Older blog entries for noda (starting at number 21)

I started porting Galeon's "Page Info" dialog to an Epiphany extension. Crispin (the Great Galeon Hacker) helped me understand a couple of details, and Christian (the Great Epiphany Hacker) persuaded me to make the "General" tab look nicer.

I used to hate Glade (its UI is pretty lousy), but I think I'm getting used to it now.

Anyway, Christian restructured it after I'd ported over "General" and "Images". Then I added "Links". So the extension has 3 of 5 tabs now. Not bad for about 10 man-hours of work.

The Page Info extension will most likely be in epiphany-extensions 1.4.0, which will be released in sync with Epiphany 1.4.0. Rockin'.

Even cooler, though, is the patch I've got which lets you load/unload extensions as Epiphany is running. There's no UI frontend (it uses GConf) and I coded it way too late for 1.4.0. But it's gonna be great: in 1.6.0, the user can specify which extensions to load. Now... if only Marco would review it!

If you hear this beep, I am alive.

*BEEEEEEP*

Following others:

The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions

Garp's face radiated pure peace.

The Habs won against the Bruins. The world is suddenly a brighter place.

I got fed up with the suckiness of my Link Checker Epiphany extension, so I fixed it. I hope. Well, at least if it makes any mistakes it'll still print semi-sane messages and it won't leave the busy cursor going on forever. Before it was at the point where I was considering removing the code altogether. Now I think it can stay :).

This person is currently certified at Journeyer level.

Wow. I feel like I'm growing up in the Free Software World. Master level, here I come! ...Except I suppose I have to learn how to program well first. Minor setback.

After exploring just about every possible UI design for my New and Improved Epiphany Popup Blocker Extension, I finally found The Perfect UI. It took dozens of hours of coding, elaborate mock-ups and countless discussions, but the final UI seems too simple for words.

It's simple and yet... deep. "View -> [ ] Popup Windows" is a per-site preference -- pretty much like my popup blocker already has been for ages. However, the COOL part is that selecting it brings up all the site's popups, and de-selecting it makes them all disappear. I think this is The Best Way To Do This, and it sure is intuitive. Do I want to see popup windows? Yes? Then I'll enable it. Otherwise, I'll disable it. Simple, and it Just Works.

Also, there's a little icon in the statusbar which represents all the poor popups which were blocked. It's got a tooltip saying how many there are.

At this point, with GNOME 2.6 right around the corner, I'm very keen to get Epiphany extensions more widely recognized and used. I think since their primary dependency (epiphany 1.2) will be widely installed there'll be a much lower barrier to entry for most people. Beyond that, though, I want to set up Debian packages. It's easy to do, but I'm not a Debian maintainer and it doesn't seem easy to become one.

Anyway, if you've got some minutes spare, check out my Popup Blocker extension. Oh, and of course, my Error Viewer extension, which is a killer app for web development. They're in epiphany-extensions on GNOME CVS. You'll need Epiphany >= 1.1.12 to compile them.

And if you like or dislike these extensions, please let me know! Besides fellow Epiphany/Galeon developers, I haven't heard from anyone who's used them.

Even the simplest UI decisions are incredibly difficult to make. Sometimes I wish I had a boss to tell me what to do. Of course, if that were the case I'd end up doing things I didn't want....

Anyway, my popup-blocker Epiphany Extension can open individual popups now, which is cool. It's buggy, which is uncool, and it needs slight restructuring, which takes thought. Thinking is hard :). Anyway, all in all, the coolness prevails.

If I didn't have to do so much schoolwork, I'd have more time to spend coding Epiphany extensions. And it seems to me it would be incredibly easy to bloat my extensions beyond all hope.

I'm considering adding a statusbar (complete with progressbar) to my Error Viewer and putting an icon into every Epiphany window for my popup blocker.... What next? Change the Popup Blocker to handle images and cookies, and give a GUI to remove sites.... These are all cool features, but do they really add value?

So I'm cultivating a lot of respect for those coders who refuse to get carried away. Every day I use GNOME I marvel just a little bit more at how simple it is.

Bugfixing can be a mixed bag. It's terribly annoying when a bug just keeps on biting. But when you finally see the problem, and you know exactly how to solve it, it's like everything is right in the world. And that's a good feeling.

I've gotten rid of all the bugs I found in my Error Viewer (and one I didn't find). It's extremely cool now.

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