Usually when I download files, I just click and forget.  Then, once every day or two, I look in my downloads folder to see what I have there, and poke through it to pull out the stuff I need to look at, to install apps, and so forth.

So really, it doesn’t matter to me most of the time how each download is progressing.  It’s not like I’m anxiously awaiting their completion so I can leap on them as soon as they’re done.

One of the nifty new features in Firefox 3 is that you can set a preference in about:config to prevent the download manager window from appearing every time you start downloading files.  Instead, a progress indicator appears in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window, like this:

If you need to see the download manager window, you can open it from the Tools menu as usual — or you can simply click on the download status indicator in the status bar.

The preference is browser.download.manager.useWindow.  Just set it to “true” and you’re good to go.

For me, this is a great bit of polish that makes my day-to-day work a little bit better.

Until support for it landed, it had never dawned on me how handy Growl notifications could be in a web browser.  Now, I can’t imagine life without them.  If you have Growl installed on your Mac (and if you don’t, you should!), Firefox 3 makes great use of it.

If you’re not familiar with Growl, it’s a notification system that applications can use to inobtrusively present notices to the user.  They appear as small bubbles or boxes (the appearance of which is very highly configurable) that fade away after a few moments.  You can also configure Growl so that the notifications are sent to other Growl-equipped computers at your home, and to only fade out if you’ve touched the keyboard or mouse recently.

Firefox takes advantage of this if you have it.  When downloads complete, a Growl notification is issued.  If you have add-ons that need updating, Growl lets you know.  If there’s a Firefox update ready to install, Firefox uses Growl for that too.

Growl is as close as Mac OS X currently comes to having a standard system for these types of notifications, and it’s a real pleasure to see Firefox taking full advantage of it.

Extensions can even easily use Growl too, by using the nsIAlertsService interface, which previously only worked on Windows.  I hope to see lots of extensions take advantage of this soon!

Now that things are starting to come together pretty well, I figured I’d post up a screenshot of what the new MDC is looking like at the moment. This picture was admittedly carefully selected to minimize the appearance of the minor issues still waiting to be resolved, but should be fairly close to what the final site will look like.

You can click on that to get a full-size look.

Among the issues we’re still working on are minor cosmetic things, such as the size and style of headings.  The second and third levels of headers are too close to one another in appearance right now, which makes things look slightly awkward in places.

If all goes well, we should be opening up the test server for people to check out sometime in the coming week, after the current round of debugging is finished.

Things continue to progress nicely on getting MDC up and running on MindTouch Deki Wiki.  Our test server now has a usable install with the new skin in place, but there are a few remaining glitches to resolve before we throw open the doors and start letting people thump away at random:

• There are a couple of really minor visual tweaks to make in the skin.
• We’re working on a couple of performance issues that need to be resolved.
• Some of our templates aren’t working at the moment, even though they have in the past under Deki, so something got busted recently.
• The converter from MediaWiki to Deki needs a few minor adjustments to fix a problem that’s causing us to have two tables of contents per page, as well as some text encoding problems under certain Asian languages.

Once those things are taken care of, we’ll be able to begin our heavy-duty testing phase and really let folks get a good first look.

I have a dark, dirty little secret.  For the first year I worked at Mozilla, I did nearly all of my editing of Mozilla Developer Center documentation using… Safari.

I wasn’t proud of it.  In fact, whenever I was visiting coworkers, I would bravely do my work in Firefox.

But it wasn’t easy.  Firefox 2 had some really frustrating text layout issues that made heavy editing like what I do on a daily basis nearly impossible.  The worst problem was that as I typed, the typing caret would drift, winding up farther and farther out of alignment with where the text insertion point really was.  Eventually, editing became impossible just because I had no idea where I was actually typing.  It looked a lot like this much of the time:

See how the word “with” is cut off, with only part of the “h” drawn?  That’s a result of the insertion point slowly sliding its way to the left as I type.  It got worse and worse the more I typed, until finally the edit box was so messed up I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

With the new Cairo rendering engine used in Firefox 3, all those problems are gone.  Text is crisp and clear, and the strange problems with text overlapping or the typing caret being in the wrong place are all fixed.

For a guy that lives and dies in text editing fields, that’s a huge, huge deal.

On the fluid intake front, today I kept careful records of how much I’ve been drinking.  I didn’t make any concerted effort to drink more than usual, and don’t believe that I did.

As of this moment, out of the 96 ounces a day I’m supposed to drink, I’ve had… (doing the math)… 130 ounces.

I don’t know what exactly that means, but I’m more convinced than ever that I’m following doctor’s orders to the letter, which leaves me puzzled as to how I’m winding up dehydrated.

Pah!

I’m a forgetful guy.  As I opened up WordPress to write this blog post, during the few seconds it took to type in the post’s title, I forgot what I was going to write about.  That’s how forgetful I am.

Now that I’ve remembered, after about 30 seconds of scratching my head, I realized that anecdone would be a good way to start talking about the second way I love Firefox 3.

As a guy that quickly loses his train of thought (usually loudly, and into a river at the bottom of the ravine underneath a missing bridge), anything that interrupts my workflow is a bad thing.  Firefox 3 does away with a number of things that used to interrupt me.

