The Mozilla Prism guys mfinkle and plasticmillion are doing a great job heading to 1.0, and happily we are about to start to get prism changes for maemo upstream.

Below some nice sshots of the current prism maemo port, prism-maemo_0.0.7-1 (which is just out), running on chinook.




Prism on meebo.com


Prism on mibbit.com


--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

So, the much anticipated Mozilla Summit 08 has just finished, and regardless some unforeseen, I truly believe that most of the 400 (+-) attendees had an amazing time, as so did I. Follows some of my highlights:

• Dan's team did really well on organization ...
  
• I had chance to see some really nice mozilla guys again including: both the father and grand-pa :) of mozilla mobile, dougt and choffman, respectively; the long term mozilla contributor on linux and always elegant, cblizzard; the mozilla brazil driver mgalli; as well as the nice leoz, romaxa and timeless from the microb project.
  
• From prism (+maemo), I got a fast but good talk to mfinkle: the point was mainly pushing prism forward on maemo and linux, and make it a fennec friend on the platform.
• The new mozilla embedding system is not just promising but real.
  
• I met the famous Stuart ‘Pavlov’ Parmenter and got some nice advices about browser benchmarks, steps toward a rendering server firefox, as well as about some of the huge Javascripts speed up they are about to land in Firefox 3.1 (new JS is going +- 10x faster then the current) ...
  
• Percy and blassey are also nice guys.
• It is great to see fennec and microb joining efforts toward a great mobile user internet experience.

Some not accomplished things after the event:

• I wish I had met Daniel Glazman and John Resig.
• I wish to have had a shorter trip back: 7hs (from whistler to vancouver) + 5 hous waiting + 5 hous from vacouver to toronto + one hour waiting + 12 hours from toronto to são paulo + 12 hours waiting + 4 hours from sp to manaus = 46 !

Long life mozilla ...

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Copy and paste the following gconf lines in the terminal if it is interesting for you to avoid your n8*0 display to light off:

gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/osso/applet/osso-applet-display/turn_off_display 6000000
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/osso/applet/osso-applet-display/brightness_period 6000000
gconftool-2 --type int --set /system/osso/dsm/display/display_dim_timeout 6000000
gconftool-2 --type int --set /system/osso/dsm/display/display_blank_timeout 6000000

Might be useful for someone.

**update - in order to undo the changes:

gconftool-2 --unset /apps/osso/applet/osso-applet-display/turn_off_display
gconftool-2 --unset /apps/osso/applet/osso-applet-display/brightness_period
gconftool-2 --unset /system/osso/dsm/display/display_dim_timeout
gconftool-2 --unset /system/osso/dsm/display/display_blank_timeout

--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

It sounds like another buzz-word candidate on the internet field is the term "RIA": many big guys commercially interested on RIA seem to concept it differently. My understanding about the term stands on its origin: RIA are applications running of top of browsers essential features and infrastructure: connectivity, interoperability, cloud storage (data available anywhere, any time), responsiveness, and so on, and IMO this is what drives the real meaning of RIA or "Rich Internet Applications".

PS: To avoid ambiguity we are generally referring RIA by "web applications".

In that sense, the Mozilla Prism project was launched w/ the intention of "integrate web applications with the desktop, allowing them to be launched from the desktop and configured independently of the default web browser". The project implements new concepts including "SSBs" and "distraction free browsers". Ok then, lets analyse what we have here from different perspectives:

1. On the pc (w/ satisfactory processing capabilities), users can have their web browser w/ many tabs opened, their RIAs living each one on their own process and windows, as well as many other OS applications all at the same time and their PC are able to run great.
   
2. But what about it all on the mobile space ? To be honest I am not really sure about the answer, *but* that is what this port job is mainly about: getting feedback about what maemo users get when they can somehow to integrate common WebApps (meebo.com, gmail, gdocs, gchat, ...) with their mobile desktop environment.
   

Although the TODO list is still big, the DONE list is accomplished so that it worth making "Prism to Maemo" project public.





1) Installation

While I am still having trouble to get my upload account to 'Maemo Extras" repository working fine, I've set up one living under my personal web dir: .install file here.


2) Warnings

• I will be working on this more seriously from now on with guys (luckily on #prism - irc.mozilla.org) to see what features are really interesting to have available on the mobile/maemo space.
  

• It is still an "under porting" work. so bugs are likely to be found and new releases are likely to appear.

