What do you do when it's 3a.m., you're sleepy, hungry, have hardly ventured your nose out of the door for the whole day, and someone pops up in your contact list who also happens to be to a serious Ubiquity hacker?

Why, of course you gently coerce him into helping you write your first Ubiquity command. About an hour of more sleep deprivation later, the im Ubiquity for Firefox/SamePlace has somehow come into existence (click image to enlarge):

The command is available through this GitHub gist and works on SamePlace development branch. (And yes, all it takes to publish a Ubiquity command on GitHub is pasting into a text area. You can even fork it with a single click and keep editing it on the web, without git. Sweet.)

Probably the feature that hooked people the most in Firefox 3 was the awesome bar. And for good reasons: what once required browsing through bookmarks, or re-googling faintly recalled keywords, or (heaven forbid) typing a whole URL, now only takes a bunch of keystrokes.

With that in mind, why not also cut on the amount of actions to perform when pinging friends, and make instant messaging a little more "instant"? Not a big deal if your whole contact list fits the screen and you can always reach everyone with a click, but for me and for most people I know, that time is long past.

So here's a touch of awesomeness for your contacts:

Goodies available through the development branch as usual.

Question: as this kind of minimal text-interface opens up a rich array of possibilities, what else do you imagine doing through it? Searching in previous chats? Adding and removing contacts? More?

Sometimes, the wisdom about “small, incremental changes” just has to fly out of the window, so last week I began landing the most drastic changes to SamePlace user interface since the Firefox extension contest.

Here's a teaser of 1) the dashboard, 2) the chat panel, 3) the stream panel (click to enlarge):

After considerable sweeping of our bug tracker, here's the compiled list of features targeted at the next minor release. It's mostly about small/incremental improvements in usability. If you know of small fixes which would yield equally significant usability improvements, feel free to file a bug.

I moved development resources from the current mix of darcs repository, Trac wiki and Drupal wiki to GitHub. Say hello to the new SamePlace wiki and the source browser.

Hopefully this will make getting into the project much easier, whether at the extension writer level, core developer, doc writer or tester. Enjoy! :-)

Please note: the stand-alone version linked below no longer available. Work is underway to provide a stand-alone option in the official release of SamePlace. Keep an eye on the twitter feed or subscribe to this blog feed to know when it's ready. Thanks! -bard

Standalone Sameplace 0.9.3

I build a standalone version (ie: a completely independent) of the sameplace extension.

Since time had come to renew the SSL certificate (thanks Eddy once more for answering my dumb questions), I took the chance and migrated the Jabber server to the same virtual server the transports are running on and also bumped up the server memory a bit. After all, changing just one variable at a time never results in an interesting day, does it? :-)

DNS propagation was quick and aside from the restart on the different machine, Jabber server suffered zero downtime. Only flaw so far is that the web address has changed from http://sameplace.cc to http://www.sameplace.cc, so if you're subscribed to feeds, you'll almost certainly receive a bunch of the old posts again. Sorry about that!

If you come across anything else looking odd, please ping me and I'll check if that's related to the migration.

Another wonderfully (?) geeky post ahead. If you're not interested in programming on xmpp4moz, feel free to skip it. :-)

I'm quite happy with xmpp4moz API so far. It supported more than one year of evolution on top of it with very few changes — a sign we're on the right track. As in everything, there's still room for improvement.

Simpler packet selection

Now:

var channel = XMPP.createChannel();
channel.on(pattern, action);

// ...

channel.release();

Possible new API: