Thoughts on yesterday’s hackmeetup
We had 33% more people than last time, but the same amount of computers. This turned the meet into a more chatty one than last time. At the start, this annoyed me because I wanted to get started with my coding, but over the course of the night I got used to it and actually prefer it that way. There’s a reason why we’re meeting up instead of just sitting at home, after all.
I tried to work on a Firefox extension, and even though I have actually written an extension before, I started out from scratch because I couldn’t actually remember anything from that time. That period one year ago was fairly hectic and my memories from it are generally quite vague.
General hints on extension writing would be to make sure you get your install.rdf and chrome.manifest files right, since not doing so can both make your extension load without doing anything at all, and load and break all of the built-in chrome in the browser. Neither of these are very pleasant. And related to that last point, make sure you follow the advice on creating a separate profile for development. I didn’t, but it would really have helped.
In the end, I created an extension that really did nothing, because I couldn’t get the nsIWebProgressListener interface to do what I wanted. I haven’t given up, though. I might just have been grabbing what I was trying to listen to at the wrong time.
On the other hand, Olle and Ola sort of got done what they wanted, with a lot of experimenting along the way, a nice big pink border and a huge magnifying glass. So all in all, it was a good night.
