So now I’m trying to deploy fennec and xulrunner to the Program Files folder through visual studio. Unfortunitely the emulator images provided by microsoft only have 10-20mb (depending on how you launch them) of free storage space, so the deploy fails.

I’m hoping some one out there has a work around.  One option would be to edit the emulator configuration in some seemingly undocumented way.  Another could be to download different images. Most actual consumer devices have more than enough internal storage (the HTC Touch Pro has 512Mb), and I seem to remember seeing device specific images at some point. Any help would be apreciated though.

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Ryan Block, one of the Engadget editors, posted this editorial about Apple’s App Store.

As a developer who has downloaded the SDK and become frustrated, “Amen.”  As an iPhone user frustrated by the lack of truely useful 3rd software available, “Please…pretty please.  Don’t make me switch to T-mobile and buy an Android phone.”

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The device he showed me had to be controled remotely with a mouse.  In his bag he had a new display witha  touch screen and a better refresh rate.  I’m really excited to see fennec running on that.

The next step is to really think about how to combat the limitations of an e-paper display.  With today’s technology those are primarily the slow refresh rate and the gray scale graphics. Can we do something more intelligent with mapping of colors to greyscale than a simple translation of brightness.  Perhaps all of the colors on a given page could be mapped out along a scale of contrast.  Perhaps you just need to consider the colors of adjacent elements, is this simply a map coloring problem?

And when it comes to the refresh rate, can the browser make certain adjustments to accommodate the device automatically?  Or do we just punt and some how give a hint to the web server during the request?

Madhava, Aza…. I’m looking at you

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This currently works on desktop linux that have a v4l2 supported camera (such as iSight) and the n800/n810. It will need to be implemented on mac and windows and configurations will need to be stored in preferences (in case you have multiple cameras or your camera uses a difference interface).

Next I wrapped a video tag, image and a few buttons in xbl and bound it to <input type=”camera” />. When a user hits a website using this tag, he or she currently will see a live video preview and a “take photo” button. When the user clicks the button, the photo is grabbed from the camera and shown to the user in the image element. The image element and video element are in a deck element so only one is shown at a time. After the photo is taken, there is a button that reads “Take another photo,” in case the user doesn’t like the one they just took. Once the user is satisfied, this element works like any other form element and the file can be uploaded to a web service.

After talking to a few people this should acutally be bound to <input type=”file” accept=”image/png”/>. Also, it needs some UI design both for what it looks like in content and for a configuration dialog. Finally, we’ll need to think about security and make sure no one can snap a photo of you when you’re not looking your best. Speaking of which, I might as well share:

I’ve notice quite a few iPhone apps that allow users to take a photo and upload it with out leaving the application. Absent the ability to do this from the web, these otherwise web centric services have been forced to write a native application to accomplish their goal. Hopefully this will eventually help web services stay on the web.

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The first such major change is to reduce our shunt layer to the most minimal possible. This section of code (located in build/wince/shunt) is intended to fill in the gaps where Windows CE does not provide the same functionality as Windows NT. Some of this has been resolved by moving our target platform from Windows CE 4.2 (the basis for Pocket PC 2003 and Smartphone 2003) to Windows CE 5.0 (the basis for Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC/Smartphone and Windows Mobile 6 Professional/Standard).

The second major reduction in the size and scope of the shunt can be attributed to removing narrow character Windows API calls from our code base. For a little background, most Windows APIs exist as two versions (wide and narrow). In this scheme “ExampleFunction” would actually be implemented as “ExampleFunctionA” which takes narrow char arguments and “ExampleFunctionW” which takes wide char arguments. At compile time “ExampleFunction” would be defined as one or the other based on whether or not the macro UNICODE was defined.

In the Mozilla code base, there are many instances where we would call “ExampleFunction” with narrow char arguments, necessitating UNICODE not be defined. Windows Mobile (and Windows XP/Vista) are wide char systems. On Windows XP and Vista, these narrow char API calls exist for backwards compatibility, but on Windows Mobile they do not. For Minimo, the shunt defined many of these narrow char function calls and redefined the ambiguous function (”ExampleFunction”) to the shunt’s version (”ExampleFunctionA”). For Fennec, we are finding the instances of these incorrect calls to the ambiguous functions and calling either the wide version (preferred) or the narrow version explicitly. This in turn has allowed us to reduce the size of the shunt considerably. It should also result in improved performance on both Windows Mobile and Windows XP/Vista due to the reduction in string conversions we perform.

With that work mostly complete, John Wolfe has been diligently working through some issues surrounding window management and file io. Currently, xulrunner can launch various xul apps without crashing.

