I just found out about this very innovative way of funding open source projects and coders, Gittip. The idea is interesting and it serves both as a funding platform for big open source projects as well as a nice incentive for open source coders who works towards betterment of web in one or the other way. I also created a gittip account (here: ), and soon hope to start tipping (and hopefully get some too) some of my favorite githubbers.
Some other work that I have been doing through this week is regarding my new add-on Custom Standalone Image Backgrounds. I recently updated it to version 0.5 which removes any chrome-content references and adds a color picker to pick any color from the image to be used as the background. I am also working on a feature to figure out the background color of the image dynamically and use it to provide a streamlined image viewing experience. Here is a quick implementation that I came up with:
Try it out by opening any image in Firefox and running the code using Scratchpad.
It is still a work in progress and the most annoying part of the function is that it can take a lot of time in the getMatchingGroupIndex for loop if the image contains very random colors. I have some ideas to improve the depth of the avg by introducing dynamic color range limit rather than using hard coded 15. You can also improve the code by forking the gist.
I have also been busy implementing a sync engine for my add-on User Style Manager by using Mozilla’s inbuilt Sync Service. MDN has a very good documentation on how to create your own simple sync server. You can find my own implementation here in the repo. This will be a very good addition to the add-on as it will remove the tedious process of installing/writing/copying your favorite styles again and again on each new device you add.
