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The new Edit Properties page of the AMO Developer Tools area is where the main settings of an add-on can be configured. The available fields on this new page are: Add-on Name, Default Locale, Add-on Icon, Homepage, Support Email Address and Website, and other add-on flags such as viewing the source online. These fields were previously mixed in the single edit add-on page.

Some screenshots of the new layout:

The only new field for this page is a flag for add-ons that contain binary components. The localizable Add-on Name, homepage, and support fields were previously on the Edit Descriptions page, but were moved here where they make more sense. One of the biggest wins of the new layout is the explanation of what each field does, consistent with the rest of the revamp.

If you have any feedback, please comment here or in the bug.

Previous post: Part 3, Manage Add-on Categories
Next post: Part 5, Manage Versions and Files

Last week, Facebook launched a new tool called Lexicon that measures the number of times a term is mentioned on user, event, and group walls. This is what the results look like for Firefox:

That huge spike at the beginning of April is when Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released. The gaps in the graph are when the term wasn’t mentioned enough to be recorded. Comparing the results of other browsers isn’t too helpful as Safari and Opera are common nouns, and most people would abbreviate Internet Explorer as IE.

Although no actual numbers are given, it’s still cool to be able to visualize a part of the biggest way Firefox is adopted around the world: telling your friends about it.

In last week’s part 2 preview of the upcoming changes to AMO’s Developer Tools area, I posted some screenshots of the new Edit Descriptions page. Before getting to the preview of the next page, I wanted to give some more information on AMO milestone 3.5’s schedule. After all of the sections of the new Edit Add-on area are finished, they’ll be pushed live to AMO where developers will have the option to try out the new edit pages rather than use the current one. This will give the new pages enough testing to make sure they’re ready to take over, while providing an alternative in case any major bugs are found. The current edit page will remain the default until 3.5 is officially launched after various other revamp pages and finished, localized, and tested.

Now, on to part 3: the Manage Add-on Categories page. This is what the Edit Categories experience currently is:

And this is the new version:

Notable changes include:

• Instead of one multi-select box with all categories for all supported applications, each supported application has its own box with a separate selection box for up to 3 categories.
• Validation was based on all categories and inconsistent, whereas now there is a hard limit of 3 categories per application.
• The Other/Miscellaneous category for each application was unregulated and many add-ons were in several normal categories in addition to the “Other” or “Miscellaneous” category. Now, an add-on can either be in 1-3 real categories or only the Other/Miscellaneous category.

As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment here. Thanks for reading!

Next, part 4: Edit Add-on Properties

Last week I blogged Part 1 of the previews of upcoming changes to the Developer Tools area of addons.mozilla.org. This week we’ll look at another new page in the revamp, now known as AMO milestone 3.5.

One UI element present on a number of pages in the Developer Tools area is the Translation Box. Anytime there’s a field that can be localized, this box appears to allow developers to switch text fields between locales. This is what the Translation Box currently looks like on the Edit Add-on page:

This is what the new Edit Add-on Descriptions page looks like:

The new Translation Box has a bunch of improvements:

• Documentation! The site currently has very little documentation about where fields are displayed and doesn’t have any explanation of what the Translation Box actually is. In the new site, every field has a description of what it is and where it is displayed, and a help section explains how translations work:
  
• Clearer understanding of translations with the idea of “adding” and “removing” translations rather than leaving untranslated fields blank.
   
• Sleek appearance. The translation boxes match the rest of the site, although some of the fields pictured may move to the Edit Add-on Properties page.
• Complete rewrite of backend code for retrieving and saving translations that will dramatically reduce the number of queries and processing required.
• Validation and errors - In the current site, localized fields can’t be properly validated, for example, limiting the summary to 250 characters. The new translation box handles maximum length detection nicely:
  

Closer to 3.5 we’ll have a staging area setup for testing these new tools, but until then, please post any feedback you have as comments here. Thanks!

Next, part 3: Manage Add-on Categories

As I neglected to announce 2 weeks ago, AMO 3.2 launched very smoothly (technically anyway - the cluster stayed up this time!)

For a few weeks before 3.2 launched, I’ve been working on a big project for an upcoming release of AMO: a rewrite of the Developer Tools area to make the user interface more intuitive and provide a number of new features to give developers greater control over many aspects of their add-on listings. I don’t have the work done so far on a staging server, but I’ll be blogging with screenshots as I finish various sections and asking for community feedback.

There are a number of big changes to the overall structure of how add-ons will be submitted, updated, and modified. The first few posts will focus on the new editing tools. Managing add-ons will be really simple and easy to figure out in the new design because the tools have been separated out into 6 different sections rather than one long, confusing page.