One of the big ones is the new way Firefox asks if I’d like to save a password.  Instead of popping up an incredibly distracting modal dialog box, an unobtrusive strip appears at the top of the browser offering to save the password:

I can keep on working, and deal with the password issue at my leisure.  Usually when I log in, there’s something I need to look at or write up quickly before I forget to deal with it, so this is a huge relief for me.

Another big help for my addled brain is this: I often get (via mail or IRC) links to web pages including content I need to deal with.  Sometimes it’s an article I need to edit, sometimes it’s something I need to read.  Often it’s just something I need to refer to while I do other work.

And, often, I don’t have time to deal with it right away.  So I leave the tab open, waiting for me to be ready to deal with the material.

Sometimes these tabs stay open for weeks.

And eventually, for whatever reason, I’m guaranteed to have to quit Firefox.

Firefox 3 — joy of joys — remembers all my tabs and loads them right back up for me when I start it again.  No more having to bookmark every single page I might ever have to find again.  I can quit and restart at my slightest whim, safe in the knowledge that I won’t lose some important thing that I need to deal with… someday.

Today (that is to say, Wednesday) didn’t go the way I planned.  Right about the time I was planning to go run the errands that I needed to get done, I was overcome by weakness all over and wound up headed to the emergency room for the second time in as many weeks.

It was an interesting experience.  I was so shaky and weak when I got there that they rushed me back to a room almost immediately, and got me hooked up to monitors.  When they were reasonably sure that I wasn’t about to keel over, things slowed down a lot.  Took over two and a half hours for a doctor to see me, and he spent about two minutes with me.

He ordered up some tests — which took over 45 minutes to get started.  Then we waited around two more hours for the results, which came up that I was totally fine — which, by then, I was.

The diagnosis: I still need to work on my fluid intake.

Unfortunately, after spending almost six hours at the hospital, it was no longer really feasible to get my errands done — which means they’ll have to be done tomorrow.  I expect to do them in the morning, so I may get a late start working tomorrow (er, today, I guess, technically).

The Deki Transition

We now have a very rough MDC up and running on DekiWiki.  The majority of the rough edges are my fault.  I made a PDF of the guide MindTouch wrote for how to set things up on our server and sent that to IT… and failed to check to see if it changed (which it did).  So our current setup isn’t quite right.

I’ve filed a ticket with IT to upgrade things and fix the stuff they didn’t know needed to be done, so hopefully they’ll find time for that today.

There’s also one relatively minor skin issue that’s causing some interesting problems, but that ought not to take long to fix, so hopefully we’ll get that today or tomorrow.

Then finally the testing can get underway.  There are probably going to be a few other things that will need twiddling, but until these other issues are resolved, they’ll be hard to spot.

Places

In more directly documentation related news, I’ve been finally actually moving stuff around for the Places documentation.  Among other things, this involves renaming a number of pages, and cleaning them up a bit.  We have reference document pages for each of the Places interfaces, so the Places API pages that Dietrich created are being phased into being how-to articles, since they include lots of great samples.

Things will continue to be a little dusty in the Places docs for at least a few more days.

Other Stuff

I’ll be out for a couple-three hours this afternoon.  My parents are coming to visit, arriving Friday night or Saturday morning, and my dad always appreciates it when we have a project for him.  So we’re going to go out and buy mattresses so that while Dad’s here, he can help us put together Sophie’s new big-girl bed.  She’s been sleeping in a toddler bed for about a year and a half now, and she’s ready to move into a full size bed.

I’m also going to take Friday off, so I can help my wife finish getting the house whipped into shape.

I’m tentatively planning not to take off any time while my parents are in town — they’re really here to see their granddaughter, and I’d just get in the way.  But I may work unusual hours for the first few days next week.

There are a lot of reasons to like Firefox 3, and if you watch Planet at all, you’ve seen a lot of folks extolling its virtues.  Deb, in particular, has done a great job sharing the joys of the awesomebar and the new security information user interface, among others.

And, yes, those are all very sweet features, and great reasons to like Firefox 3.

But my enthusiasm actually stems from a very different place:

I’m a Mac snob.  Seriously.

I’m one of those Mac elitists that Windows users get very annoyed by.  From mercilessly mocking their flawed and derivative user interface to taunting them every time they have computer problems to harrassing them over their never-ending battles with malware, I tend to get on their nerves pretty fast.

Now that I’ve stirred up that hornet’s nest and practically guaranteed some cranky comments, I’ll get to the point I was trying to make.

As a Mac snob, I get very frustrated when software doesn’t live up to my snobbish standards.  Firefox used to be a real problem for me in this regard.  It was like running Windows software on my Mac.  It looked wrong, felt wrong, and in some cases acted wrong.   When I interviewed for my job at Mozilla, the only uncomfortable moment I had was right after I ranted a bit on this point.

Tip: Complaining about how ugly your prospective employer’s product is is not necessarily a great conversation starter during a job interview.

Fortunately for me, it wasn’t a secret that Firefox was lacking a bit in the sex appeal department on the Mac.

With Firefox 3, that’s all changed.  Firefox 3 looks and feels, at long last, like a real, honest-to-goodness Macintosh application.  From the native controls in forms and windows to the sleek new skin that blends in seamlessly with the other applications on your Mac, Firefox 3 doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb the way Firefox 2 did.

Whether you like the specifics of how it looks or not (there are folks that don’t like the black-on-grey icons, or the grey background, for example), you can’t argue that it doesn’t look and feel like a real Mac application.

And for me, that’s yet another reason to love Firefox 3.