Weekly report: June 23rd 2013

This week the tabbrowser patch saw a lot of tweaking (four review iterations iirc) and is now almost checkin-ready. I also worked on bug 2002 - adding a command to display about: pages in a new tab. This was a good demonstration of the new tabbrowser features and might help iron out any remaining bugs once it lands in the nightlies and users try it out.

I also worked on the awesometab buddy list. There were discussions about the UX on IRC and I experimented with a few UX ideas (async loading of contacts, alternating background for list elements, displaying only a few contacts at a time and loading more while scrolling, etc). Many of the to-dos have now been crossed out (see previous post). Next week I hope to report much more progress on the UX and possibly some initial details of the filtering/ranking system that is a major part of my project.

A few things that I want to mention:

• Mic created a cool icon for Awesometab. Thanks!
• I learned more about the working about XBL. I had a few frustrating moments because I did not realize that bindings were applied only after adding the element to the DOM (because they are applied from CSS) until Mook kindly pointed this out on IRC (thanks for saving me a lot of time when nobody else was around!). This same issue forced me to be extra careful while dealing with addition/removal of contacts from the Awesometab buddy list.
• I still haven't received my GSoC welcome package and hope it comes soon :(