In this issue…

Add-ons challenge ends Apr 12
There are two weeks left to submit an entry to the current Firefox mobile Add-ons Challenge for a chance to win Mozilla swag and a shiny new Nokia N900. “Developers are challenged to build an add-on that shows innovation, compatibility and that considers the mobile context (small screen size, touch screen, on-the-go, etc.) At the end of the Challenge period our panel of judges will select ten winners who will receive a new Nokia N900.” Some themes the mobile team thinks are particularly interesting are: using device APIs; photo, media, social and sharing tools; and saving files and session restore. Check out the Mozilla blog for more information, or read the complete contest details and rules.

SFX Education toolkit
Mozilla’s community marketing team recently launched the brand new Spread Firefox Education Toolkit. “These materials allow us to scale our events program. Instead of doing a few events per year where we work one on one with either community members or event organizers, we are now able to have more events and participation! With the new Firefox education toolkit, anyone can go out and teach people about Mozilla and Firefox. The toolkit contains everything you’ll need, including a set of print pieces, videos and presentations.”

Summer of Code applications
Gervase Markham writes, “Applications have just opened for the Google Summer of Code 2010. If you are a student, please consider applying to Mozilla — either to do one of our ideas or an idea of your own. If you are not a student, please contact students you know and encourage them to apply.”

Thank you notes for contributions
The Mozilla Add-ons gallery (AMO) site has added a new feature for developers. “Since we launched the Contributions Pilot last year, hundreds of add-ons have participated in the program. We know from talking to developers that they deeply appreciate it when they receive contributions, so we thought we’d launch a small feature to help express this gratitude. Now, in the Contributions section of the Developer Control Panel, you can fill out an optional ‘thank you’ note that gets sent to anyone who elects to send you a contribution. These emails are text only and contain a link to the developer profile page for the add-on.”

Mozilla Foundation update
Mark Surman has posted the most recent update from the Mozilla Foundation. “As we near the end of Q1 2010, we are starting to see good early results from Drumbeat and other Mozilla engagement efforts. Of course, we’re still at the seedling stage. We now need to move to a place where large numbers of people can participate in Drumbeat, and where it’s easy and obvious for almost anyone on the web to support Mozilla with their time or donation. My March status update provides a detailed overview on all of this, both progress to date and challenges ahead.”

How to make toolbar button glyphs
Stephen Horlander has posted an extensive and detailed tutorial about how to create your own toolbar button glyphs for Firefox. “Now that the new ToolbarButton style has landed on Trunk, I put together some templates in Photoshop and posted them on the SVN server. These templates will allow someone to make their own glyphs with only a new vector graphic.” Stephen’s blog has a step by step guide that walks you through the process.

Firefox engagement hub
“As part of our larger plans to strengthen our communication channels, we’ve created the Firefox Engagement Hub on mozilla.com, highlighting our top four social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This is a fairly simple/static page right now which we’ll be evolving into a more robust engagement space in the near future — including an awesome Twitter visualization and much more.” See Tara’s post for more details, or go check out the Engagment hub yourself.

SUMO Twitter experiment
The Firefox support team is launching a new experiment in which they will be reaching out to Firefox users on Twitter and offering them help when needed. “A huge number of people are actively engaged in social networks, where they speak their mind and share what’s bothering them. When they experience a problem with Firefox, they might just post a tweet and express their frustration instead of finding their way to SUMO and getting help with the issue.” You can read more about this plan through Kadir’s blog post or the project’s wiki page.

Open source law
Luis Villa, the newest member of Mozilla’s crack legal team, has written an interesting article about FOSS and lawyers over at opensource.com. “There is a fairly common perception among FOSS hackers that there is no community of FOSS lawyers. Scratch the surface, though, and it turns out that the FOSS legal community is there and growing. Since this question recently came up in the context of Mozilla’s decision to revise the MPL, I thought it might be a good time to talk about this community.”

Visualizing usage of the Firefox Menu Bar
Working with data obtained through the recent Test Pilot study to explore how users interact with Firefox’s menu bar, Alex Faaborg has generated some heat map illustrations of how Windows users use Firefox menu bars. “The Firefox UX team and the Test Pilot team put together this study and are now sorting through the data to help streamline Firefox’s menu interface for Windows Vista and Windows 7. This interface re-factoring is still very much in progress.” Alex goes on discuss some initial ideas the team is working with based on the data, and includes some mocked up early designs.

Experimenting with page designs
The Metrics team has been working on some website optimization experiments, and Blake Cutler has written about the recent results of their trial to see which design elements are most effective in driving downloads on the IE landing page. “We didn’t know which elements were most effective, but expected each would help visitors to ditch IE. Our results were surprising! The simplest variation performed the best, increasing the download conversion rate by 2.3%, at the 99% confidence interval. This improvement translates to 1.7 million additional Firefox downloads per year!” For more details, check out Blake’s post on the Metrics weblog.

Software releases
* Bugzilla API 0.5
* Jetpack SDK 0.2

Upcoming events
* Apr 3 – Jetpack Workshop – Taichung, Taiwan
* Apr 9 – Testday – Tab matches awesomebar

Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.

About about:mozilla
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning.

If you have any news, announcements, events, or software releases you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.