Monthly Archives: May 2016

Projects / Uncategorized — Comments Off on GSoC 2016: Getting Oriented
23
May 16

GSoC 2016: Getting Oriented

Today is the first day of the “coding period” for Google Summer of Code 2016 and I’m excited to be working on the “Event in a Tab” project for Mozilla Calendar. The past month of the “community bonding period” has flown by as I made various preparations for the summer ahead. This post covers what I’ve been up to and my experience so far.

After the exciting news of my acceptance for GSoC I knew it was time to retire my venerable 2008 Apple laptop which had gotten somewhat slow and “long in the tooth.” Soon, with a newly refurbished 2014 laptop via Ebay in hand, I made the switch to GNU/Linux, dual-booting the latest Ubuntu 16.04. Having contributed to LilyPond before it felt familiar to fire up a terminal, follow the instructions for setting up my development environment, and build Thunderbird/Lightning. (I was even able to make a few improvements to the documentation – removed some obsolete info, fixed a typo, etc.) One difference from what I’m used to is using mercurial instead of git, although the two seem fairly similar. When I was preparing my application for GSoC my build succeeded but I only got a blank white window when opening Thunderbird. This time, thanks to some guidance from my mentor Philipp about selecting the revision to build, everything worked without any problems.

One of the highlights of the bonding period was meeting my mentors Philipp Kewisch (primary mentor) and MakeMyDay (secondary mentor). We had a video chat meeting to discuss the project and get me up to speed. They have been really supportive and helpful and I feel confident about the months ahead knowing that they “have my back.” That same day I also listened in on the Thunderbird meeting with Simon Phipps answering questions about his report on potential future legal homes for Thunderbird, which was an interesting discussion.

At this point I am feeling pretty well integrated into the Mozilla infrastructure after setting up a number of accounts – for Bugzilla, MDN, the Mozilla wiki, an LDAP account for making blog posts and later for commit access, etc. I got my feet wet with IRC (nick: pmorris), introduced myself on the Calendar dev team’s mailing list, and created a tracker bug and a wiki page for the project.

Following the Mozilla way of working in the open, the wiki page provides a public place to document the high-level details related to design, implementation, and the overall project plan. If you want to learn more about this “Event in a Tab” project, check out the wiki page.  It contains the mockup design that I made when applying for GSoC and my notes on the thinking behind it. I shared these with Richard Marti who is the resident expert on UI/UX for Thunderbird/Calendar and he gave me some good feedback and suggestions. I made a number of additional mockups for another round of feedback as we iterate towards the final design. One thing I have learned is that this kind of UI/UX design work is harder than it looks!

Additionally, I have been getting oriented with the code base and figuring out the first steps for the coding period, reading through XUL documentation and learning about Web Components and React, which are two options for an HTML implementation. It turns out there is a student team working on a new version of Thunderbird’s address book and they are also interested in using React, so there will be a larger conversation with the Thunderbird and Calendar dev teams about this. (Apparently React is already being used by the Developer Tools team and the Firefox Hello team.)

I think that about covers it for now. I’m excited for the coding period to get underway and grateful for the opportunity to work on this project. I’ll be posting updates to this blog under the “gsoc” tag, so you can follow my progress here.

— Paul Morris

Project Updates — Comments Off on Google Summer of Code 2016
17
May 16

Google Summer of Code 2016

It is about time for a new blog post. I know it has been a while and there are certainly some notable events I could have blogged about, but in today’s fast paced world I have preferred quick twitter messages.

The exciting news I would like to spread today is that we have a new Google Summer of Code student for this summer! May I introduce to you Paul Morris, who I believe is an awesome candidate. Here is a little information about Paul:

I am currently finishing my graduate degree and in my spare time I like to play music and work on alternative music notation systems (see Clairnote). I have written a few Firefox add-ons and I was interested in the “Event in a Tab” project because I wanted to contribute to Mozilla and to Thunderbird/Calendar which is used by millions of people and fills an important niche. It was also a good fit for my skills and an opportunity to learn more about using html/css/javascript for user interfaces.

Paul will be working on the Event in a Tab project, which aims to allow opening a calendar event or task in a tab, instead of in the current event dialog. Just imagine the endless possibilities we’d have with so much space! In the end you will be able to view events and tasks both in the traditional dialog and in a tab, depending on your preference and the situation you are in.

The project will have two phases, the first taking the current event dialog code and UI as is and making it possible to open it in a tab. The textboxes will inevitably be fairly wide, but I believe this is an important first step and gives users a workable result early on.

Once this is done, the second step is to re-implement the dialog using HTML instead of XUL, with a new layout that is made for the extra space we have in a tab. The layout should be adaptable, so that when the window is resized or the event is opened in a narrow dialog, the elements fall in to place, just like you’d experience in a reactive designed website. You can read more about the project on the wiki.

Paul has already made some great UI mock-ups in his proposal, we will be going through these with the Thunderbird UI experts to make sure we can provide you with the best experience possible. I am sure we will share some screenshots on the blog once the re-implementation phase comes closer.

Paul will be using this blog to give updates about his progress. The coding phase is about to start on May 22nd after which posts will become more frequent. Please join me in welcoming Paul and wishing him all the best for the summer!