New FF add-ons

Ubiquity is the first add-on that makes me want to dive in the firefox internals. I tried creating add-ons myself but i was turned off by all the files you need to maintain. Ubiquity makes it easier to start playing with firefox. For example this Ubiq, ubiquity is just too long to write it all the time, command

// speeddial, sqlitemanager, fireftp, firefly
CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name: "add-on-gui",
icon: "https://addons.mozilla.org/img/favicon.ico",
takes: {name: noun_arb_text},
execute: function(name){
var addon = name.text;
Utils.openUrlInBrowser( "chrome://"+addon+"/content/"+addon+".xul" );
}
});

Ubiquity is a javascript powered addon, they even included jQuery. It has several functions to let the creation of commands not stand in your way, CreateCommand is the most basic. As you see it takes a YAML like syntax as an argument, in javascript it's know as JSON.

What this command does is opening the GUI for add-ons like speeddial, sqlitemanager, fireftp, firefly in a new tab by pressing ctrl+SPACE, typing add-on-gui speeddial and pressing return.
If you used one of those add-ons extensively you could have bookmarked the url but in my opinion that makes your bookmarks more browser bound. Maybe i'm just an old school bookmarker thinking that bookmarks are only for websites.

Now i'm talking about bookmarks, another recent add-on is tagmarks. Tagmarks adds a number of icons next to the bookmark star in the locationbar for easy tagging. There are a few read later add-ons that want to make your bookmarks easier to maintain but firefox 3 bookmarks are database powered so maintaining them already is easy if you use the tag feature.
It comes out-of-the-box with a few tags most people won't find useful; radiation, add, stop. But creating your own tags is not that hard if you are willing to do a little bit of graphic work.

The icons are stored in the profile\extentions\tagmarks@felipc.com\chrome\skin\icons directory. If you look at the icons they have a grey and color part. This is called in css programming a sprite. Only one part of the image is visible. So if you want to make your own tagmark you have to make a sprite. I use xnview and inkscape to do it but there will be one application solutions.

1. open the icon file you want to use in xnview


2. grayscale the icon and save it


3. import the color and gray icon in inkscape and position them next to eachother


4. Select the two images and export as bitmap

Now all you need to do is, put the icon in the icons directory and open ...\tagmarks@felipc.com\chrome\content\taglist.js in notepad or another editor. There you find again a JSON formatted list that you can modify.

If you don't want to go through all this trouble you just press ctrl+SPACE, type tag any-tags-you-like and press return. So we are back to Ubiquity with one of the build-in commands. The add-on still needs a bit more work but it already proves to be an essential add-on, certainly for the people who are used to command line like applications as launchy, quicksilver, and others. Ubiquity will make it possible to reduce the number of add-ons if you like to type. But people who like GUI extensions are not left in the cold because of it.