving Thunderbird, as well as the number of end users justifying the effort at doing so, there will be people who will be passionate and dedicated enough to step forward and make it so. And with the new, separate organization focusing entirely on the email client, the unavoidable distractions that come with supporting other, non-mail projects should be eliminated.

I admit that Clippings wasn't originally intended to be compatible with Thunderbird; I had designed and coded it with Firefox in mind. As a Thunderbird user, it never struck me as the slick, polished application that Firefox is; even with version 2, I still regard Thunderbird as nothing more than the mail and news component split off from the original Mozilla 1.x suite. But compare that with Firefox... much effort has been put into making it the most user-friendly open source application thus far (although I have heard a lot of good things about Ubuntu...), and Firefox 3 promises to be another great leap forward into making Web browsing even more easier, efficient and fun -- for both end users and developers.

Hopefully we will soon see the same with Thunderbird.

Clippings 2.99.3 development snapshot released

2007-10-08T10:58:00.000-07:00

This is the third development milestone leading up to Clippings 3.0, intended for early adopter users who crave the latest and greatest. Users not comfortable trying out pre-release software and tolerating its many bugs should stick with Clippings 2.6 for now.

» Download: Clippings 2.99.3 (128 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 1.5-2.0.0.x and Thunderbird 1.5-2.0.0.x)

If you already have a previous release of Clippings installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a development snapshot, no automatic upgrades to this release will be available to current Clippings users.

What's New in This Release

Default clippings. System administrators and redistributors who want to package the Clippings XPI with default clippings can do so by unzipping the XPI archive using a ZIP client such as WinZip, putting the data source file containing the default clippings in the "defaults" directory, and then re-zipping the archive. The data source file must be named "clippak.rdf", and must be a valid Clippings file. Hint: Create and organize the default clippings using Clippings Manager, and then export the data to a Clippings file.
The predefined clipping variable $[HOSTAPP] now includes the host application's version number.
On-the-fly updating of clipping edits/changes.
Automatic refreshing of Clippings Manager's display whenever its window is focused. This is especially important when common Clippings data is enabled, because this ensures that the most recent changes from the other host application is reflected in Clippings Manager.
Improvements to the new common data source feature, which was introduced in the last development snapshot.

Known Issues

For the most up-to-date list of bugs, please see http://clippings.mozdev.org/bugs.html.

Common clippings is still disabled by default; please read this blog post for instructions on how to enable it. This issue will be addressed in the next development snapshot release.
The Clippings menu in Firefox's textbox context menu may not appear if the default clipping file is corrupted or not recognized as a valid Clippings file (bug 17898)
Clippings Manager's status bar item count is sometimes incorrect; this can happen when either a new clipping/folder from another host app is created, or when a clipping file is imported from another host app. This bug occurs when common clippings is enabled (bug 17871)

Other Things You Should Know About

The function key for Clippings Manager's Redo command (a.k.a., "Reverse Last Undo," "Undo Last Command" or - my personal favourite - "Undo Undo") has changed. Prior to this release it was F4. Because that key is in conflict with the shortcut key for invoking the menu in the new Shortcut Key drop-down field, the function key for Undo Undo has been changed to F2.

Help and Support

Send your questions to the Clippings mailing list at clippingsmozdevorg. Enter a new bug here (Bugzilla account on Mozdev required - or you can just post your bug report to the mailing list). Remember to check the bug list first to see if an issue you want to report has already been filed.

Clippings featured in Linux.com article

2007-09-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

Clippings was among the five extensions described in an article on Linux.com:

“As the name suggests, the Clippings extension allows you to save text snippets and quickly insert them into a message, which can save you a lot of typing. To create a new snippet, select the desired text fragment, right-click on it, and choose Clippings -> New From Selection. Alternatively, you can evoke the Clippings Manager by clicking on the Clippings icon in the lower right corner of Thunderbird's main window. You can then create a new clipping from scratch (press the New Clipping button), or from the text in the Clipboard (press Options and choose New From Clipboard). The Clippings Manager also allows you to edit the existing clippings and organize them into folders. Better yet, using the Options button, you can easily export and import your clippings, which can come in handy if you use Thunderbird on multiple machines, or you want to share clippings with other users.”

Click here to read the full article.

More about the Clippings 2.99.2 development snapshot

2007-08-30T11:02:00.000-07:00

As promised, here are more details on the new features introduced in the latest pre-3.0 development snapshot.

