In this issue…
- Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 now available
- Reviewing l10N goals
- Becoming an AMO editor
- Canvas text goes bidirectional
- Mozilla funds SA translation team
- Firefox 3.1: Smart Location Bar improvements
- Mozilla’s localization dashboard
- Developer calendar
- Subscribe to the email newsletter
Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 now available
The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox - code named Shiretoko Alpha 1 - is now available for download. Shiretoko is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only. For more information, including a list of new features and links to release notes, please see the DevNews blog post.
Reviewing l10N goals
Seth Bindernagel writes, “Last week, a subset of the l10n-drivers team met in Paris to discuss many things related to l10n, including a review of goals that had been set last November before the lead-up to the release of Firefox 3. The goals were ambitious and listed many ways in which the team could create positive impact. Part of our work week was to review these goals and to find out what we did well, didn’t do well, and could do better as we create goals for the upcoming quarter.” Seth’s weblog post continues on to go through each goal in detail, discussing what went well and where things can be improved in the future.
Becoming an AMO editor
Mozilla Add-ons (AMO) is one of Mozilla’s most popular and important sites, and our Add-ons Editors are critical to maintaining a great experience for millions of add-on users. Justin Scott of the AMO team has posted an overview of what Editors do and how to get involved with with that aspect of Mozilla over at Justin’s weblog.
Canvas text goes bidirectional
Eric Butler writes, “The patch for the last of the major outstanding bugs with the WHATWG Canvas text API landed in time for a nearly spec compliant implementation to make it into Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1. I am pleased to say that Canvas now supports right-to-left text and bidirectional text resolution on its text drawing functions.” Canvas has undergone and will be undergoing other changes, as well. More information is available at Eric’s weblog.
Mozilla funds SA translation team
As reported by Tectonic, “South Africa’s award-winning multilingual software developer, Translate.org.za, has been awarded a grant by the Mozilla Corporation to extend its translation tools. Mozilla awarded the grant to Translate.org.za to further its work on Pootle, a web-based translation tool, as well as the Translate Toolkit. The grant also covers a still to be released offline translation tool.” For more details, read the full article at Tectonic, and Seth Bindernagel’s original blog post.
Firefox 3.1: Smart Location Bar improvements
Edward Lee, one of the primary developers of the Smart Location Bar (aka “Awesome Bar”), has written a blog post outlining some of the upcoming Smart Location Bar changes that will appear in Firefox 3.1. “[T]here’s some new ways to change what shows up in the Smart Location Bar such as restricting results to show only your history (and not your unvisited bookmarks) or matching only in the URL instead of also in the title. Additionally, you can see your Smart Keywords queries show up in the drop down.” For details, see Edward’s full blog post.
Mozilla’s localization dashboard
Seth Bindernagel has posted about Mozilla’s new “localization dashboard” that was created by Axel Hecht. “As our team tries to improve efficiency and outreach/service to localizers in our l10n process, this tool will greatly help in how we focus on and respond to community needs related to localization.” Seth’s post goes on to describe some of the features of the dashboard to help you get started.
Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.
Subscribe to the email newsletter
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
