If you use the Operator extension and geoFlock, then your in luck as I have just finished making an Operator user script. With this script, you can pass a microformat address or geo location straight to your address list.

Head to the bottom of the geoflock geodiscovery help page to go get it!

Technorati tags: operator, microformats, geoflock

Blogged with Flock

Hi Folks. If there is any geoFlock users out there, I have added a few extras to the Cormarant version (no longer supporting the flock 0.7 version due to forthcoming Flock 0.9 release).

First up is traffic information. Open up the minimapper topbar and click on the small car button to toggle Google supplied traffic info. It looks like major USA cities only at present, but hopefully google will extend to more locations.

Next I have added limited support for kml files - if you see a kml file link on a webpage, drag and drop onto the minimapper topbar to view. This is just a simple implementation at present to get a quick look at the kml without loading up Google Earth; I personally do not want to go down the route of creating a 2D version of GE in geoflock.

UPDATE: Have noticed a bug with the following, will correct in next release by wednesday 20.00 GMT. Finally, the flickr geotag dialog now contains a new button: click on it and all your public geotagged photos from flickr will show on the dialog map - useful to see where you may have geotagged photos in the past.

Head over to flock.spatialviews.com and install geoflock 0.7.3 FOR FLOCK 0.8/0.9 ONLY.

technorati tags:flock, geoflock

Blogged with Flock

I am now in the fortunate position of having Mac OS X, Win XP and Linux (FC6) but after a couple of days trying to sort out my Flock extensions to work in the forthcoming 0.8 release, I have had a cross platform eye opener.

Mozilla/Firefox/Flock are all cross platform, and whilst busy making my extensions had always assumed that if the extensions simple xul code worked in windows, so it would work in Mac and Linux - not so it would seem.

The main issue I have stumbled across of late is the window behaviour. In blogplus I had been using hidechrome, fine for windows and linux, and only after recently getting my mac did I discover we need the additional titlebar=no. Thats sorted with the windows then, oh wait, hold on a minute, alwaysRaised only works in windows grrr, this is proving to be a bit of a pain.

There are other slight differences such as the handling of css. Windows was showing my window as a 0.5 opacity, Linux and Mac not handling the opacity properly at all.

For the time being, I am happy that the core functionality of my extensions now works in 0.8 and will tackle the minor annoyances over time. The one exception is the blogplus contextual toolbar which relies on the opacity and alwaysRaised - without these two it just becomes a stupid, useless background window for mac/linux users. The only possible fix I can think of just now is to forget writing the toolbar in xul and inject it as an absolute positioned div into the editor. One major drawback to this approach though, if it is not 100% watertight and removed from the body tags before posting, everyone is going to end up with a silly div in their blog post

These things are sent down to test us, and I guess we all like a challenge now and again….

technorati tags:flock, extensions, xul

Blogged with Flock

I (briefly) took part in the Cormarant Bug Test Day yesterday, the first time I have ever done so. Would have liked to stay longer but I think hanging on to midnight over the pond here was as best as I could manage.

Also my first experience of using litmus, not entirely sure I tackled it the right way, but had good fun hitting the mediabar, uploader and blog test cases. Almost everything I tried passed, with the exception of a couple photobucket failures.

Really nice to hang out on the irc channel, have to do that more often, and I look forward to the next bug day. A big thanks and congrats to everyone that arranged the day, certainly went well from my end and I encourage everyone to come along next time.

flock

I have now, after some significant changes to the contextual toolbars behavior, got to the point where I think blogplus is functionally finished. The changes to the contextual toolbars relates to the timeout I originally had in place: rather than disappearing after 1^1/2 seconds unless you mouse over or when you mouseout, it now stays in a semi-opaque state until you unselect text or links. The biggest improvement to the behavior is with the focus, as the blog editor now retains the focus (this was proving to be a pain).

So what do I mean by functionally complete? Well, the extension is already getting a bit bloated and the time has come to stop adding features, and just concentrate on getting the present ones to work without bugs. Things I was considering doing but have now dropped include:

• making the sidebars work in both the editor and source tabs. However, it was getting very very hacky trying to do this so will not attempt it any more - just use the editor tab when you want to utilise the sidebars. There is one exception to this though, the Preset Markup sidebar. Being able to see the markup that is applied is far more useful in the source tab, so this sidebar will work in both tabs.
• Tabbed Blogging. Why not, we have tabbed browsing so tabbed blogging would be good wouldn’t it? Well, maybe someone better than I could have a go, I just found it too much of a pain, and if truth be told are you ever going to have 4 or 5 blog posts on the go at once and need them all in tabs.

I have added an extra blogplus pane to the Flock Options window to control the contextual toolbars (actually called them smartTools in the dialog but suspect that name is used 1000 times over elsewhere). This is actually the first post I have done from the Lowerblog component as well, I guess if you are reading this it worked!

Technorati tags: flock, blogplus, extension,

Blogged with Flock