Time is almost up for the Extend Firefox contest and you need to get your entries in by tomorrow (10/2/09). Entries will be accepted until 11:59pm Pacific Time (GMT -8) so don’t wait until the last minute!
The submission page can be found here:
http://labs.mozilla.com/contests/extendfirefox3.5/enter.php
We look forward to seeing all of the great ideas being submitted. 
Hi everyone! There are only 7 days left to put the final touches on your genius idea. Remember, the contest closes on October 2, 2009 at 11:59pm PST!
We are eager to see what you’ve come up with. As always, let us know if you have any last minute questions or needs. Thanks for being involved and making this contest great. Good luck to all!
Last night we held an add-ons meetup in Miami and it truly was a great event. South Florida has a vibrant community of very talented developers and social media experts and that was clearly visible by the quality of questions and level of engagement by attendees.
Similar to New York, the schedule was kept very flexible allowing attendees to freely ask as many questions as they wanted. While we wanted to get our message out about all of the cool things going on with AMO, the priority was to listen to the community and ensure that we took full advantage of the face-to-face time to hear them out.
Brian Breslin’s presentation on his add-on Twitbin was especially important. Brian is the founder of Refresh Miami and a very well-known & respected developer in the South Florida area. Having him vouch for the power & extensibility of the Mozilla platform really helped drive our message home to the attendees.
Add-on development is something that’s very new to this community so it was great to be able to have some face time and help them better understand what the Mozilla add-on ecosystem is all about. Gauging from the responses on Twitter it seems that people were genuinely impressed by what’s happening within the add-on ecosystem and the steps we’re taking to make add-on development better.
We’ve planned another add-ons meetup in Chicago later this month (9/29) and we look forward to having another great meetup in the windy city!
The Shareaholic team, who were Extend Firefox 2.0 winners, have created a great AMO collection featuring add-ons that were Extend Firefox grand prize winners.
This is very cool! Thanks guys!
The Extend Firefox 3.5 contest is currently under way and you still have time to enter before the October 2nd deadline. Don’t miss out on a great opportunity to build the next great web experience and win some fantastic prizes.
Photo by kevindooley
Along with Miami, FL on Sept 15th, we’ll be hosting another meetup in Chicago, IL on September 29th. If you’re in Chi-town, this will be a great opportunity to get to familiar with add-on development and have an opportunity to share your ideas with the AMO team.
The full details of the event are up on the Mozilla wiki:
Mozilla Add-ons Meetup: Chicago, IL – Sept. 29th 6-9PM EST
There’s no cost for the meetup and it will be packed with great sessions. Look forward to seeing you there!
If you’re never built an add-on but really want to enter the Extend Firefox 3.5 contest, we have some resources that will help get you up to speed. First we have Robert Nyman’s excellent tutorial on building add-ons:
How to develop a Firefox extension by Robert Nyman
Also, two great videos to help you get started are below:
Extension Development 101
Extension Development 101 from rhian on Vimeo.
Extensions Bootcamp: Zero to “Hello World” in 45 Minutes
Extension Bootcamp (Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Spring 09) from Mozilla Labs – Concept Series on Vimeo.
And don’t forget that we’ve created an Extend Firefox 3.5 discussion group to answer an questions you have about the contest. Good luck!
Photo by (le)doo.
Last week’s meetup in New York City was a great event bringing together developers to learn about add-on development and hear about the newest features on AMO.
We’ll be hosting another meetup in Miami, FL on September 15th so if you’re in the South Florida area, this will be a great opportunity to get to familiar with add-on development and have an opportunity to share your ideas with the AMO team.
The full details of the event are up on the Mozilla wiki:
Mozilla Add-ons Meetup: Miami, FL – Sept. 15th 6-9PM EST
There’s no cost for the meetup and it will be packed with great sessions. Look forward to seeing you there!
Last week’s Add-ons Meetup in New York City turned out to be really great. The attendees ranged from the “curious about add-ons” to developers & companies that are hard-core add-on developers. It was a perfect blend of participants and it allowed us to be extremely flexible in how & what information was presented.