The first section I’d like to introduce and get feedback on is the Manage Add-on Authors page. It currently looks like this at the top of the Edit Add-on page:

The new page:

New features:

• Authors can now have 3 different roles: Owner, Developer, and Viewer
• Someone can be an author but not show up as one on the public page. For example, if a company has multiple people working on an add-on but only wants one to show up as the company name, the others can be hidden.
• The display order of authors can now be specified, so a developer who does 90% of the work can be listed first rather than by name or user id. (bug 291629)

If you’re an add-on developer, please take a look at the screenshot and comment with any feedback.

Thanks!

Next, Part 2: Edit Add-on Descriptions

Yesterday, Mike announced the public preview of the upcoming changes to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). One of the new features that has been long-requested is the ability for developers to see how many update pings, or Active Daily Users, their add-ons have. Just like Firefox, extensions check for updates once a day, and we count how many times this happens for each extension. While the total number of downloads tells add-on authors about how many people have tried out their extension, the active daily user count tells them about how many people used it on a given day, although it’s not perfect.

There’s a bit of fine print regarding active daily usage, but some of the more important points are:

• Only add-ons that do not have an updateURL specified are counted. All add-ons are required to have an empty updateURL when submitted to AMO. If an add-on is distributed from another website with an updateURL, those pings are not counted by us.
• Active Daily Users is not the same as saying “this many people use my extension”. Not all extension users use Firefox every day of the week, users can manually check for updates which will count false active users, etc.
• Many people keep extensions installed but disabled. The stats dashboard allows you to see the various statuses, such as enabled, disabled, incompatible, etc.

Now that some background information is out of the way, on to the features!

Summary Graph and Table

The first thing you’ll see in the stats dashboard is a summary graph that shows the downloads per day and active daily users for the last 2 weeks. Active daily users are currently only counted on Wednesdays, but will switch to every day in the future when we change around the back-end processing. Below the graph is a summary table that shows download information on the left and active daily user information on the right.

Customizable Graphs

The plot selector dropdown in the top left allows you to choose a graph to display: Downloads, Active Daily Users, or Active Daily Users broken down by Add-on Version, Application, Add-on Status, or Operating System. Downloads and Active Daily Users will give a historical graph since July 2007 (or later if your add-on is newer). The ADU breakdown graphs will sort the values by total count and plot the top 6 so that the graph isn’t horribly cluttered. You can use these plot dropdowns to change any of the plots to another value, or even use the options menu at the right to add more plots.

All of these graphs have Firefox and add-on events layered on them so that you can see where the release of a new Firefox or add-on version might have influenced download or ADU numbers. The options menu also allows you to make the graph larger and view the CSV file of the data used in the graph.

RSS

There’s now an RSS feed of the Statistics Summary box updated every day with the latest download and active daily user totals.

Public vs. Private

By changing the settings of their dashboard, add-on authors can designate their statistics as public or private. All dashboards are private by default, meaning only the add-on authors and Mozilla can see the statistics, with the exception of Total Downloads. The number of total downloads was displayed publicly prior to March 2006, and with the upcoming changes will once again be displayed on the add-on’s display page. Active Daily Users and the detailed breakdowns, however, have never been public before and are only part of the dashboard. If the dashboard is set to public, a link will appear on the add-on’s display page to view the statistics, and anyone browsing the statistics index will see a list of all public stats add-ons to view.

I’ve marked one of my add-ons as public, so feel free to take a look at the dashboard yourself. (You don’t even have to log in!)

Known Issues

There are number of known issues filed and a number of known issues in my head for which I haven’t yet filed bugs. Some of the more annoying issues are actually Timeplot (graphing library) bugs that we’ll work on fixing, such as the value popups overlapping and being hard to identify with a plot. I’m also planning on adding a good bit of documentation to the stats dashboard so that you don’t have to read this blog post to understand how everything works.

Feedback

Feedback on the Stats Dashboard can go to the feedback wiki, or for specific bugs and features, please file a bug.

It’s been 4 months since my last Rock Your Firefox post, and since I’m all about stats updates lately, here’s the latest:

• Over 7500 people have tried the application, with 4400 still using it and around 45 people interacting with it daily
• Average of 13-15 application adds every day although occasional spikes up to 35 per day, and about the same number of removes every day, although most of the removes are from people that added some time ago
• This chart shows the breakdown of how users found and added the application today.
• There were 12 application adds this week from someone accepting an invitation to RYF sent by a friend
• The application “About Page” has about 50 page views every day
• Over 24,000 favorites added, 8000 of which were added using the automatic import feature

So, what amazing features are planned now? None! The app doesn’t have any major bugs and does its job well for the number of users it serves. I don’t think there’s a need for me to continue active development, which is why that actually stopped a number of months ago. Of course, the app is open source and part of AMO’s codebase, so patches are welcome.

