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This article is a translation of a recent article in Japanese by fellow Jetpack Ambassador Gomita which was published on the Mozilla Labs Jetpack blog. I’m cross-posting it here for posterity.

Mozilla Labs recently released version 0.2 of the Jetpack SDK, which fixes some issues of the 0.1 release such as a glitch regarding development with Windows. SDK 0.2 doesn’t include the planned APIs for rapid development of new browser functionality, but you can still play with SDK 0.2 to get a flavor for development with the Jetpack SDK.

In this article we begin by setting up an SDK 0.2 development environment and explain the steps required to develop a simple, practical add-on using SDK 0.2. The instructions here are for Windows, but the basic steps are the same in every platform.

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I recently confirmed three different very exciting speaking gigs which I’ll be doing this spring:

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A couple weeks ago I gave a talk at the Boston Javascript meetup introducing Jetpack and filling people in in the latest developments in the project, including the Reboot. Between 20 to 30 people came to the talk which was at Microsoft Cambridge. Here are the slides from the talk:¹

Extend the Browser with Jetpack

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A couple weeks ago I went out to Mozilla HQ in Mountain View for a Jetpack Ambassador meetup. Jetpack is a project at Mozilla labs intended to make writing Firefox add-ons easier, and shares some ancestry with the Ubiquity project dear to my heart. The Jetpack Ambassadors are a team of Mozilla community members who will be involved with Jetpack marketing, evangelizing Jetpack and writing about our own experiences working with the exciting new Jetpack architecture.

We spent a good chunk of time with a team from Invisible Elephant who came in to give us some training on making technical presentations, and then dug into the code on Day 2. It was great to have the geniuses at Mozilla Labs like Atul and Myk show us the latest Jetpack code as well as get the latest project direction from Daniel, Aza, and Nick, from which we could see the amount of careful consideration and effort that’s gone into the Jetpack reboot.

The best part of the whole experience, though, has to be the fellowship with the other Jetpack Ambassadors. The Ambassadors came from all over the world, encompassing Europe, Asia, S. America, and of course N. America. Each are involved with some really exciting projects and have each made a name for themselves in their respective communities. I’ve put together a twitter list of all the Jetpack Ambassadors and the core team members and invite you to follow them.

We also had the greatest number of Ubiquity core developers to have ever been in the same place at the same time, which of course had to be documented.

(More photos can be seen in my gallery.)

I had a fantastic time in MV and it was a shame I could only be there for such a short time. I feel honored to be a part of this group and am looking forward to speaking on Jetpack soon at an event near you!

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the TechMaine annual conference in Portland, Maine.

Being a longer time slot than I previously have used to talk about Ubiquity, I decided to dedicate a good portion of the talk to Jetpack. Being outside of Mozilla for the past few months, this gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Jetpack APIs. I myself was impressed by how easy it was to develop a quick Jetpack. I ended up preparing two to live-code during the talk: one called Helvetica which, with one click, replaces all fonts on the current page with Helvetica; and You Are Here which uses an open API from IPinfoDB to display the physical location of the domain you are currently visiting in the status bar. Both are now on the Jetpack Gallery.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a snowstorm leading up to the event, but there was still a nice turnout and I got to meet some fantastic people there. Ken Shoemake of slerp and quaternion fame came up to me after my talk and said “the Ubiquity parser reminded me of the dancing bear… it’s less surprising that it works well as that it works at all.” I also enjoyed the other great presentations in the technology track, covering the virtues of REST and basic iPhone development.

Mashup the Browser with Ubiquity and Jetpack