New hacking opportunities with Facebook, Firefox, and Chickenfoot

Facebook just announced its own toolbar for Firefox, but interestingly, no toolbar for Internet Explorer. As they mention in their Developers News page, "[the toolbar is] open source, so if you’re interested in adding functionality (or porting it to another browser), join the discussion thread!" Sounds like we'll have to wait for a solution from "the community," whoever that turns out to be...

Now, although Firefox is gaining marketshare, it still has a long way to go before it can dethrone Internet Explorer, so why wouldn't Facebook focus on building a toolbar for the majority? My first thought is that building a toolbar for Firefox was just easier for the development team. For starters, there is already a plethora of toolbar extensions for Firefox that Facebook developers could have used to model their toolbar after as a starting point. Also, there are no Microsoft Visual Studio licenses to buy when developing for Firefox, and the structure of the browser is easy to learn and explore with free, built-in tools because it's one giant DOM. Or maybe there was just one crazy developer (Ari Steinberg?) who just happened to like hacking on Firefox that started prototyping a toolbar and ran with it. Lots of software projects start that way.

The one thing that I can't imagine is that a Product Manager at Facebook said, "Hey, I think we need to have our own toolbar. And instead of going after 80% of the market, I think we should focus on only 10% because having all those users would be too crazy." Unless, of course, the PM has a shiny new MacBook Pro and didn't want to see his or her developers working on something that he wouldn't be able to use. Either way, I'm excited to see new tools that promote Firefox.

Although I haven't looked at the source code for the toolbar yet, I'm curious how similar it is to the wrapper for the Facebook API that I wrote for the new version of Chickenfoot. My wrapper isn't mentioned in the release notes (though I assure you it is bundled in the extension), but the source code for the Facebook wrapper can be viewed online, and can be used by adding include("facebook.js"); just like any other library in Chickenfoot.

In my initial experimentation with the Facebook API, I was very frustrated that their client libraries did not come with good sample code to demonstrate how to use the library, so I promised myself that I would not make the same mistake with Chickenfoot's Facebook wrapper. As you can see, I have some sample usage at the top of facebook.js, but I plan to put something better together like I did for Chickenfoot's Prototype wrapper. Admittedly, I have yet to build anything with facebook.js, so until I have a sample application, I suppose I shouldn't promote it too heavily.

Nevertheless, you should still check out the new version of Chickenfoot because it now supports keyword commands! Both the keyword commands UIST conference paper and video of the tech talk at Google that showed them publicly for the first time are available on the Chickenfoot publications page. With keyword commands, you can write a script without learning JavaScript. For example, the following is a valid keyword command script in Chickenfoot for doing a Google web search:

go to google.com
type "chickenfoot MIT"
search

At first glance, you might think this is some sort of pseudo-natural-language programming like you see in AppleScript, but composing keyword commands is even easier than traditional scripting because keyword commands are not validated against a grammar. This is an important distinction, and I recommend reading the paper or watching the tech talk for more details.

JSON Inpsector (for GData)

Yesterday, I was very excited to announce JSON support for GData on the Google Data APIs Blog. Even though we provided some nice documentation and samples for this new feature, I thought it would be helpful to be able to browse the structure of the JSON returned by the feed in a standard tree widget.

In Chickenfoot, you can inspect a JavaScript object fairly easily by leveraging the DOM Inspector:

function inspect(obj) {
  // explore obj in Firefox's DOM Inspector
  window.openDialog('chrome://inspector/content/object.xul',
  '_blank', 'chrome,all,dialog=no', obj);
}

Unfortunately, this JavaScript does not work in a web page because it needs access to the browser chrome. Because not everyone has Chickenfoot installed, I decided to make an online JSON Inspector for GData feeds (shown below) where you can simply enter the URL for a GData feed and click Show me the JSON! to explore its structure with a standard XUL tree widget. (Because this web page uses XUL, it only works in Firefox.)

Hopefully this will help you write your first GData mashup over the Thanksgiving holiday! You'd rather hack on JavaScript than fight your way through the mall on Black Friday, right?

Update (11/22/2006): Mihai just pointed me to an existing JSON Inpsector targeted at JSONP (JSON with Padding), which lets you inspect JSON from sources other than GData.




