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After the Deadline is a powerful and intelligent proofreading tool which checks for spelling errors, misused words, some grammatical gaffes, and even some stylistic issues. For the past month, I’ve been working for Automattic, the company behind AtD and the makers of WordPress.com, to create a Firefox add-on which enables this superior technology everywhere on the web. Words can’t do justice to the magic that is AtD, so here’s a video we put together:

I invite you all to give it a spin:

Working on After the Deadline for Firefox gave me my first experience creating an add-on from the ground up and I’ve learned a lot. After working on Ubiquity and dabbling with Jetpack, it’s given me another perspective on extensibility on the web and I look forward to thinking and writing more about these experiences in the near future.

In the mean time, happy proofreading!

Here at Mozilla Japan Firefox 3.5 Headquarters,¹ we just launched the new and improved Light of Firefox (in Japanese, tomoshibi (灯)) for Firefox 3.5. The Light of Firefox is a real-time, interactive website which shows sparks on a map of Japan for every manual download of the new Firefox from mozilla.jp.

The name tomoshibi means “torch” in Japanese. As a new Firefox brings new technologies and possibilities to all corners of the web, so too will the tomoshibi light up the night in Japan!

The site was designed and coded by Daisuke Akatsuka of the Keio Kakehi Lab (xlab), the same fine folks who brought you interFORest.

By now many of you have probably seen this new Microsoft Australia campaign, “Ten Grand Is Buried Here.com,”¹ which calls Firefox “old” and Safari “boring”:

I’m not sure what this is saying about me, but my immediate reaction was to go check whether tengrandisburiedthere.com was available. To my surprise, Microsoft had yet to snatch it up! A few hours later, here’s the result:

Go ahead, visit the site and give it a try!

Note: Not being a marketing guy, I just threw some text together to introduce Firefox. If someone has some better copy for this display, please let me know.

One of the eventual goals of the Ubiquity project is to bring some of its functionality and ideas to Firefox proper. To this end, Aza has been exploring some possible options for what that would look like (round 1, round 2). All of his mockups, however, use English examples. I’m going to start exploring what Ubiquity in Firefox might look like in different kinds of languages. Let’s kick this off with my mother tongue, Japanese.¹

今後多様な言語に対応したFirefox内のUbiquityを検討していきますが、その中でも今日は日本語をとりあげます。後日日本語で同じ内容を投稿するつもりです。^^ 日本語でのコメントも大歓迎です！

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I created a new Ubiquity command that gives you super fast access to your MySQL database’s data: select.

select Command for Ubiquity from mitcho on Vimeo.

Get the command and set it up here.