some words from technology briefcase

Recently, I visited a blog post  with associated comments organized as a tree. I thought  it would be hard to  come back later for reading only the modifications, that is, the comments added since my last visit. So, I have got an idea, a use case involving  HTML5 and  JetPack.

So, how to improve a blog (or a forum) reading  experience ?
Well,  HTML5 support provides offline data storage, that is, client-side storage. Then, everytime a user visits a page, like a blog or forum page, it’s possible to store the page visit’s date  on the client-side. With the last visit’s date, HTML5 enables to highlight, to emphasize with a different color the added or modified sections (<div> sections with a timestamp ?) since the previous visit.
And I imagine a Jetpack extension  could leverage that stored information to emphasize these kind of sections.Such a feature has an interesting potential. It would be a small, but very useful feature, like an introduction to the HTML5+JetPack potential. And beyond emphasizing sections, the HTML5 capabilities open the door to execute time-based actions (using, for example, JetPack extensions).
In my personal optionion, i think that it would be interesting to think at a use case that show these features!

(my new project?…mmm)

A new type of “Browser Customization” tool started to be a real developing tool for addons in Mozilla Firefox.

Mozilla Labs released the version 0.7 of Jetpack!
I will not explain how to use and how to install it (you could even watch video tutorial on the website) but i will show a little example of it.
Once you installed Jetpack, a special tab (about:jetpack) will appear with several tabs: a smart description, a list of installed Jetpack addons, a developing window, tutorial with some demos, memory usage monitor and api tutorial.  In tutorial tab there are examples about scripting under this API but not all are working..
Anyway, there is a script that is checking every minute how many unread mails you have in your gmail account and it shows an icon on your mozilla status bar.  I edited it a little bit and now it will show a toast notification if new mails arrived.  Here the code:
 (continue reading…)