Planet Maemo: category "feed:252d36e7b24498212f260fde2b4a4608"

Be the Chameleon

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:53:51 +0000

Reading some blogs and forums, I noticed that some guys (and girls) are interested in having User Agent Switcher ported for MicroB. So tonikitoo, Tomaz Noleto and I rolled up our sleeves and got it to work! The result you can see below:

MicroB as Firefox 3.0

MicroB as Internet Explorer 7.0

MicroB as Opera 9.25

Get the installer here and check it by yourself. Remember to restart your MicroB browser twice and then configure it according to your preferences by clicking here or manually loading chrome://useragentswitcher/content/config.html.

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Flashblock port for MicroB

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:55:08 +0000

A picture is worth a thousand words!

Click here to install Flashblock for MicroB.

Remember to restart your MicroB browser twice!

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Thanks, clarifications and hints

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:54:15 +0000

No, there is not a new port (done)! This post is just to address some concerns that have been raised recently.

First of all, I would like to thank some guys who have really helped me with my job: Antonio Gomes (a.k.a tonikitoo) and Tomaz Noleto who taught me how to port the fonts and the Greasemonkey Add-ons. Andre Pedralho who helped me work on the MicroB spell checker, dictionaries and Adblock Plus porting. And finally a special thanks to Wladimir Palant, the Adblock Plus creator and maintainer, who warned me about a security bug in my port and who inspired me on to write this post.

I was informed by Wladimir that some "Adblock Plus for MicroB" users have looked for help in the official ABP forums. Unfortunately he will not help any of those users there. If you have any doubt, suggestion or complaining about any port we have done, you can subscribe yourself to our list, send it to us and we will reply you as soon as we have a good answer.

As Wladimir suggested in Adblock Plus official blog all the ported extensions will be renamed. Actually, the packages name will remain the same, but some configuration files would reference me and/or the guy who performed the porting and the port itself.

I hope to release a new port in the coming weeks. I'm just trying to make it work on the microb-engine (1.0.3-5) available in the maemo repository. I asked Pedralho to test the new port on a newer microb-engine version (1.0.4-5) and it worked fine!

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I am glad to present Adblock Plus

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:05:21 +0000

One of the most popular Firefox add-ons, Adblock Plus, is a content-filtering extension for Firefox that prevents nearly 99% of web advertisements and banners from being downloaded and subsequently displayed. Now it is available for MicroB!

Installation

The installation process is straightforward:

Install the ABP (Adblock Plus) package by clicking here. Remember to restart your browser.
You might see a red button in the bottom-right corner. It is a shortcut to the ABP preferences window. When you tap it, it suggests that you define a set of filters to effectively use ad blocking.
You can select filters from the following list filter subscriptions. Note that you should not enable more subscriptions than you really need as this increases the possibility of blocking legitimate content and might slow down your browsing experience.

If you get in trouble see the Notes section at the end of this post.

Blocking and whitelisting

As soon as you define filters that match ads, the ads will no longer appear. Here is an example of how a page (ebaumsworld.com) looks with before/after using Adblock Plus:

Adblock Plus Disabled

Adblock Plus Enabled

The following steps will enable you to select pages and domains that bypass Adblock Plus by defining a whitelist:

Open the page or a page from the domain you wish to whitelist.
Click the ABP button to open the preferences pop up window.
Check "Disable on this page only" or "Disable on (the current domain)".

Restrictions

Unfortunately I could not port all the Adblock Plus features, for example:

Block image: is provided in Firefox by extending the context sensitive menu (CSM) and the MicroB CSM cannot be changed.
Show tabs on Flash and Java applets: this uses XBL to add the tab around those objects and interact with the ABP preferences.

Setting preferences

ABP provides some preferences you can set in Firefox but not in MicroB, most of them are dependent on XUL or XBL, a full listing of these preferences is available.

The most important options available are in the ABP preferences pop up.

The extensions.adblockplus.showinstatusbar preference controls whether the ABP button is visible in the bottom-right corner of web pages.

Notes

ABP button is not shown in pages loaded from certain protocols, including chrome:, about:, file: and javascript:.
ABP button tries to open a pop up window, you must allow your browser to open it.

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Firefox and MicroB get a new spell checker

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:21:14 +0000

Hunspell is an open source spell checker engine and has been added to Firefox 3 development code replacing previous MySpell engine that currently ships Firefox 2.x. It provides advantages including support for Asian languages, Unicode support, morphological analysis and support for complex compounds and Agglutinative languages including Basque, Estonian and Finnish.