Looking forward, there are some known issues on the horizon such as font shaping that much be fixed. We also need to turn an eye towards further optimizations. However, our progress to this point makes us quite optimistic about the future of Mozilla on Windows Mobile. If you have specific knowledge in fonting (especially experience with harfbuzz), an interest in tuning performance or just a general interest in making Windows Mobile go for Mozilla, please hop on the #mobile irc channel; we could use your help.

Finally, we would like to announce that Brian Crowder has bought a Windows Mobile phone. His frustration with Pocket Internet Explorer quickly lead to him expressing interest in helping out with Fennec; help which was gladly accepted. Brian brings with him a deep knowledge of Mozilla’s internals which I’m sure will prove to be invaluable in the quest to bring Windows Mobile to the mobile web rock party.

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I have been playing with Vlads canvas 3d extension to implement fish eye zoom (Its was good way to kill some time on airplanes).

As far as I know, the original idea for the Fish Eye Zoom came from Asa, and it seems like a really good way to allow the user to inspect the content of a page when fully zoomed out. Or, if you think of it another way, it can give the user context they don’t usually enjoy in the traditional “key hole” view a mobile browser provides.

Big thanks to Vlad for his work in the 3d Canvas, I can see this really opening up new doors.

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ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/xulrunner-1.9b5pre.en-US.linux-arm.tar.bz2

The build bot is getting very close to being able to push these builds automatically, so soon you’ll be able to find the latest and greatest here every day.  Also, once I get off my but and make the changes to the build scripts to produce debian packages from this, you’ll be able to install it from the application catalog on your n800/n810.

You’ll notice that this is xulrunner and not firefox.  There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is we hope this will encourage people to roll their own browser (and other apps).  There are already several available to try out, hear is a sampling:

Browsers:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Image:Touchscreenbrowser-atotic.zip (from atotic)

http://wiki.mozilla.org/images/b/b1/Touchscreenbrowser.zip (from venky & co.), discussion can be found here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/UI/Designs/TouchScreen

http://people.mozilla.org/~blassey/SpBrowser.tgz (from me, 2 months old) discussion can be found here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/UI/Designs/NonTouchScreen

http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/xulrunner/mybrowser-0.2.2.xulapp (from bsmedberg, very minimal)

Other:

http://people.mozilla.org/~blassey/tetris-example.tgz (tetris game I took shamelessly from croczilla)

http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/xulrunner/xulmine-0.9.xulapp (mine sweep originally by Neil Rashbrook, packaged as xul app by bsmedberg)

And there’s already a collection of apps running on xulrunner for the desktop.  Most of them are not packaged to be easily used on maemo with xulrunner.  If you’re feeling adventurous, give them a try.  If any of them work, leave a comment (maybe even a screen shot).

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner_Hall_of_Fame

and

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Category:XULRunner:Examples

Installation
This is the procedure I used to install xulrunner on my n810 (as root)

# cd /opt
# bunzip2 /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/xulrunner-1.9b5pre.en-US.linux-arm.tar.bz2
# tar -xf /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/xulrunner-1.9b5pre.en-US.linux-arm.tar
# cd xulrunner
# ./xulrunner --register-global

and then to install and run an app, I did the following (again, as root)

# cd /opt/xulrunner
# ./xulrunner --install-app /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/<application name>.xulapp
# /usr/lib/<vendor name>/<application name>/<application name>

A couple notes, I downloaded everything with microb, which puts downloads in the Documents folder and hence the path above. The vendor name and application name are specified in the application.ini file of the xul app. Finally, the –install-app flag assumes a zip archive (which is what the xulapp extension is). You may need zip the app up yourself to use it. I

I installed and ran xulmine, mybrowser and chatzilla.  They all ran (woot!).  To prove I’m not completely full off it, here’s a screen shot:

If you have your own ideas for a good xul app or what the browser should look like, put them into javascript and xul and post.  Leave a comment here so people can try them.

Note: some of these xul apps were written before mozilla 1.9 was released.  If you get a warning such as “Could not find compatible GRE between 1.8 and 1.8.0.*”, you’ll have to edit the application.ini file.  Just change MaxVersion from 1.8.0.* to 1.9.0.*

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Well with some ever so slight massaging (there functions defined in the headers of the standard sdk that don’t seem to exist in the libraries, tisk tisk m$), I finally got a build going on my phone.

First I tried a very simple xul app I wrote that contained a toolbar, button, label and browser element (src=about:mozilla):

nice, very nice.  Next I pressed my luck and tried bsmedberg’s MyBrowser. Lo and behold… it ran too. Complete with the network connection:

One last note about this.  This is a full debug build for the entire tree, with all the binary bloat that implies.  This makes me fairly optimistic that we will be able to run reliably on these types of devices.

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