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So I'm trying to make borderless desktop widgets with XULRunner. It's mostly working except for one strange limitation - I can't seem to get the windows to resize to less than 100px in height. If anyone has a clue how to make an XUL window that is smaller than 100px high, please let me know, I'm stumped. Update: I finally got it to work! This involved a combination of omitting width and height attributes from the xul window tag and then calling window.sizeToContent() in the window's load event handler.

Update #2: now I have round, borderless xul windows on linux, however, I don't have alpha blending. The alpha channel on my PNG icon seems to be ignored, see screenshot...

I recently installed the Operator extension for Firefox. Operator is an interesting little extension which attempts to expose microformats embedded in web pages through a toolbar in the browser.

While browsing this site with Operator installed I noticed a problem with the tags that are typically attached to each post to organize the site into categories. Drupal attempts to conform to the rel-tag microformat by attaching a rel="tag" attribute to each tag link (Look at the section titled Tags: at the top of this post.) The problem is that drupal uses numbers for each category (aka "Taxonomy Term.") and numbers don't make very readable tags. As several others have already pointed out, this could be considered a deficiency in the microformat. The rel-tag specification doesn't provide any alternate way to specify a text-version of the tag, other than the last segment of the url. In the case of drupal, the last segment of a taxonomy url is the taxonomy term id, which is a number.

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I just saw KaiRo's XULRunner Wishlist and I want to point out that he has some really really valid points and I share many of his wishes. Perhaps I can help somehow with Bug #68702 (Pipe-based IPC). I'm actually really disappointed to learn that this doesn't already work, stdio is such a, well, standard thing, I assumed it would already be working. This will be a huge obstacle which may prevent me from using XULRunner for a major project that I am working on. Hopefully I can help fix that bug or otherwise work around the issue. Anyway if you are concerned about XULRunner and you didn't yet read KaiRo's post, go check it out ..... More...

This is a quick and dirty copy-paste hack to get Password Manager and "about:config" functionality in webrunner 0.5: More...

Some things I would love to see in XULRunner:

• Better cross-platform desktop integration. For example:
  • Support for customized dock menu entries on OS X.
    I am investigating this one. It may be possible without modifications to XULRunner.
  • Support for system tray icons on windows and linux.
    There is a patch for this somewhere in bugzilla. I will look into it further when I have the time to test out the patch.
• Tools to help with packaging XUL Applications for multiple platforms.
  It seems that XULExplorer is moving towards providing this
• A code library providing often-used features that we take for granted when developing for Firefox.

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As much as I love XUL and the Mozilla platform, I would like to introduce a related topic that I think deserves a little bit of attention. Maybe everyone is aware of this already but I rarely see it mentioned so I would like to devote a few minutes to the topic of XHTML applications in XULRunner. It may not be completely obvious to everyone: XULRunner can do a lot more than XUL. Just about any technology which works on the web will work inside of XULRunner - you can develop applications that utilize HTML, JavaScript, SVG and even Flash (via the Flash Player plugin.) Some developers may feel that XUL is superior HTML for user interface design, however, there are a lot more people who are familiar with HTML and JavaScript.

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I have started writing a tutorial for the MDC XULRunner documentation and it will be my first significant Mozpad contribution. I have only written a short introduction so far but I thought I would shoot this link to the moon: XULRunner:Creating custom app bundles for Mac OS X. I would also invite anyone who has experience with this topic to add to the tutorial or at least double-check my work for correctness. I have not written the document yet but it will be based on my recent experiment with WebRunner and my previous experience with CocoaPSYC.app. Update: I have published some work related to this project on google code. Feel free to grab updates from the svn repository or even contact me if you would like to contribute to that project.

Tonight I threw together a Mac OS X package based on Mark Finkle's "WebRunner" code (Version 0.3.)

Everything looks good on my G4 PowerMac but I don't have any other environment to test this with. I believe that it requires XULRunner 1.8.1.3 XULRunner 1.9a7pre to be installed in the default location (/Library/Frameworks/XUL.Framework/) though another version might work.

I would appreciate any feedback on this as I have minimal experience with MacOS packaging. I intend to use this experience as the basis for a tutorial on MDC and the finished app bundle will make a nice example for other developers to learn from.

If you manage to test this please let me know whether it worked along with the versions of XULRunner and OS X that you tested. Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide.

Update: I created an icon that you might like to use for webrunner, however, I can imagine using several instances of webrunner for several different webapps. In that case it would be really cool if there were a way to generate a custom version of the icon for each unique webrunner application. More on this idea later.....

Update 2: I am writing up an article with details of how this was done. You can read what I have so far over here on the Mozilla Developer Center wiki. More...

I would like to invite mozpad members to join me in blogging on Developerfriendly.com. If you don't have a blog or don't want to mix mozpad-related entries in with your other blog(s) then please let me know. I will gladly set up an account here for any mozpad members. I can also help you get acquainted with Drupal and assist you with customizing the theme and features of your blog. I can be contacted at twentyafterfour+mozpad a.t gmail . com or look me up in the #mozpad channel on irc.mozilla.org (My nick is twentyafterfour)

I would like to see the Mozilla platform become more tightly integrated with desktop environments on each supported OS platform. On the mozpad wiki I have stated a personal goal to "Improve OS integration and cross-platform consistency"

Right now there are a few subtle differences between Linux, OS X and Windows that cause problems for cross-platform XULRunner applications. We should improve platform-specific documentation and eliminate inconsistency wherever it is feasible to do so.

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