Expensive Hardware Logging and Greasemonkey
For those of you keeping score in the “Expensive Hardware Lobbing” game, this is your link. Clicking the links for each of the planets gives you a breakdown of how the scores were calculated (fun). More interesting even than baseball. :^)
On a more technical note: Greasemonkey still rocks, and now there’s an XPI-compiler for user-scripts.
Compiling user scripts into extensions
One of the problems with Greasemonkey scripts is that they’re very geek-oriented — assuming people have Firefox installed, they need to install Greasemonkey before they can use your script. Adrian Holovaty has simplified this process by creating a Greasemonkey compiler, which converts a user script into a full-fledged Firefox extension (XPI file) that can be used by itself.
This will definitely lower the barrier to entry for writing Firefox extensions, and make it much easier to get people to use user scripts.
[source…]
I have to concur with the “easier to write” thing. There’s a metric ton of inane details that have to be taken care of when writing XPI’s (having tried and given up once or twice). There are definitely more complicated things to do, but you have to learn a lot of different tech’s (JS, XPI, XML, HTML, XUL, etc) to do something useful. Plus a lot of it is very Mozilla-specific so it doesn’t feel “right” to do it that way. Definitely Greasemonkey → XPI is much more interesting, and some of the things I’ve read about: “forget XUL, do it all in mostly cross-platform DHTML (JS + HTML + DOM)” seem to make more sense. JS and DOM manipulations have really advanced (matured?) to the point where using them is a practicality, now if only IE7 doesn’t muck it all up again.
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