Mozilla in Asia

Jeremy Zawodny has a very nice interview [Flickr Uploadr: Open Source and Powered by XULRunner] with Yahoo! developer Richard Crowley who was responsible for building the new Flickr Uploader on XULRunner (Mozilla’s runtime package which enables anyone to create cross-platform applications.) Richard discusses how Yahoo! looked at both Adobe Air as well as XULRunner and the key differentiators for XULRunner included:

• linking in outside code (vs. Air which cannot pull in outside libraries)
• multi-threaded (vs. Air which is single-threaded)
• extendable (like Firefox is)

Flickr Uploader is available in English, French, traditional Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

For those of you who are interested in XUL or XULRunner, it’s an interesting interview, especially when Richard discusses how there may be a future for user-developed extensions to Flickr Uploader.

For those of you who use Flickr.com, the popular photo sharing service, the new uploading application, Flickr Uploadr 3.0, is based on Mozilla’s XULrunner platform and is now open source software, as well as being cross-platform, and available in 8 languages (sadly not Japanese, but in Korean and traditional Chinese.)

People who know that Mozilla is a non-profit, public benefit organization sometimes wonder what Mozilla does with the revenue that the organization generates.

Seth Bindernagel explains that recently Mozilla gave a $100,000 grant to the Participatory Culture Foundation, a non-profit that has developed a free and open-source video application that happens to use a lot of Mozilla technologies.

As Seth explains, Mozilla supported PCF with this grant on 3 terms:

1. Their mission to ensure the continued rise of open source & open standards aligns with the Mozilla mission to encourage choice & innovation on the web.
2. They’re building something that can have influence on the way users browse web content, rich media, and desktop UI — and it’s based on Mozilla technology.
3. PCF is another example of that leverage we are looking for…they don’t have any venture backing, they’re running on a very lean budget, and they continue to seek creative resources to make a big difference in the way their users access content on the Web.

Please try Democracy Player- it’s quite an amazing piece of software.

On June 16th, Mozilla Japan will be hosting our 2nd Developer Conference in Tokyo, focusing on extensions and add-ons.  We’ve announced it on the Inside Mozilla Japan blog as well. If you are a web developer in Tokyo, please mark your calendar and reserve the date.

Our previous developer conference in December of 2006 attracted over 150 participants (report in Japanese; photos of the event) and was a big success.

GigaOM was able to wrangle a site for Joost Beta invites.  If you haven’t tried out Joost (which is based on Gecko and XULRunner) and want to try it, here’s your chance!

Rafe Colburn points us to eMusic’s new download manager 4.0 which is developed in XUL. Other promising new applications built on XUL include Songbird, Joost, and Democracy Player/Miro.