• .deb sizes 10Mb and installed it takes 30Mb on disk.

Hope you enjoy.

--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Since a while I've being paying some attention into the promising Mozilla Prism project (old WebRunner), specially over a mobile developer perspective. Prism is a Mozilla Labs advanced development project that provides "a simple XULRunner based browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface". More interesting over is that the project came to me at the same time philip van hoof blogposted about "Web 2.0 email clients" (or something like this). My post could even get titled "mozilla-based web 2.0 email client" (or something like this), but Prism goes far away forward from that.

Main concepts here are two: Site Specific Browsers (SSB) and Distraction Free Browser:

• SSB: applications with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application (whereas typical browser chrome are rarely used). It doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrements of a normal web browser . An SSB also has a tighter integration with the OS and desktop than a typical web application running through a web browser.

• Distraction free browsing: "This is nice for those times when your have to have your web based email and docs open but you don’t need the distraction of the rest of the Internet keeping you from your work. Plus the memory footprint is kept to a minimum because it isn’t the ‘full’ browser and all of its extensions."

Could that interest users of mobile devices ?

Not sure about the answer, but I put some effort on that these days to answer this question with some practical stuff. First, I got blassey's xulrunner armel build for maemo, checked out prism source from svn, pulled Firefox 3 pre beta 5 source base (to work as my mozilla build system), built them all together and after some hacks I got Prism running on maemo OS 2008 w/ some webapps (meebo and gmail for instance).






I will try to get some thumb enabled set UI for it, as well as making a .deb/.install available for Prism to see how things go from a mobile user perspective ...

PS: Prism has nothing to do with web application development, it's simply providing a more desktop-application-like interface for web applications. Mozilla claims: "Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we're not building a proprietary platform to replace the web ... Prism isn't a new platform, it's simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don't have to target it separately, because".

UPDATE: Greetings to MFinkle and other for all work on this.

UPDATE2: Here is Prism as a Firefox 3 addon.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Feature's already implemented (and landed on microb svn).



--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Greasemonkey webaddon port for MicroB is now installable on Chinook again. Some have reported installation problems on chinook due to a libhildonmime0 incompatibility problem, but it is just fixed.

Tested on both bora (n800) and chinook (n800 and n810).

Have a nice browsing.

Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Wladimir Palant, the original Adblock and Adblock Plus Firefox web-addon developer, among other complainings, has pointed out an important security hole in initial version of the Adblock Plus Microb port :

"... So I downloaded this Adblock Plus version and soon it was obvious that it is inserting an Adblock Plus button into all web pages the user visits — using my favicon as the image on the button. Which makes me the lucky guy who can track every move MicroB users do on the Internet (at least if I decide to send HTTP headers preventing caching)."

Happily, Andre Pedralho quickly fixed this issue and uploaded the 0.0.2-1 version of Adblock Plus MicroB port in a few minutes. It is highly recommend for all Adblock Plus (maemo port) users to update their packages to the newest as soon as possible. For the other raised issues by Wladimir in the post entry, including changing the addon port name, we are investigation how much we've changed from the original source to take the proper action.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

These past days, I've been testing the just released version of Spellcheck extension for MicroB, and I'd say that even with all MicroB UI constraints for addon development including no XUL, XBL, overlay (no extensible UI) it is a great work.

Follows some usability scenarios that could be improved, though (spellcheck has to be installed).

1. Through "about:config" page, set the "layout.spellcheckDefault" to '2' and go to default browser home page.
2. Install the russian dictionary, and change you default input method language to Russian as well.
   
3. Mistype any word in Russian and it won't get underlined (indication a mistyping), once the default 'en-US' dictionary is the one in use.
   

• It is not possible right now to users to switch the a dictionary w/out having to mistype any word in the currently used dictionary language, double tap it, and change the dictionary from the prompted Select dialog. Suggestions ?
  

1. I am a user and I want to know what is the currently used dictionary , how to do this ? Only going to 'about:config' and searching for 'spellcheker.dictionary' value.
   

• Couldn't it get indicated in any of the dialogs' title that spellchecker prompts out ?
  

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

After installing Greasemonkey addon on MicroB, my n800 browsers much better: first I showed how users could better youtube from MicroB, and now just a quick update on how users can also better google search on your device: mine install google greasemonkey script, for example, add videos, images and wikipedia top 5 search results alongside normal google searches.. All this through AJAX !!!! It ends up like:


--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com