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Independent Projects Status Reports

by TONY JORDAN |

K-Meleon - Sebastian Spaeth

K-Meleon is the Windows answer to Galeon. Thus, K-Meleon is a lite Web browser based on gecko (the mozilla rendering engine). It's fast, it has a light interface, and it is fully standards-compliant. To make it simple, K-Meleon could be considered as the unbloated Mozilla version for Windows.

Originally created by Christophe Thibault, K-Meleon was released up to version 0.21 in 2000, and received mostly positive feedback. Christophe, being busy with coding Winamp3, was not able to satisfy the demand of the public for faster development. The development team was enlarged in the end of January and development continued with our coding god Brian (binaryC) as lead coder.

We quickly moved away from the BCG library which became commercial and switched the codebase towards using mfcEmbed instead of winEmbed. Further plans include bloatlessness, world domination and Winamp2 similar plugins to fulfill all kinds of tasks.

On 02/15/01 we released the first result of our major changes: K-Meleon v0.3, if you don't know K-Meleon yet, it might be a good possibility to start with. By the way, we are always in need of coders, testers, documenters, and creative people.

If you are logged into sourceforge.net you can turn on release monitoring for K-Meleon by visiting: http://sourceforge.net/project/filemodule_monitor.php?filemodule_id=12235

Releases: http://download.sourceforge.net/kmeleon/kmeleon03.exe
R. Notes: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=14285=23692
Developer list: kmeleon-dev@lists.sourceforge.net
Subscribe here: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kmeleon-dev

Sherlock - Ricky Iseli

Achievements:

  • The quality guidelines for writing plugins have been released. If you have any comments or questions, don't hesitate! Thanks Azrael.
  • The mozdev bug 122 has been worked on. Next week, the database will probably be running! Christoph Studer was a great help. Thanks again.
  • More plugins have been submitted. Last's week "nearly 100 plugins" was somewhat overestimated (hey, we didn't count them!), it was around 60 plugins. Now we are at about 80. As soon as the database is running, we'll have more accurate numbers.

Tasklist:

  • We need some people to test the different plugins according to the quality guidelines. Anyone interested? This is especially a good job for those who are afraid to contribute to Mozilla because they don't know a programming language.
  • We need to finish the database. Currently we have the structure, the PHP search engine, we still need to feed the database and create an admin tool. Any PHP freak?

Problems:

  • Mozilla 0.8 has a bad regression bug, Bug 67944: Advanced search sidebar category dropdown not working. This is annoying if you have organized your search plugins into categories, but it doesn't affect the developpment work of sherlock plugins, since our plugins are installed into the web category by default, the only category that is available with this bug.
  • Mozilla 0.8 has another regression bug, also very annoying and highly visible: Bug 67574: Can't open (some) menus after switching themes. Since the Search menu is affected, you cannot set Search | My Sidebar Search Tab | Advanced. Workaround: restart the browser or open a new browser window.
  • Robert Churchill commented Bug 66363: 95+% of public search engines out there use HTTP GET... With the current architecture, there is no easy solution for providing full support for HTTP POST.
  • The bugs mentioned last week are still there: Bug 65863 and Bug 65453

Jabberzilla - Eric Murphy

Jabberzilla now has a component that works. This is going to allow Jabberzilla's in-memory RDF data to be accessed anywhere in Mozilla using XPConnect. This is a major accomplishment for this project, and opens up a lot of possibilities for intant-messaging to be integrated in to Mozilla itself.

Chameleon - Pete Collins

Fixed these 8 bugs.
Next week will continue fixing bugs and try to wrap up a 0.02b snap.

mozmp - Tom Vaughan

Highlights

  • A sample native (C++) xpcom component, Camille, has been added to mozmp. Camille doesn't do anything other than stat (stat(2)) a file, and return its st_mtime as a string. But the fact that we understand xpcom well enough to put all this together (making xpcom calls in javascript to a native library, using the DOM to display results, using other xpcom components like a "file picker") should mean that mozmp will be playing audio (at least) and video (perhaps) real soon now. (Tentative release date for version 1.0 is on the 3rd.) Please see http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/mozmp/2001-February/000077.html.

Lowlights

Tasklights

  • Close PR#153.
  • Flesh out the UI. The UI will be kept very simple. But we do need to add a few things like a play button.
  • Create an audio or video xpcom component. Pete Collins is researching several video libraries for possible inclusion in mozmp. Like gstreamer. I'll probably just dive in and create an Ogg Vorbis xpcom component.
  • Check out The Donnas at The Roxy on Friday.

Thanklights

  • Pete Collins has been especially helpful all the way around. Several people have begun to install mozmp, or checkout the source and have sent in feedback to the mailing list which is just great! Other people have begun great discussions on mozmp's architectural direction, like Dan Dennedy. Please see http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/mozmp/2001-February/000038.html.
  • Thanks everyone! Keep it coming!

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