Clippings 3.1 beta 1

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

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. And the setup required to make Send Tab URLs work with classic Yahoo! Mail would be too difficult for "normal" computer users to bother with.

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)

1. Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.enabled to true.
2. Open a new browser window or tab and login to your Yahoo! Mail account.
3. 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.
   
4. 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

1. Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.googleapps.enabled to true.
2. 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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

1. Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.enabled to true.
2. Open a new browser window or tab and login to your Yahoo! Mail account.
3. 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.
4. 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

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

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

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!

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

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.