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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.