The spell checker extension for MicroB is now available for OS2008 users (OS2007 and earlier are not supported). Get the installer here and check the features:

Misspelled words are underlined in red just like they are in Firefox.

Double tapping on a misspelled word provides a list of suggested corrections. In addition, user can ignore the current word or add it to the dictionary.

User can also choose the dictionary to be used by the spell checker.

Dictionaries

Firefox dictionaries are fully compatible with Hunspell and can be easily packaged into a MicroB dictionary extension (see this howto). I have already packaged the following dictionaries:

If you have any problems with creating your own dictionary package or issues in general, contact our development mailing list.

Setting preferences

layout.spellcheckDefault controls whether spell check function is enabled for multi-line and/or single-line edit controls (more info).

spellchecker.dictionary: selects the spell checker's current language or locale (e.g., en-US, fi, ru, or pt-BR) (more info).

The preferences above can be found in the MicroB about:config page.

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Greasemonkey for MicroB

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:38:26 +0000

Greasemonkey is a powerful Mozilla Firefox extension that can be used to customize web page content, layout and functionality, fix rendering bugs, combine data from multiple web pages, and numerous other purposes. This is done using JavaScript.

"When the user loads a matching page Greasemonkey invokes the relevant scripts, which can then add to the page, delete parts of it, or move parts around. Greasemonkey scripts can also poll external HTTP resources via a non-domain-restricted XMLHTTP request". Greasemonkey, Wikipedia

Users can now use hundreds of already available GM scripts for their favorite web sites.

Installing Greasemonkey

To install Greasemonkey, get the installer here, open and install it through the Application Manager.

Important: You will need to restart your browser twice after that to enable Greasemonkey. I still haven't found the reason for this weird problem. It could be either a bug in the extension port itself or a Extension Manager issue in MicroB.

Installing user scripts

Userscripts.org contains most available Greasemonkey scripts. Search for any scripts you wish, tap on "Install this script" button on the top right of the page and confirm installation.

If you don't know from where to start, below is a list of scripts that I personally like, and others that were positively reviewed by other bloggers:

Google Scripts

General

Configuring Greasemonkey

As the MicroB Browser UI does not support Firefox's user interface language, this package provides a GTK+ based UI to manage user scripts. You will be asked to choose where to place this item during installation process.

The left pane lists installed scripts and has a check button to control whether the script is enabled. Clicking the 'Details' button will show the script description and an 'Uninstall' button which will completely remove the script from Greasemonkey.

The right pane lists included/excluded pages for the selected script. Most scripts include default lists, however, users can add (using regular expression) or remove pages from these lists at any time.

In addition, there is a Web based UI, which you can access through browser URL bar: chrome://greasemonkey/content/config.html. It works pretty much like the standalone UI although it is not complete. Avoid using both at the same time as they may conflict with each other.

Caveats

Some of Greasemonkey features are not supported by MicroB and may cause some scripts not to work completely. For now, these GM API functions are disabled:

GM_RegisterMenuCommand(): Adds a custom script command to "User Scripts Commands" submenu. Currently, it is not possible to do that in Maemo Browser UI.

GM_log(): Allows logging on Error Console, also not available in Maemo Browser UI.

Feedback

Please, report any bugs or give feedback to browser.extras@gmail.com The next release of GM MicroB port shall include bugfixes as well as requested features.

Other screenshots

Gmail Super Clean

Download Video

Google Extra

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New font packages available

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:46:23 +0000

I have just uploaded two True Type Font packages: Arabic and Chinese, with Arabic and Chinese character sets respectively.

To install one, click it and select open. Application manager should open. If you don't have the Browser Extras repository installed, it will ask for your confirmation to add it. If your repositories are all in working order, it should then ask to install the font package you've selected. After installing, the font may not work immediately. In this case, reboot your device and try again.

The latest version of packages will also be available on the downloads page.

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Browser Extras project launched

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:31:52 +0000

Since the MicroB beta was released, people have expressed excitement about the web sites which are now accessible because of the Mozilla engine. Although MicroB is not yet ready for its official release, I feel it is mature enough for users to use. Not simply use, but take advantage of the power of a real desktop browser on a small device.

I have been thinking of ways to improve the browsing experience on the N800. So I started packaging, developing, and porting components to enhance the MicroB browsing experience, including fonts that support other character sets. There will be more detailed posts when I have news about available add-ons.

I hope you enjoy it.

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