There are a couple other reasons I’m not too excited about working on Facebook Platform stuff anymore.

For one, while it’s pretty easy to get started developing an application for Facebook Platform, it’s now almost a full-time job trying to keep an application up to date utilizing all of the latest bugfixes and improvements, something that only companies dedicated to Facebook App development can handle. There are changes and new features constantly announced in the Platform Status Feed, Developer News Blog, and weekly push SVN commit log. Developers might also find themselves spending time in the platform Bugzilla, forum, or wiki. There are so many sources of information to follow if you want to feel like you’re on top of things.

There was a time when I complained about the lack of all of these tools (mainly the open bug tracking system), so I suppose I should be happy they’re here. Rock Your Firefox has been fortunate in that it hasn’t been broken by any of the changes so far — at least not any of the intentional changes.

Another reason I think putting RYF into maintenance mode a few months ago was the right decision is that Facebook apps seem to have gone from cool and trendy to just annoying lately. When someone sends me an application invitation these days, I just feel bothered. Especially because I’m obsessive enough that I have to immediately get rid of it. I’m one of those people that clears their Gmail spam every time they notice the number. (Note: to anyone who plans on sending me a bunch of application invitations now, I have anticipated this and determined that it will not be funny. Now you don’t have to do it!)

This is a bit longer than it was supposed to be. I’ll probably post another RYF update in 6 months or so. If you haven’t tried out Rock Your Firefox, you can check it out here.

I just released Password Exporter 1.1 after over a year since the last release. I’ve been getting several emails a week asking about Firefox 3 compatibility, but due to the Firefox 3 complete Login Manager rewrite, it wasn’t an easy fix. I rewrote the extension pretty much entirely, and split the Firefox 2/Thunderbird code into a different file from Firefox 3. From this point on, Firefox 2/Thunderbird is in maintenance mode and new features will probably only be added to Firefox 3. I had to drop support for Firefox 1.5 in this version, but exports can still be made from an older version like 1.0.6.

In addition to Firefox 3 support, this version added a number of new features including a cool import progress bar, a number of bug fixes, and a new locale (ja-JP - Japanese) bringing the total number of supported languages to 20. You can see the rest of the changes in the changelog.

If I have time, I expect I’ll be releasing a minor update in a few weeks with some locales that couldn’t update this week, as well as some bugfixes for things that will probably be discovered next week. I have a few new bigger features that I’d like to tackle in the coming months, but I may not have time.

If you already have the extension installed, Firefox will detect the update sometime over the next 24 hours. If not, you can always download it or check out the new website.

I had planned on making a post about the new website comparing Google Code Project Hosting to Trac, but couldn’t get around to it. Maybe I’ll do that soon. I’ve been very happy with GCPH - it’s very simple yet powerful.

In other Password Exporter news, there’s a MozillaZine thread about what was thought to be a security issue in the extension, but which I am considering to be a request for enhancement.

Update of 2006 State of the Projects.

Free-time project status:

• Password Exporter - Finished version 1.1 this week and is currently awaiting localization to the 20 languages it’s now in. Should be released sometime the first week of January. More details on that version will be in an upcoming post. Password Exporter has now been download over 203,000 times and has about 70,000 active users every day.
• FavLoc - Haven’t had time to work on it. Will try to find time to update compatibility for Firefox 3 sometime soon, but doubt I’ll add any new features. 28,000 downloads and 6,000 active users.
• LSU Campus Map - I haven’t updated anything since I first made it a few years ago, but it’s still very popular with people just searching for an LSU campus map. It had especially high traffic following the recent shooting on campus.
• All other projects including arraise, Startup Authenticator, Degree Analyzer, elurt, and all other ideas in my head that I detail but never start - I haven’t had time to work on and are pretty much dead.

Work project status:

• addons.mozilla.org - Remora was launched in March and the AMO team is currently working on version 3.2 to be launched in mid-January. I’ve been working on a statistics dashboard for add-on developers, and after 3.2 will be continuing to work mainly on AMO stuff, probably including a Developer Control Panel revamp with lots of new features.
• Operation Firefox - Contest was a big success and winners were announced earlier this month. Site will probably stay the way it is.
• Extend Firefox - Contest ends tonight. Future plans to be announced later.
• Rock Your Firefox - 0.6 released. Work on other milestones is not currently scheduled, and the app is pretty much in maintenance mode right now.
• Personas - Site hasn’t officially launched yet, but has been finished for a few weeks.
• Misc. other projects popping up and going away just as quickly.

The last few days I’ve been cleaning up a lot of site stuff, as I was quite shocked to find I had over 50 subdomains on this site, many of which are no longer used. I think I’ll be removing the ribbon from my pages soon, as I don’t think it’s helping anything.