Greg Stein left a comment yesterday about being able to submit an application to work on Mozilla for Google’s “Summer of Code” even if it isn’t listed. This morning I submitted a proposal. The basic premise is to allow me to accelerate my development of the reporter tool, including some server side changes (to help prevent abuse), and getting started (this is most likely longer term) on screenshot support, so users can submit a screenshot of the issue they have (should they choose to do so, it will be an option for obvious privacy reasons).
It sounds like a great opportunity, and a good excuse to give my Mozilla contributions greater priority.
Thanks to Greg for giving me the heads up on that.
5 replies on “Summer of Code 2”
If you want to allow submitting a screenshot, the best would be to be able to take it from the copy/paste buffer. That would make it very easy to submit one.
Joel (as in Joel On Software) described a similar tool they wrote to ease bug report submission.
I hope you are also planning to integrate support for the canvas element and its drawWindow() function. This way, you could capture the web page exactly as it is rendered by Gecko, without the need for external tools or the clipboard. Of course, this won’t be available before the next Deer Park alpha release or Fx1.1, but IMO Reporter should be ready for it.
Only thing that’s missing is the ability to get the image data in a canvas as a PNG file, but roc said it would be ready for Gecko 1.8.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291218
Yes, I’m doing it as a canvas element. It won’t hit the fan until 1.1 ships. This is a 1.5 feature enhancement.
I repeat this is not for 1.1. As far as reporter is concerned, the feature set is frozen at this point. Only bug fixes from here on out.
Of course we need it as rendered by gecko, and no extra tools. It needs to be cross platform too.
Don’t worry, I’ve been planning since I started to see roc’s work.
About the screenshots: what would be really nice if the system could just create a screenshot itself. Assuming the website is publicly accessible all your system has to do is take the URL, load it in Firefox and create a screenshot of it. That would be the most user-friendly way of creating screenshots: not bothering users with it.
You could also do this only when no screenshot was provided by the user (to ensure that each website has a screenshot associated with it).
BTW, there have been online services with which one could view how a specific URL would look like in different browsers (like IE, Firefox, Netscape, Safari, etc). However, I cannot recall the name or URL of the service.
Martijn: no, that wouldn’t work, since we would have to recreate the exact system (OS version, browser build). We would need quite a bit of resources, and it wouldn’t be accurate.
We need *accurate* data.