Hacks Mozilla.org

When we originally introduced our work on WebAPI, we got a number of questions where a particular question was the most frequently asked. Now, four months later, we wanted to follow up with what has been happening since.

One thing which has been very important when it comes to creating special end user experiences have been the ability to show something fullscreen, effectively hiding all the other content etc.

Remember when web sites gave you instructions how to configure your web browser with hiding toolbars and more, just to get a slightly better user experience? Or maybe it’s just me… :-)

If you are a web developer, you surely must know how handy it is to dynamically change the class attribute on an element. The benefits this technique are quite a few:

As part of Mozillas WebAPI effort, we have been working with bringing a Vibration API to all devices that support it.

The idea with the Vibration API is to be able to give the user a notification, in a game or other use case, by telling the device to vibrate. It accesses the native vibrator and tells it how long it should vibrate.

The way to do this is quite simple – in this example the parameter is how long it should vibrate, i.e. the number of milliseconds:

Here are today’s Wiki Wednesday articles! If you know about these topics, please try to find a few minutes to look over these articles that are marked as needing technical intervention and see if you can fix them up. Read more

One day after the conference part of Mozilla Vision 2012 volunteers, Mozilla staff and friends organised a “hackday” event in a burger cafe (of all places) in Tokyo. The twist: instead of catering to developer hackers the audience was web makers – and in this case those of the future:

We’re aware of the problem on MDN in which error messages appear in place of code examples (and a few other places). This is due to a bug in the wiki platform software that causes some of its extensions to fail to load when a server restarts. The problem has been diagnosed by the vendor, and we are awaiting a patch to fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience!

Cloud9 IDE and Mozilla have been working together ever since their Bespin and ACE projects joined forces. Both organizations are committed to the success of Node.js, Mozilla due to its history with Javascript and Cloud9 IDE as a core contributor to Node.js and provider of the leading Node.js IDE. As part of this cooperation, this is a guest post written by Ruben Daniels and Zef Hemel of Cloud9 IDE.

We all know it: UA-based browser detection is bad, the right way is feature-detection. Regardless, legacy code relies upon UA sniffing and may need to be updated for Firefox 10′s release.

We are currently in Tokyo, Japan for the Mozilla Vision 2012 conference and hack day. For two days Mozilla Japan with friends from the other locations are putting up an amazing effort to encourage people to help us educate the next generation of web makers.

As you might know, each month we have a Dev Derby as part of Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), and each of them are focused on a certain technology where people can compete with their submissions.

Canvas is a new HTML5 element which creates a digital “drawing board.” A web developer can use one of these drawing boards along with some JavaScript to create simple shapes, graphs, animations, interactive games, and more. Recently, eighteen creative minds showed us just how powerful and important Canvas is by sharing their work in the November Dev Derby.