Eli Grey

Jetpack API

By Eli Grey Comment

Mozilla Labs’ latest creation, Jetpack, is a great way to extend Firefox. It currently has a poorly documented API that doesn’t mention all of the public methods and fields. Due to Mozilla Labs’ decision of not putting the API documentation on MDC or the MozillaWiki, I cannot update the documentation myself. Therefore, I will list all of Jetpack’s documented and undocumented features as of version 0.1.2 in this blog post.

(Not) Assigning Properties

You can’t do things like jetpack.tabs.focused.contentWindow.foo = "bar". I find this much too restrictive, as it hinders a developer’s ability to make an API for a webpage to communicate with a jetpack to do things that need more privileges. Ironically, it seems that jetpacks have full access to Firefox’s XPCOM (Components.*, ect.) which means, with a little hacking, it may be possible to bypass this restriction. The follow code shows an example of getting an nsIAlertsService and using it instead of jetpack.notifications.show.

var body = "Some text",
title = "Notification",
icon = "http://code.eligrey.com/favicon.ico",
 
classObj = Components.classes['@mozilla.org/alerts-service;1'],
alertService = classObj.getService(Components.interfaces.nsIAlertsService);
 
alertService.showAlertNotification(icon, title, body);

(more…)

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Noteboard tweaks and Safari support

By Eli Grey Comment

I am happy to say that Noteboard now supports Firefox 3+ AND Safari. It doesn’t support the current release of Safari so you have to use the Safari 3.1.2 nightlies as those builds include localStorage. Technically, I should be also be able to make Noteboard work with IE 8 beta 2 due to it also supporting localStorage, but I don’t want to waste my time making fixes for IE.

Now on to the tweaks for version 2.0.1:

  • Documents can now have custom titles instead of having the document name be the title.
  • The title quickly changes to “Noteboard” and changes back when you push Ctrl + D to bookmark Noteboard.
  • I stopped using uneval function built-into Firefox and took part of the JSON.stringify function from json.org’s JavaScript JSON script.
  • I added and changed these keyboard shortcuts:
    • Import is now Ctrl + Alt + 1
    • Export is now Ctrl + Alt + 2
    • To change the current document’s title, push Ctrl + Alt + T
  • Starting the open a document prompt (Ctrl + Alt + O), clicking OK, and leaving it blank opens up the shortcuts page.
  • The shortcuts page is no longer stored on your localStorage and is now a protected static document that can’t be edited/deleted.
  • A lot of code tidying up.
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Noteboard 2.0

By Eli Grey Comment

I have almost completely re-wrote Noteboard from the scratch and made Noteboard 2.0 because I felt that Noteboard 1.0.1 was not that extensible. There are a TON of changes in Noteboard 2.0, most notibly, multiple-document support. Just the same as the original Noteboard, it’s Firefox 3+ (and maby 2+) only. The reason there are only keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) to control Noteboard is so there are no other elements other than a single text box. The stats bar has been disabled by default and can be toggled on by pushing Alt + Ctrl + I. All of the keyboard shortcuts are on the first document, ‘shortcuts’. I don’t reccomend deleting this document until you get used to using Noteboard.

With multiple document support, you can now create as many documents as you like. To create a document, push either Alt + Shift + N or Alt + Shift + C and type in the name of the document. To open a document you can push either Ctrl + Alt + O or Alt + Shift + O. To delete a document, you push Alt + Shift + D. To rename the current document you’re viewing, push Alt + Shift + R. All documents (and document names) have full Unicode support so you may name them whatever you want to and put whatever you want in them.

Another cool feature introduced in Noteboard 2.0 is document autoload URLs. (more…)

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