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.
appMac, creator of wkiosk, announced a new version. This new version uses Apple Safari HTML engine, and is a free upgrade for customers of wKiosk 2. Version 2.2 is still available, and uses Gecko.
Wonder why they switched?
One should note it requires 10.3. So perhaps, they are utilizing the smaller package (no need to install WebCore, as it’s ships with 10.3). Unlike Gecko, which has to be included.
What has been a really annoying issue apparently has a better patch. Bug 21962 has been fixed.
Thankfully. Hopefully this time, all these errors will go away. Not as often as before the first fix, but still happens sometimes.
As undoubtably, everyone will blog in the next 24 hours… New mozilla.org has been launched. Looks great. Also has a wonderful end user focus.
One thing I would do, is make a subdomain for corporate customers. Gear the same information, but corporate advantages (why Mozilla is good for an organization). How to deploy? Security? Updating? Customizing? Branding? etc. These corporate users involve thousands of users per company. And remember. Convince 1 company, and potentially thousands of users are exposed to Mozilla. That means some will undoubtedly, download for home use.
An ISP targeted subdomain may not be a bad idea either.
While not technically end users. These customers will advertise for the Mozilla project. All have reason to consider Mozilla. For example licensing. Mozilla is free distro for all OS’s. Great for ISP’s. Can be customized, etc.
Food for thought.
I’ve been an advocate of making Calendar an Extension for Thunderbird. I think Calendar extension is important in a Mail client, as most business users are accustomed to this (Microsoft Outlook). As a result, it makes sense for Mozilla to offer such functionality.
Besides matching, it’s also quite convenient. What 2 Apps do most people keep open? Email, and a Calendar. Secondly, Calendar can integrate quite well with email (Appointment notification, etc.)
This really is a giant step in bringing Mozilla closer to the workplace.
Very interesting developments lately regarding Apple and Mozilla. At first, it appeared the groups were closer than they appeared. Rumor was that iBrowser (known as Safari now), was going to use then Chimera (now Camino) as it’s basis. Ended up Apple used KHTML, and some claimed it made them “compete”, though most including myself believe any standards compliant engine is good.
Now Pinkerton makes a very interesting find:
Apple has started bundling NSPR and NSS in Panther
From November 3, 2003 @ 10:38 PM
So Apple apparently is providing some sort of Aid for Mozilla technologies. But that’s not all.
David Hyatt notes his work on Safari:
(5) A complete implementation of the XUL box model. Safari on Panther supports the complete XUL box model, including horizontal and vertical boxes, the ability to flex, and the ability to reorder content and reverse content. If you’re building canned content that you control using WebKit, you’ll find a whole new range of layout possibilities at your disposal. Need to create dynamically sized headers and footers and flexible center content? The XUL box model can do that. Need to center an object within the viewport? The XUL box model can do that too.
From October 28, 2003 @ 12:48 AM
Henrik Gemal also notes XUL support in Safari.
Ok, I found it interesting. Perhaps someone else will as well.
A little discussion with David Bienvenu today regarding spam filtering in Mozilla. Allow me to summarize:
I’m a huge fan of the SpamAssassin project. I use it, and love it. It’s not perfect, but does a great job. SpamAssassin, adds a header to all email it searches, known as “X-Spam-Status” It’s “yes” if it’s spam, and “no” if it isn’t. If it’s spam, the message contains the tests that triggered (causing it to be recognized as spam), and it attaches the original message to the email.
As a result of this, the email isn’t pure spam anymore. It contains SpamAssassin markings. That’s good, and bad, depending on how you look at it. My suggestion was to acknowledge other spam products do this, and take advantage of it.
Several things can be done as noted in the bug:
An option to use X-spam-status over bayes testing.
This in essence disables bayes testing in Mozilla. It uses the spam status to decide if the message is spam. The UI works the same (the little garbage icon’s and junk folder), just the actual spam checking is done by another product. Easier than configuring a filter (for end users). Cleaner UI.
Give weight to x-spam status
This would allow the mozilla to somehow give a weight to spam marked as spam.
Feed Mozilla’s Bayes
This I suggest as a default behavior, as SpamAssassin does this for it’s own bayes engine, and it’s successful. emails marked as spam are automatically acknowledge by Mozilla as spam/ham, and learned by the bayes system in Mozilla. In essence the bayes learns automatically without user interaction.
There are other possibilities as well. Regardless of the method(s) utilized in the future, there is serious room to enhance an already powerful tool. Comments on the bug would be nice. Mozilla Mail kicks butt thanks to it’s ability to provide great features. There has to be a way to utilize this to fight spam better than any other email product on the web.
Interesting checkin for Camino. According to Pinkerton’s Post, it brings for some awesome features. In particular Rendezvous Integration makes my list. I’m real excited to see my favorite browser of all time making a stride forward. This is awesome “Top 10” bookmarks sounds interesting too (perhaps that could be ported to Firebird?)
Now where is Camino 1.0? I’m dying for it to get that far. It’s the best browser on the Mac. And in my opinion best browser on any platform.
I’m a little concerned by some linkage brought by Mozillazine.
Two possible uses here, one inferred is not so good. I’m a bit concerned about this idea being spread around the community. We do NOT want to download Open Source products behind the users back. Doing so would not be a good idea. It will associate fine products like Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Gaim with Spyware and Trojans. If the user wants the files, that’s a different story.
One thing all these products share, is the promise to fight such evils (Mozilla doesn’t download ActiveX, OpenOffice is more secure than Microsoft Office).
An individual who uses such an app for anything such as downloading without the computer owners consent should be well aware that this contradicts the ideas of Open Source, and the values the community holds. Open Source is about freedoms. Freedoms don’t need to happen behind someone back.
While it’s great to see enthusiasm in getting Open Source projects into the world. Don’t do so with unethical means. All it will do is put a negative spin on a good thing. It will hurt, not help Open Source.
Perhaps someone can turn this little Gem into a convenient App so that a user can learn about Open Source alternatives, download and install them from 1 nice little App.
It’s great to be an open source zealot (tell all your friends and family). But don’t do anything that puts open source projects in a negative light. Thousands of programmers have made these projects what they are. They love people promoting their products. But they don’t like people making their products look bad.
I hope others will make a mention of this as well on their blogs, and open source projects. Don’t ruin Open Source.