Will at FOSDEM

This weekend I’m at FOSDEM in Brussels, I’ll be checking my blog but probably won’t have much time to respond. If anybody else is going then feel free to give me a shout.

Firefox Currency Converter – ViewMyCurrency 0.3893 (alpha) released

There are just a few small changes in this release. I focused on improving the feedback wizard as it makes supporting users much quicker.

Minor changes:

• Give Feedback wizard
• Added current theme to technical info
• Fixed: GUI issues for Firefox 1.0.7 Thanks Simon!
• Fixed: Give Feedback handles loss of network connection. Thanks Simon.
• Options Dialog
• Fixed: preview text code was buggy
• Fixed: Currency Table expands to fit available space. Looks better if you have a lot of currencies. Thanks Ken!

• Added: tooltips with full name of currency to popup Convert Text bar + statusbarpanel. Thanks Jamie.

Download from the Install page (or via automatic update)

Firefox Currency Converter – ViewMyCurrency 0.3892 (alpha) released

Changes:

• The currency conversion is now split into multiple threads. ViewMyCurrency should seem more responsive and ‘Unresponsive Script’ warnings should be reduced. Let me know if you still get them.
• Added visual cues. During conversion statusbarpanel goes green during currency conversion and bold if something was changed on the page. This is an attempt to discreetly remind people that they are looking at a modified page. Thanks for the feedback Peter.

Please let me know if you think this is an improvement.

Minor changes:

• Added: Highlight changes option (hidden debugging option)
• Added: validation of summary field in Give Feedback (highlights in red if empty). Thanks Peter
• ‘Finish’ button is now ‘Add to website’. Thanks Simon
• Startup Wizard now always includes EUR, USD and GBP in default currency list

Download from the Install page (or via automatic update)

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Firefox Currency Converter – ViewMyCurrency 0.3891 (alpha) released

I’ve added a Feedback Wizard to make it easier for user to submit requests, bugs or general feedback. If you see something on a web-page that you want to comment on:

• select the problem text (optional)
• right-click on the ViewMyCurrency statusbarpanel and click ‘Give Feedback’
• The wizard will prompt you for more information about the problem
• When you click ‘Finish’ the wizard will open this blog and paste your comment in.
• You must then click ‘Say it’ publish the comment.

Hopefully this wizard will save everybody time as I won’t have to keep emailing back to ask for more info.

Changes:

• Added: Give Feedback Wizard

Currency changes: (remove and add currency to get changes)

• DDK default symbol is now ‘kr.’ rather than’kr’. Thanks Christian!
• ‘bucks’ no longer treated as USD. For all those Milwaukee Bucks fans out there. Thanks Bob!

Minor changes:

• Fixed spelling. Thanks KK
• Fixed: Convert Text popupbar would not appear if nothing selected in webpage or clipboard. Thanks Jamie!
• Fixed: The popupbar will never be taller than 5 rows
• Fixed: Text was truncated with ‘…’ in the statusbarpanel. (Now using style to set width to 6 ems). Thanks Santi!

Download from the Install page (or via automatic update)

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ViewMyCurrency – Today’s Browser Tip on Download Squad

ViewMyCurrency is Today’s Browser Tip on Download Squad. Very cool to get a mention on a blog I read daily!

I said yesterday that I was happy to maintain a small but enthusiastic user-base until ViewMyCurrency comes out of beta. But I guess the number of users is going to grow a bit faster than I was expecting!

Welcome Download Squad readers. If you have installed ViewMyCurrency then I would be very happy to get your feedback. Feel free to add your comments below. (You might want to read over my ToDo list).

ViewMyCurrency is spreading

Wow, I just checked my access logs and I’ve had more than 3000 downloads of ViewMyCurrency in two weeks. There are also a few mentions on blog posts and I’m number two on Google for “Firefox Currency Converter”
Now what would be really cool would be to get on the first page of Google for “currency converter”. Of course to do that I just have to displace XE.com, oanda.com, x-rates.com, Yahoo! Finance, Microsoft, CNN or the Bank Of Canada. Now that’s going to be a challenge!