Placeholders In Clippings

You can now define placeholders inside a clipping that you will be prompted to fill in when you paste the clipping. Placeholders are essentially variables that appear in the clipping text in the format $[variable_name]. Valid variable names can contain letters (lowercase or uppercase), digits (0-9) and underscores. Example clipping with placeholders:

Hello, $[YourName], I'm glad you're coming to the club meeting at $[meeting_time]. See you $[2nite]!

$[NAME] - the name of the clipping
$[FOLDER] - the name of the folder the clipping belongs to
$[DATE] - the current date, expressed in the format defined in your system's locale settings
$[TIME] - the current time, expressed in the format defined in your system's locale settings
$[HOSTAPP] - the name of the host application you're pasting the clipping in
$[UA] - the user agent string of the host application

Toolbar Button for Firefox

To add this button to a toolbar in the Firefox browser window, right-click on a toolbar and choose Customize, then from the toolbar button pallete drag the Clippings button to the desired location.

Common Clippings Data for Firefox and Thunderbird

This much-requested feature allows your Clippings data to be created, accessed and modified from both Firefox and Thunderbird. That means that a clipping created in Firefox will be visible in Thunderbird; a clipping created in Firefox that is modified in Thunderbird will be updated in Firefox, too; etc.

This feature is still a work in progress with lots of bugs, and is therefore turned off by default. If you want to test this feature, be sure to familiarize yourself with the list of known issues in the post announcing the release of this milestone and the latest bug list from the Clippings website.

To enable common clippings for both host applications (Firefox and Thunderbird):

Download and install this release of Clippings in both host apps.
Export your clippings from both host apps. You can skip this step if you've never used Clippings before, or want to start from scratch.
Create a new boolean pref in about:config named clippings.datasource.common and set it to true. Do this for both host apps.
Exit both host apps and restart them.
In one of the two host apps, open Clippings Manager, then import the clippings you had exported in step 2 (Options -> Import).
Switch to the other host app, and from there either right-click on a text box or open Clippings Manager. You should now see the imported clippings from the other host app.

If this feature is enabled, your Clippings data for both host applications will be stored in your home directory. So for Linux or UNIX, this would be /home/username, and on Windows this would be C:\Documents and Settings\username.

Sometimes the tree list of clippings and folders in Clippings Manager may not be updated with the latest changes from the other host app. To refresh the display, choose Options -> Reload. (This command appears on the Options menu only if clippings.datasource.common is enabled.)

Clippings 2.99.2 development snapshot released

2007-08-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

This is the second development milestone leading up to Clippings 3.0, intended for early adopter users who crave the latest and greatest. Users not comfortable trying out pre-release software and tolerating its many bugs should stick with Clippings 2.6 for now.

» Download: Clippings 2.99.2 (120 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 1.5-2.0.0.x and Thunderbird 1.5-2.0.0.x)

If you already have a previous release of Clippings installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a development snapshot, no automatic upgrades to this release will be available to current Clippings users.

What's New in This Release

Here is a summary of the new features in this release. More information on these new features will be posted to this blog soon.

Clipping placeholders. You can now define placeholders inside a clipping that you will be prompted to fill in when you paste the clipping.
Toolbar button for Firefox.
Common clippings data for Firefox and Thunderbird. There are a lot of bugs affecting this much-requested feature that can render it unusable; consequently this feature has been disabled by default. More details (like how to turn it on) will be forthcoming.

Known Issues

For the most up-to-date list of bugs, please see http://clippings.mozdev.org/bugs.html.

Undoing deletion of a clipping with a shortcut key assigned to it will not restore its shortcut key. It is also not yet possible to undo a shortcut key assignment in Clippings Manager (bug 17531).
Clippings Manager doesn't immediately update the shortcut key assignment on a newly-created clipping, if it was created via the New Clipping dialog box (bug 17467).
Clippings Manager problems with Options -> Reload: repeated invocations will cause folder icons for empty folders to change to a clipping icon and then back to folder images. Also, unwanted undoing of editing actions when invoking Reload (bug 17669)
Subfolders sometimes don't appear in the Clippings menu when common Clippings data is enabled; the Clippings menu needs to be invoked repeatedly to have all subfolders (empty and non-empty) appear (bug 17413).
Shortcut key doesn't work immediately after assignment in Clippings Manager (bug 17673)