Will's Miro dev blog

I’ve been doing Firefox extension development and it’s been going pretty slowly because it’s hard for me to figure out what’s going on when things are running (and I’m not wildly familiar with the things I’m working with).

After whining about how I wish there was a REPL for JavaScript, I did a Google search and came across MozRepl. It’s helping a lot so far. I’m not spending hours hunting for object documentation anymore.

On an interesting note, you connect to MozRepl with telnet and it has a line-mode interface. Turns out that Lyntin (a mud client I worked on years ago) works fantastically for this. I would assume most mud clients would because at heart they’re line-mode telnet clients with a bunch of features designed to remove repetition in common tasks and make it easier to skim large amounts of output quickly without having to read through all of it.

I threw together a Planet using Venus for Miro-related blogs (and other feeds). Like other Miro-related sites, the configuration and templates are stored in SVN. It’s currently set to update every 8 hours, but we can change that if need be.

The mission of these dev blogs and planet miro is to keep everyone in the loop on progress of Miro. Previously if you wanted to track progress, you could hang out on IRC (#miro-hackers on irc.freenode.net), follow the Trac timeline, and/or watch bugs change status in Bugzilla through searches. These methods are good, but they don’t follow the progress of a person or groups of people, they’re following the status changes of development artifacts–the two things aren’t necessarily the same. When I started in July, I mentioned starting development blogs and a planet because I think this has been wildly successful for other projects, but then … I never really got around to implementing the dream. Kudos to Dean for getting the devblogs set up!

As a side note, when putting together the planet, I skimmed the Miro Testing blog and I thought the entry from the 26th on how do we grow the community was both poignant and important. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already.

Update 9/29/2007: Upon Dean’s request, I changed the frequency of planet miro updates to once an hour.

I’ve been working on getting the Mediabar to be tab-friendly over the last few days. Currently Mediabar re-discovers all the media on a page every time a user goes to a new url (by clicking or entering something new in the location bar) and when the user switches tabs. That’s the behavior that I’m working on fixing.

In order to fix it, I’m doing a minor redesign of how Mediabar works internally. I’ve been hanging out on #xul and #extdev on irc.mozilla.org and picking up interesting tidbits of information.

After I fix this issue, there are a bunch of minor issues to fix and then I think it’ll be golden. I think it’s going to take another few days at least–probably more on the order of another week.

This is a first post as I get used to the WordPress interface….

I’m a developer at Participatory Culture Foundation and I work full-time on Miro development. Currently I’m working on Mediabar which is a Firefox extension that discovers media on a web-page and allows you to send selected media to media applications like iTunes, Miro, VLC, ….

My plan is to post status-type posts on this blog as well as short essays on various development issues that I come across. This gives readers a window into my development progress so that things are more transparent.

I’m using Planet Mozilla as inspiration.

That about covers it. If you’re interested in other kinds of content, comment below and I’ll see what I can do.