P.S. If any of you decide to host XUL files on your own webserver, make sure to add the following line to httpd.conf or else your XUL trees may appear strangely:

AddType application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml .xul

Introducing Gvite (a Firefox extension)

Okay, so I'm a little upset that Evite has links to add an event to both Outlook and iCal, but not Google Calendar, so I decided to write a Chickenfoot script to deal with the problem. My script adds the following when visiting an Evite invitation: (1) It replaces the "View Map" link with a link to Google Maps, and (2) it adds a button that lets you add the event to Google Calendar. I used Chickenfoot's packaging tool to package the script as a standalone Firefox extension (click this link to install it).

I have to admit that I really hacked this script together, and my only test cases were the two Evites that are currently in my inbox, so I haven't been very thorough. If you look through the source code for the Chickenfoot script, you'll see that I have some TODOs in the code, so I already know about some of the shortcomings. That being said, please feel free to email me with improvements to the script. (If there's enough interest, we could move this to the Chickenfoot Script Repository so we can leverage the power of Web 2.0 to handle all of the Gvite edge cases!)

Did I mention mitcalendars.com?

No, I don't believe I did, but it yesterday (my birthday, for those of you who forgot), mitcalendars.com appeared on the Google Code Featured Projects blog. I created mitcalendars.com with fellow Googler and MIT alum Mike Lambert a few days after the fall semester started at MIT.

So why didn't you post about this weeks ago?, you wonder. Well, here's what happened: Mike and I were eating lunch at Google, and I was expressing my disappointment that MIT would be an unlikely candidate for Google Apps for Your Domain because it has already invested a lot in its Athena computing system, and people would freak out if they couldn't use Pine or mh or whatever junk people who don't use Gmail use. What I really wanted, of course, was for every MIT professor to enter his or her syllabus in Google Calendar, which would save students the trouble of figuring out recurrence rules and determining which MIT Tuesdays are actually Mondays.

But then Mike raised the key question: "Why don't we create all the calendars for them?" Upon hearing this, I immediately realized that this was one of those ideas that was just so stupidly obvious that we needed to drop everything and just start building it. So we did.

We decided that the interface that would be most familiar to students would be one that paralleled MIT's online course directory. We would simply copy the HTML from the directory, and in the spirit of not being evil, would provide links to make it trivial to add the course schedule to Sunbird or iCal as well as Google Calendar.

As it turned out, Mike and I were already scheduled to fly to MIT that weekend for some on-campus recruiting. In many ways, it was fitting that we didn't sleep at all on the red-eye, discussing our design, and then went straight from Logan to the MIT student center (I got the first LaVerde's breakfast sandwich of the day!), and continued hacking until we had published the site.

Of course, we couldn't contain our excitement, and showed off our work to some MIT students who were passing by. One common reaction, which both excited and disappointed me, was, "Oh man -- I wish you had that a week ago! I already uploaded all of my courses to Google Calendar!" Clearly the early bird catches the worm, and the early bird was not us.

We sent the URL around, and the site got some uptake, but it didn't generate as large a response as we had hoped. There were definitely a number of things we did wrong (I hope no one accidentally goes to class on Thanksgiving because of us, or misses their final exam, for that matter), but now we know how we can do better (and that we should act earlier) next semester. Although we'll be sure to look out for that second-system effect we learned about in 6.033, you can expect a better version of mitcalendars.com for the spring semester, so be sure to check back in February!

GCalQuickTab for your Domain!

I released a new version of GCalQuickTab that works with Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD). It may not be that exciting for most of you, but if you use Google Apps, it's a lifesaver!

TargetAlert 0.8.9.8 Released

I received several requests to update TargetAlert so that it is compatible with Firefox 2.0. As 2.0 has been out for awhile now, this is a reasonable request, so I finally made a new version (0.8.9.8) available here on bolinfest.com:

http://www.bolinfest.com/targetalert/download.html

All I did was download TargetAlert.xpi from bolinfest.com, unzip it, changed some version tags, and reposted the thing. That means version 0.8.9.8 does not have the features that the 0.9 preview release has, and that the memory leak is still at large.

I do plan to figure out what's causing the memory leak and release a 0.9 version with support for custom alerts. I don't know when I'll have time to do it, though, because I'm caught up in a handful of other side-projects right now and I'd like to get those out the door. (New code is always more exciting than old code, isn't it?)