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about:mozilla - Labs roadtrip, Geode, new PR blog, SUMO, SVG, Firefox 3.1 docs, Ubiquity, MozAfterPaint, and more…

In this issue…

Mozilla Labs in Europe next week

Aza Raskin writes, “Mozilla Labs will be making its way to Europe next week to meet with community members, hackers, bloggers, media types, and general feasance doers. We’ll be spending time in London, Berlin, and Barcelona. We’ll be having Labs nights, Hack sessions, or drinks in each of the cities. They are open to everyone, so we hope you can join us!” More details, including a rough schedule of events, are available at Aza’s weblog.

Introducing Geode

Geode is a new add-on that allows developers to begin experimenting with geolocation technologies and concepts in Firefox 3. Future versions of Firefox plan on supporting the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and for you to optionally grant access to, your location. These should be available for users to play with in upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1, as well as alpha releases of Mobile Firefox (Fennec). Geode provides an early implementation of this new technology so developers can work on and test concepts that include location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today. The add-on includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data. The initial Mozilla Labs blog post includes lots of information about how Geode works, where to download it, some ideas of how it could be used, and how to participate in discussing ideas and possible experiments. Aza Raskin has also written a follow up post about Geode that delves into some of the questions that have emerged about the add-on since its initial release.

New Mozilla public relations weblog

Mozilla’s PR team has unveiled a brand new weblog called “Above the Fold: Mozilla in the News”. “Above the Fold is a place where the community can come to gain insight into public relations at Mozilla. We will keep track of news cycles around announcements, competitor news and general industry trends. We’ll then provide context around why particular articles and dialogues are important to Mozilla.” If you’ve ever been interested in public relations, how it works and what it all means, you should keep an eye on Above the Fold.

SUMO: Article editor ideas wanted

The team over at support.mozilla.com (SUMO) is looking for ideas about how to improve the SUMO Knowledge Base editor system. Discussion and feedback is happening over on the SUMO Contributors forum, and there is still time for you to post your thoughts and ideas about the problems you have with the current editor and possible ways to fix those issues. A list of some of the problems and solutions that have already been posted is available over on the SUMO blog.

Firefox accessibility team needs your help

Marco Zehe writes, “If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty a bit and would like to help the Firefox accessibility team, now would be a good time to get involved. The code that calculates the names for any created accessibles has been growing over time and became largely unmaintainable. New features such as adding the aria-label property support requires code duplication for HTML and XUL, and in general the code has many stylish un-niceties. Our team has started a code cleanup and code refactoring series to get the code into better shape.” As with any refactor, there is a risk of regressions that cannot be discounted. The team is looking for help in testing for these possible regressions and for help filling in any gaps that exist in the suite of available testcases. This is a really great way to get involved with Mozilla development efforts, so if you’re interested in helping out you should read Marco’s blog post to get started.

SVG external document references

In a post over at the Web Tech weblog, it has been announced that SVG external document references have landed on trunk in time for the second beta of Gecko 1.9.1 and Firefox 3.1. “What this means is that the SVG element being used as fill, clip path, mask, filter, svg:use target, or marker no longer needs to be in the same document as the element being filled, masked, filtered, etc. In particular, what this means is that the preceding post about SVG effects in HTML content now applies to HTML documents, not just XHTML.” For further details and a link to a small demo, see the Web Tech blog post. Robert O’Callahan has also written about recent SVG development on his weblog.

Audio, Video, Geolocation, and Media queries documentation

Eric Shepherd has been hard at work documenting some of the exciting new web technologies that are slated for inclusion in Firefox 3.1. The first of these is the HTML 5 audio element that is used to embed sound content in an HTML or XHTML document. Similarly, the HTML 5 video element documentation is available, explaining how to use this element to embed video content. Eric has also put together a “Using geolocation” article that introduces the new geolocation API that is being developed for Firefox 3.1. Finally, the documentation for CSS media queries — allowing different style sheets to be selected based on very precise criteria — has been finished.

Help wanted: QA Companion Firefox add-on

Clint Talbert writes, “Zach Lipton and Ben Hsieh created the QA Companion Add-on. This is an extension that sits in a little window outside Firefox or Thunderbird and helps you run litmus tests against the application. It has helped hundreds of people when testing Firefox, and has become a central part of our QA Test Day events. The QA Companion has great potential, lots of poeple have thought about ways to do more interesting mash-ups with it, including integrating some of the Nightly Tester Tool functionality, integrating Mozilla automation UI, etc. If you’ve always wanted to work on an Add-on but it seemed like too big of an undertaking, this is a great opportunity. The base code is already written, and it’s all pretty straightforward. Together, we can design a new direction for the tool and make it a really useful item for all the testers out there in Mozilla Land.” If you’re interested in helping the QA team out with the development and maintenance of the Companion, Clint asks that you leave a comment over on his blog post.

Ubiquity progress

A release candidate for Ubiquity 0.1.2 has been made available, and the team is asking for help with testing. 0.1.2 contains a preliminary version of the parser-localization API that Jonathan DiCarlo discussed in an earlier blog post, and that he has described in detail in his parser localization API tutorial. Complete release notes are available for 0.1.2, and further information about and download links for the release candidate are available at Jonathan’s weblog.

SUMO: Live Chat and community participation

Matthew Middleton, the new leader of the SUMO Live Chat project, has written an interesting article about the Live Chat facility and its contributor community. “One great thing about support as a community is that the line between user and helper is blurred. Many of the current support volunteers got started by asking a question themselves, staying around to help other people using information learned solving their own problems. While most users don’t have time to commit regularly, many users have spent extra time to troubleshoot an issue, to let us know what finally fixed a problem, or to post advice in the forum. The support community allows new helpers to learn about Mozilla and support in general, while actively helping users solve problems.” As always, the SUMO team could use more help, and if you think Live Chat might be right for you, you should read Matthew’s post to find out how to get started.

MozAfterPaint: new experimental API

As posted on the Web Tech blog, the Firefox 3.1 team has created a very experimental API for Firefox 3.1 that fires an event every time content is repainted. “The event is called MozAfterPaint and is fired at the document, bubbling up to the window. The event offers two attributes, clientRects and boundingClientRect, which tell you what was repainted, using the same objects and coordinate system as the getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect methods. This is very useful for Firefox extensions and other ‘chrome’ code that might be using the canvas.drawWindow method to capture the contents of windows. It might also be useful for tools like Firebug. But it’s also potentially useful for regular content, for example if you want to add some lightweight JS instrumentation to a page to measure what gets painted by Firefox, and when.” For more information about this new API, read the post over on Web Tech.

Developer calendar

For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

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Original Article from Mozilla

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