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Jetpack posts

Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Mozilla Jetpack contest winner harnesses GPU power to process data

Mozilla Labs has announced a winner of the Jetpack .5 contest. While Jetpack is known primarily as a framework for allowing coders with a web development background to put together add-on type enhancements for Firefox, the winner 's project wasn't your run-of-the-mill sidebar hack.

Alex Miltsev's submission was jetpack-to-CUDA, and it provides Jetpack developers with a simple way to offload intense processing tasks to GPUs. CUDA (demo video above) is NVidia's parallel computing architecture - and with CUDA-capable chips in more than 100 million PCs, Miltsev's handiwork could enable some seriously cool (and powerful) Jetpack add-ons to be developed.

The runners up (not to take anything away from them) were much more standard Jetpack offerings - a Google Translate extension, link shortener and sharer, and Twitter client.

Kudos to Miltssev for his creative entry! Here's hoping we see some truly awesome things in future versions of Firefox and Jetpack as a result.

Filed under: Audio, Developer, Utilities, Mozilla, Browsers

Jetpack 0.4, now with audio recording and page mods



Jetpack is Mozilla's new favorite power tool for customizing the browsing experience. As Lee has explained here on Download Squad, Jetpack makes creating Mozilla add-ons easier, allow developers to build using HTML, CSS and Javascript. The latest Jetpack release, 0.4, includes APIs for audio recording and encoding, as well as a page modification API.

Audio can be recorded directly to Ogg-Vorbis, which is the sound format of choice for Firefox 3.5's audio tag. That means you can allow recording and embedding, straight from the browser and all within Jetpack's APIs. There's a voice memo demo you can check out to get an idea of the way these features can be useful.

The page mod API makes it easy to implement Greasemonkey-style modifications to web pages. Some code examples are posted, including a little page mod that blacklists a site for a set amount of time to deter proscrastination.

Filed under: Mozilla, Open Source, Beta, Browsers

New Jetpack add-on puts any web page in the slidebar


The Mozilla Jetpack "In the Wild" page seems to get a little bigger every day. Mozilla is rightfully proud of the fledgling project, and for good reason. Jetpack brings no-restart add-on installation to Firefox and it opens development to a huge base of coders since they need only know HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Any Webpage Slidebar is a good example of what Jetpack can do in a very limited amount of code. In 10 lines, the developer has created a way for you to embed, well, any page you want into the Slidebar.

Paste the URL into the Any Webpage generator and set your desired width in pixels, and submit. The install button will appear on the next page. Click install, and you can pop out your page at any time by clicking the blue Jetpack arrow.

To test, I used Dabr - a web-based Twitter client optimized for mobile browsing - which is well-suited to being crammed into a 300-pixel wide column.

It's not quite as slick as Opera's dead-simple click and drag to panels, but it's a simple, effective way to make better use of your widescreen real estate in Firefox.

Filed under: Mozilla, Open Source, Browsers

Mozilla takes Jetpack back to the future with v.2 release


While it's still just a few weeks old, Mozilla is already working hard to get Jetpack ready for the future. Version 0.2 has been released, and it comes with several new API additions that make Jetpack development easier and provide access to features that will be baked in to future releases.

The most obvious addition is the Slidebar, which you can see in the screenshot above. It's a lightweight way to provide functionality much like the sidebars used by some current add-ons. Slidebars are still "full of quirks," as Mozilla's Aza Raskin puts it, but they're usable. The Facebook Chat jetpack works very well - I didn't experience any memory leaks or chrome oddities. Mozilla's Video Slide demo (check the video after the break), however, is a bit more touchy and started acting up after I tried to leave the video page from which I was adding clips.

Not a big deal - none of us should expect Jetpack to be perfect after two minor releases. It is what it is - an exciting, fun project that is going to launch a whole new rush of add-on development for Firefox.

One minor (but annoying) issue has been fixed as well. Jetpack icons no longer bleed over the top edge of your Firefox status bar. It's a minor touch, sure, but it's nice to see the attention to detail. Two more key additions: add-ons can now utilize the clipboard and persistent storage across restarts.

For more detail about the update, check Raskin's post on Labs.

Read more →

Filed under: Mozilla, Open Source, Browsers

Userscripts.org straps on a (Mozilla) Jetpack


While it's barely been available to the public for a week, Mozilla's Jetpack project is already starting to take off. The collection of scripts as already grown from two simple demos to more than 20. Clearly developers are excited about the ease and speed with which Jetpack addons can be created.

Why, they're a lot like Userscripts - which may have something to do with a new page on Userscripts.org. In addition to "power-ups" that run in Firefox with Greasemonkey, you can download a growing number of Jetpack customizations from the popular site.

Most of the scripts are fairly basic at this point - a YouTube downloader, GMail checker, etc. - but this early enthusiasm is a good indication that Jetpack is going to be a big hit for Mozilla.

Let's hear it for add-on functionality without bothersome browser restarts!

Filed under: Mozilla, Open Source, Beta, Browsers

With Jetpack, Mozilla stokes the customization fires

Firefox may never catch up to Chrome in the speed tests, but Mozilla has a huge lead when it comes to customization. The newly-announced Jetpack project might well ensure that they stay well ahead of the pack.

Jetpack aims to make browser addons easier to create by allowing developers to do so using only HTML, CSS, and Javascript (newer tags like <canvas> <audio> <video> are also supported, as is AJAX). And of course, Jetpack integrates well with Bespin (video clip after the break), which will make it easy for developers to create addons and roll out future updates.

You can see just how easy writing a Jetpack addon is in Mozilla's tutorial and by taking a quick look at the API reference.

If you add Jetpack to your Firefox install, don't expect perftection. It is, after all, only release 0.1.1. The two demos - GMail checker and UnAd - work just fine, but the position of their statusbar icons needs to be tweaked slightly.

The Firefox community loves their extensions, so making them easier to develop and accessible to a much larger group of developers is an excellent move by Mozilla. The simplicity Jetpack brings should allow for some exciting developments in a very short amount of time.

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