Some great achievements here… and some utter frustration. After spending an hour due to missing some curly braces on a call to a property that plays host to an anonymous function, I finally got a very cool extension in place to test the waters of intercepting and tinkering with the default behaviour of the multi-touch events that I have in place. To get these noted first… here are some pertinent links:
- The Bug on Bugzilla
- The link to my dmg image installer of Thunderbird for Mac
- The link to my extension that I developed – gives an on/off switch link function
- And a direct link to the patch (which is already built into the Thunderbird for Mac installer)
The almost complete Release…
I despise this. But I must accept. We discussed in class some of the concepts around open source development and one of the ideas was the relaxed pace to get things done… the lack of stress and pressures that come from a normal job. Who wants to be normal anyhow…. well…. being in school with deadlines still makes it feel pretty normal, but here it goes.
The Patch
I managed to use some of the latest coding found in the firefox realm to fire off the events for the multi-touch actions. But the new code has a strange behaviour that causes the x/y coordinates of the event to get lost for my up/down swipe events. So I set up the action to use the older method of firing the event. Actually, all of the functionality could work fine under the older system, but I wanted to have the newer code implementations in place for the sake of future proofing the work and taking it in a direction they are heading in anyhow. So for that it feels a little incomplete, but it still is only a 0.3 release and not a full fledge polished submission.
The Extension
The extension was a bugger. I’m not even sure I went in the correct direction with it, but I’ve got it doing something cool. First here’s the problem with the extension. It won’t work when you install it the normal way. You have to expand the files and then use a reference file that you place in your extensions directory of your profile… and then it will work. So I’m looking into that, but for the sake of posting it even though its not perfect… here it is!
What’s cool about it is this. In the menu that the “add-ons” are on, this extension puts two items on the bottom of the menu list. One will disable or turn off the swipe and pinch behaviours and the other will turn them back on!!! I thought it was fun. It does so by storing the preferences when Thunderbird loads, and then erases them when you turn them off, and places them back in place when you turn the mutli-touch actions back on. Just to protect the settings, they are saved back when Thunderbird quits.
My digression
Well, I’m not back next semester, but I will approach this bug as a true open source project… and not a school project. Which means I’ll relax with it and work on it when I can. I do like what I’m working on and at the moment have a wish to do OSD700 in the summer if possible, so keeping my feet wet will be good. I will continue to post blogs, but not likely as frequently as we’ve been doing or trying to do. Thanks for wonderful semester and I’ll see you all around.
Andrew Grimo's old college projects 