The Android platform comes with a great market available for browsing and downloading applications. Comments are easy to read, the permissions the application is requesting are clearly explained, and installing is a snap and happens in the background. Overall it’s a breeze to use. However, it’s got a large gap in it’s model that I haven’t seen addressed anywhere - there are no automatic updates for the applications.
Building off the success and fun that was had with the Firefox 3 T-Shirt Design Contest Mozilla has just launched a new Community Store. This store will let anyone upload shirt designs and print custom Mozilla shirts. If you've got good taste but designing isn't up your alley you're welcome to browse and customize the existing designs as well. I don't think there are any localized shirts on the site yet but I'm sure they'll start popping up soon - and once one is designed anyone in your local community can order it. Zazzle, the company we're using, says they ship to 84 countries which isn't everyone but it's a good start. I'm excited that localized shirts are finally available and I'm looking forward to some great designs.
Looking over what I've written about Verbatim I realize that I've never talked about the overall plan on here. Even though we're well into it at this point it doesn't hurt to review. The original plan for Verbatim was to branch Pootle and continue to merge code between the branch and trunk as features were developed. As we developed code we realized this just creates more work for developers and makes users have to choose between two branches. A better method is just to have everyone commit to trunk and write the code in such a way that any site specific code is maintained in configuration files which is what the current plan entails. Step 1: Branch Pootle. Wynand created the Mozootle branch as a place for Mozilla developers to commit. For the record, Verbatim is the name of the project, Mozootle is the name of the actual branch in the repository; effectively, they are interchangable. Step 2: Develop Mozootle. We used Bugzilla to track our changes and there are still plenty to do but the first milestone is closed at this point. Step 3: Merge Mozootle to Trunk. This is the stage we're currently at. The translate.org.za team has been reviewing the changes in Mozootle and planning out the merging strategy. There is a fast moving wiki page tracking issues with the merge right now. Our current goal is to resolve these and merge in the next couple days. Step 4: Continue development on Trunk. The plan after the merge is for all developers to continue committing code into the Pootle trunk. What "development" means is a post in itself so I'll cut this off here. In hindsight the whole branching and merging process seemed necessary at the time but it doesn't feel like we gained much. Next time I think we'll just skip the branch.
SQLite only supports a simple set of data types and the only one that really matters is "INTEGER PRIMARY KEY" so you can have it auto-increment. In fact, by default, I can declare the columns as anything I want and it doesn't even throw a warning. sqlite> CREATE TABLE t2(c1 wtf, c2 yomama); sqlite> INSERT INTO t2 VALUES(1, 'blah'); sqlite> SELECT * FROM t2; 1, blah This is all documented and explained so I can't complain to much but it's still an interesting concept.
I got the chance to try out the latest version of Shredder last night which recently celebrated it's Alpha 3 release fixing an impressive number of bugs. Among the heap of bugs is our very own bug 262319; "sort by thread fails to resort on new message." Two weeks shy of celebrating it's fourth birthday it was squashed and a fix was checked in. A few straggling bugs aside[1] proper message sorting has been achieved and the ThreadBubble extension is no longer needed. The latest version, ThreadBubble 0.8, is compatible with Thunderbird versions up to 3.0a2pre and I expect it will be the last version released. Maybe I'll work on a Firefox extension next... Anyway, thanks to everyone who tested, used, and gave feedback about ThreadBubble. :) [1] This is kind of a joke - the parent bug is actually a meta bug for all threaded view issues and I don't know how many of those are confirmed or are relevant to what ThreadBubble fixed. I do know I filed bug 461100 last night which is a new problem with the threaded view as far as I can tell.