Categories
Mozilla Software

Fuller Screen Mode

Daniel Glazman is at it again, this time with Fuller Screen Mode. This has serious potential for anyone who ever has to do a presentation. I’ve had it in the back of my mind for a while. With a copy of Firefox, you now have full screen presentations that look great. For presentations on the go, consider a USB Drive and Portable Firefox if you’re using Windows. Very easy, very compatible, very usable. Combine it with jQuery and the Interface Elements or script.aculo.us (with included prototype.js), and you can even have some fancy transitions and everything. Not to mention it can print out very well, and is very compatible to share on the web.

Of course you’ve seen that S5 is a great way to make presentations. Still waiting on someone to make an extension for NVU/Mozilla Composer that makes S5 presentations a snap for average Joe who doesn’t want to code.

Categories
Mozilla Software

Wengo Preview

Daniel Glazman hooked me up a few days ago with a preview of the OpenWengo extension for Firefox he’s been working on. It didn’t work with a build of mine (likely my fault), but did of course work with Firefox 1.5.0.1 which I tested with. I’m on very limited bandwidth here, and voice quality was very good in the limited testing I did. That was not only subject to my terrible connection, but had a trans-Atlantic hop, so it’s likely the worst case scenario most users will ever experience when using VoIP. It seems stable, and has a very well designed UI. The Dialpad UI (featured below) did strike me as a little basic (just regular buttons for numbers), but it’s an early build, I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets a little better looking over time. Address book is similar to Thunderbird in what it includes. Personally I’d love to see it support reading Thunderbird’s address book.

At this point the UI option for chat and SMS are implemented, but the feature itself doesn’t exist. He’s now working on chat right now, so I suspect we’ll see that soon. It looks like it’s pretty standard from the screenshot he provides.

Hopefully OpenWengo will work with GoogleTalk in the near future.

Overall, I think it’s got strong potential to beat Skype. I haven’t yet tested it’s Firewall skills (I’ll post again when I see how it does in this test). Provided it can meet/beet Skype with Firewalls, the biggest problem would be getting enough users to be useful. Working with Google Talk would be a big step in that direction.

Below are some screenshots I took:

Login Menu Wengo Address Card 20060131_wengo_buddies.png 20060131_wengo_dialpad.png

Categories
Mozilla

NVU 1.0 PR

Glazou needs some credit on his accomplishment for a 1.0 PR release. It looked pretty solid on the Mac. The one thing I noted was the prefs window appeared slightly to small (horizontally) cutting off a few things, and the same for the “ping us so we can count our users” window.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, go grab some bits. It’s a pretty solid product, and not even 1.0.

Categories
Mozilla

NVU 0.50 Released

NVU 0.50 has been released by Daniel Glazman. Awesome new build. Some cool new features. Spell Checking is my favorite (and hope to see it in Thunderbird soon).

My real pet pieve is this:

Spell checking invokes to early. It should invoke when you press space, or return, not when your still on the word. Otherwise it marks it as an error until you complete. That flashing red line is just plain annoying. An option to delay it until you ‘leave the word’, or better yet ,make that the default, would be greatly preferred.

Daniel did a list documenting the new features, so no need to re-write that. All around a great build. All html geeks, and non-geeks should be checking it out. Makes web development easy.

Categories
Mozilla

NVU 0.2 Out

It’s out and available for download.

As expected, awesome work on behalf of Daniel Glazman. I decided once again to take it for a spin. I normally hand code all my pages, but sometimes, especially when working quick on web apps, I like to just draft quick temporary html pages for working, and make them good later. So an editor like NVU would still be useful to me.

Here are a few things I saw that prevent me from using it full time (remember it’s only 0.2, and already kicking butt, I expect it will be much more polished and powerful by the next release):

  • Ability to open multiple pages at one using the File -> Open dialog. I’ve got sometimes several files I work on quite a bit. Would be nice to get them all in tabs, so I can just toggle through them while I work. Tabs kick butt by the way
  • Ability to use a local directory, or a server share in the Site Manager. This would allow people that use samba to connect to their intranet server, or someone with a .mac account to connect to the server via webdav.
  • Normally when I write a template, I create one as a master, but leave a spot in the body where the actual contents will be included dynamically on the server. On the server, I normally have a bunch of .tmpl files that have chunks of html, but aren’t complete HTML files. Just body. NVU, and Composer finish them off for me (adding all the precursor stuff like a doctype, and title, body tags. I don’t want those. That would break my app. I would like it to open and preserve if it uses .tmpl extension and don’t modify my code. Just assume I know what I’m doing πŸ™‚

My dream list (most likely shared by most power users, and corporate users):

  • Support raw html editing just as well as WYSIWYG, including code completion, and a method for third parties to implement support for other languages
  • XSLT support
  • Option to use XHTML

Ok, well that covers my quick little review. It’s worth a look, even if your not adopting quite yet. I’m not going to use it from day to day, but from what I see, that time will come soon enough. It’s already got some pretty cool new toys, and some polish since the Communicator days. Some cool new toys like templating, and that all to sweet color picker, which hopefully will be in Mozilla soon enough so I can use it in Thunderbird.

Categories
Mozilla

Nvu Progress

If your not checking Daniel Glazman’s blog on a daily basis, you really should be. I wish more developers would blog like he does. Checkout the latest screenshot. I hope that color picker makes it to Mozilla soon. That’s real sweet.

Seriously. Keep an eye on that blog. It’s great stuff. Often screenshots, and daily updates, with lots of detail. And it’s not to technical.

Categories
Mozilla

Disruptive Innovations

Looks like Daniel Glazman is serious (as if we thought he wasn’t). Disruptive Innovations apparently has a website. Composer++ is listed, though the product page isn’t complete yet.

Noticed this when my logs had a mention of it (look under press).

Wishing Daniel the best of luck. This is great for him, as well as the Mozilla community. Composer is a solid product, and seeing it continue to mature is a wonderful thing. It’s by far the best free WYSIWYG HTML editor. Now it’s just going to destroy the competition. How cruel. πŸ˜‰

Categories
Mozilla

Composer to continue full steam

Daniel Glazman apparently is starting a new company!

MozillaZine has it covered.

Composer was never powerful enough to meet my needs as a web developer. But perhaps they can take it to that level. Imagine a Composer product competing with Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

All built on a Gecko Foundation….

And Daniel is all into standards. Even mentions joining W3C. I imagine that means we will be seeing the most standards compliant WYSIWYG web design application ever.

IMHO I would do a few things to composer:

  1. Autocomplete tags like PHPEdit does. In fact, that’s my preferred editor. I use it constantly for HTML. The best auto-complete implementation I’ve ever used. Just enough to speed me up, yet not get in my face. I would love to see Composer adopt that for source editing.
  2. Support for HTML, XHTML, XML, WML, XUL, JS, CSS, PERL, PHP, PYTHON, syntax highlighting, and code-complete where applicable (closing tags, etc.).
  3. Valid code. Keep getting closer to 100% valid code all the time. It’s good, and should keep improving.
  4. A full IDE feeling. Take PHPEdit, MSVC, or any IDE. Get that type of functionality and feel in those menu’s. Perhaps a pro/lite mode. Lite as it is now, Pro takes on a more professional, and more thorough (complex) interface.

Perhaps more later. These are my main idea. I would love to see a real open source based editor that’s thorough enough for me to be using on a daily basis. To me, Composer is a toy with potential. Not quite professional quality.

I think Daniel’s venture may be the ones to give it the emphasis it needs to become that killer app. The new resizing images, among other features added in recent history have been a good step. He’s got the experience. Now he can devote himself to composer as an Application, not a component. Yea!