While we had a set agenda for the event, we kept the event very loose encouraging participation at any point. We wanted attendees to be able to get immediate feedback and feel engaged and from the level of interaction, that was definitely the right choice (Thanks Fraser!). We also made sure to have food & drink for attendees as a full belly always helps keep developers focused.
Mozilla’s Justin Scott gave excellent overviews of Developer.AMO & Collections and fielded a number of questions about these two initiatives. Developer.AMO was a hot topic since we were actively looking for greater detail on what information is important to developers. The consensus was that more metrics is a good thing & providing greater detail in terms of data or mechanisms that could help developers better gauge conversions would greatly help in managing their add-ons. Justin also discussed opening up multiple release channels for add-ons that would allow developers to support multiple versions of an add-on in a single listing.
Rey Bango followed, presenting on the recent Contributions project which allows developers to request financial support for their project. More than one developer expressed a strong desire to have a “subscription-based” contribution mechanism added to Contributions essentially providing a mechanism for “pay-as-you-go” type of services. Also, along the lines of other marketplaces, there was a suggestion of being allowed to offer a free and a premium version of an add-on. The multiple release channels mentioned above could be a way of making this happen.
Last but not least, Shaun Salzberg of Drop.io gave an excellent demo of the Drop.io add-on and service. The Drop.io add-on is really one of those extensions that pushes the limits of JavaScript and it was exciting to see what this team had done. It was especially important to show those developers who are just getting their feet wet in the Mozilla platform the power available to them.
We’d like to thank the team at AdaptiveBlue for their help. Apart from providing the venue, they helped to spread the word locally and generate plenty of buzz in the add-on community.
Our next meetup will be in Miami, FL on September 15th. If you’re in the area, please be sure to stop by. Entry is free and we’d love to get your feedback.
I’m sure you’ve seen a LOT of movement on in the AMO house with major changes happening to the site and lots of outreach going on. We’re doing our best to fill the needs of developers and most importantly, listen to your suggestions. We’re going to take it a step further by getting up close and personal with developers in major cities throughout the United States via the Mozilla Add-ons U.S. Tour!
Our first stop will be New York City on August 18th. Justin Scott and I will be discussing some of the newest initiatives going on including Collections, Contributions & more. This will be a great opportunity to meet & mingle with other add-on developers as well as pick the brains of AMO team members. Here are the details:
Mozilla Add-ons Meetup – New York City
August 18th, 2009
6-9pm EST
131 Varick St, Suite 909
NY, NY
10013
Be sure to RSVP by filling out the registration form.
Look forward to seeing you there!
As add-on authors quickly realize when submitting their work to AMO, the review process is typically the hardest part to get through mainly due to the immense amount of add-on submissions we receive. Going through the queues can be a daunting task as new add-ons and updates come in daily.
This past weekend we decided to dedicate ourselves to bringing these submissions down to a manageable number and helping the development community get the feedback they so badly craved.
The AMO Review Queue Burndown brought 16 add-on editors & developers together for a weekend of add-on code reviews making for interesting conversations, ideas to improve the review process and hard core code scrutinizing. We’re happy to report it was a great success.
We started with 232 Pending Updates & 353 Nominated Add-ons at 12:47am 6/27/09. As of 9am EST today, we’re at 86 pending updates & 114 nominated add-ons. The editors absolutely kicked ass and worked feverishly through the weekend to help get the queues down. The following were the dedicated crew that participated this weekend:
In all, considering some authors received feedback and fixed + renominated their add-ons, the editors reviewed about 221 updates and 308 nominated add-ons during the weekend!! Outstanding! Words cannot express how much this effort is appreciated by this dedicated group of volunteers. It shows their love and commitment for the Mozilla community.
We still have a lot of work to do but that’s a massive dent that I’m sure will bring a welcome smile to many add-on authors as we start the week off.