And now for a quick reality check…

I still don’t think ViewMyCurrency is ready for mass-adoption. Right now there are still some bugs in ViewMyCurrency that will disappoint many people (like treating every $ as a USD) and these users might never come back again. (Known as the Marimba Phenomenon)
Ideally, I would also like to perform a code-review focused on security with a more experienced developer.

So for now I’m happy with my relatively small user-base who are already giving me feedback faster than I can fix stuff.
But once the worst problems are solved, watch out Bank of Canada

Firefox Currency Converter – ViewMyCurrency 0.389 (alpha) released

Changes:

• Big improvements to right-click ‘Convert Text’ bar
• Edits clipboard contents or webpage contents (depending on where you have selected text)
• All the strange characters are now hidden
  
• Menu item ‘OFF’ is now ‘none’ and grey. (thanks for all the feedback Jamie)

• Added popup to inform user that VMC has been upgraded
• Change: Startup Wizard now only lists the currencies related to your Firefox language setting. (Use ‘Show All’ button to see the rest) Thanks Peter.

Currency changes:

• Currency: added symbol ‘kr.’ for Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (symbol ‘kr’ was already recognised). Remove and add them to get the change. Thanks Vegar!
• Currency: Fixed bug with RON and SIT by adding symbol ‘lei’ for Romania and symbol ‘tolar’ for Slovenia. Thanks Alexandra!
• (if you were already using these currencies, then you need to remove and then add them to update the symbol list)
  

Download from the Install page (or via automatic update)

The next alpha release will probably contain my first attempt at solving the Dollar problem. (There are 50 countries that use the ‘$’ symbol and currently I always treat it as a USD).

Comments are very welcome!

Firefox Currency Converter – ViewMyCurrency 0.388 (alpha) released

I feel this version is very close to being ready for submission to Mozilla Update. So please add a comment here if you have any problems before another 2000 people download it. Thanks!

Changes:

• Added option: Layout Order. You can now choose which way round you would like the brackets, they can be around either your currency or around the recognised currency. Thanks Kim!
• Currency: added recognition of ‘AUD $’ and ‘AUD$’ symbols. Thanks Mike!
• Internal rewrite: I completely rewrote the guts of the extension and now instead of 40 global variables I now use one. Apart from making the code look much nicer, this should also reduce the chances of conflicting with another extension. The rewrite should have caused no visible changes.

Minor changes:

• Changed: “Hide Original” is now “Hide Recognised” (trying to be consistent with “Recognised Currencies”)
• Fixed Bug: Startup wizard would sometimes reappear. (test for document.body = null. Happens with WordPress HTML editor)
• Changed: No messages are not printed to the Javascript Console unless debugLevel > 0. Thanks Simon
• Bug fix: webservice selection could break if you removed recognised currencies
• Added: debug preference extensions.viewmycurrency_hackMode (VMC doesn’t start on browser init, you need to press Shift+Control+Alt+P)

Download from the Install page (or via automatic update)

–Will

Fixed: Download figures from Mozilla Update

I wrote earlier that there was something fishy about the Mozilla Update download figures. (The “downloads this week” was more than the “total downloads”).Well now it looks like morgamic and justdave fixed the problem.
Thanks guys!

With two randomly chosen new extensions you can see the result:

After the patch was applied, the difference between the two download figures stopped increasing.

This extension was released after the patch was implemented and you can see the download figures track each other almost perfectly. The tiny difference (the right axis is 20 times smaller than in the first graph) is probably due to the total and weekly update scripts running out of phase.

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I guess I don’t have any excuse for delaying my next submission to Mozilla Update

ViewMyCurrency 0.387 (alpha) released

Important bug-fix for international versions of Firefox

• Fixed: Major bug that prevented install wizard from completing in non-English versions of Firefox.
  (Wizard hung if your browser was set to one of the following languages: ca, bg, ar, cs, de, ru, sl, fr, el, hu, it, pl, nl, fi, he, ja, ro, eu, da, mk, sq, tr, ko, mn, sk)
  Thanks Rufus!

Are you using an international version of Firefox?

Did this version of ViewMyCurrency correctly guess your country?

Please let me know by adding a comment below. Thanks!