Tonight I threw together a little XUL file that demonstrates most of the major user interface [controls|widgets|whatever] so that I could get a quick idea of how any given GTK theme would look on a variety of different interface elements. I'm sure there is a GTK application that does this but I thought that it would be an interesting use for XULExplorer.

So without further ado I present you with my mostly useless example-widgets.xul

Obligatory screenshot:

Check out their site for more info!

The following is a simple bit of code that can make a borderless window dragable, currently tested only on Linux. While this may not be needed in most X Windows Managers (due to alt-click dragability) it's still an important part of any desktop widget runtime. In WidgetRunner you can simply include this JavaScript file to provide the functionality automatically. 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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