Wow, What can I say! Amazed, stunned, but most of all honoured to see my Minimap Firefox addon win one of three grand prizes in the Extend Firefox 2 competition.

Like a lot of developers (I call myself that loosely, the extension was created in the early hours of my limited spare time), the extension fulfilled a personal need and I threw it out there on the off chance it would be equally useful for others.

I never even imagined I would get a small mention from Extend Firefox, so to receive one of the winning accolades is just awesome.

Many thanks to the judging panel, and ActiveState, VMWare and O’Reilly for sponsoring the competition.

So now I turn my attention to what’s next. The arrival of a new member to our family last autumn/fall has severely hampered my ability to action requests for change, but as things settle I will be looking to address some of the more pertinent ones, including full Firefox 3.0 support (few issues to iron out).
If anyone would like to join me in developing Minimap further, you are more than welcome – it has been a great learning experience to write this, my first Firefox extension, and would be thrilled to have other members to bounce ideas, concepts and code off of each other with.

It is only fair that I give a quick shout out to the addons inspiration. Erwan Loisant and Jesse Andrews, two awesome developers, came up with a mapping concept for Flock that was shelved early on in the developer previews, but it had inspired me to make Minimap. A lot has changed since that point though, and summer last year the time was right to release this Firefox extension into the wild and into the competition (NB. I have developed a parallel Flock version).

Finally, I hope this extension is useful to you, and makes your Firefox experience just that little bit more pleasurable.

Best wishes, Tony