FireMozFeeds

In this issue…

• Our First Issue
• Fennec M4 Available for Testing
• New Fennec Working UI Designs
• New Mobile Networking Profiling Tool
• Aza Raskin’s Mobile Concept Video
• Embedding

Our First Issue

Welcome to the first issue of about:mobile.  This newsletter will cover what’s going on in the Mozilla Mobile community on a monthly basis.  Please send your comments and suggestions to about-mobile@mozilla.com.  You can follow this newsletter from the Mozilla Developer News weblog or via our email list.  You can always unsubscribe from the mailing list with the link at the bottom of the mail.

Fennec M4 Available for Testing

The M4 Milestone release of Fennec is available for testing for the N800 and N810.  The main feature of this release is that it features really good scrolling and panning, largely written by Stuart Parmenter and Gavin Sharp.  Please note that this is still a very early milestone release, and as such this build has many features that are either incomplete or unstable.  Please see the instructions on how to install this Fennec milestone release on the N800-series tablets and Mark’s post on the release.  If you follow the instructions you will also get milestone updates as they become available.  The M5 milestone should be out a few weeks from now.

If you want to get involved remember that you can join the Mozilla mobile community on the mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile newsgroup or join via IRC on #mobile on irc.mozilla.org.

New Fennec Working UI Designs

Madhava Enros has updated the working UI designs for Fennec.   The current designs aim to minimize required typing, make it easy to do quick searches, and also to maximize the amount of screen space dedicated to web content.  Primary browser controls and tab thumbnails are placed out of the way, just beyond a page’s edges, but can be dragged quickly into view when needed.  Please see his updated mockups in the mobile section of the wiki to get the full story.

New Mobile Networking Profiling Tool

Pat McManus is working on measuring network performance for mobile.  As part of this he has created a network emulation tool that lets Fennec on Linux run as if it were connected to the Internet through a variety of different wireless networks.  He’s created configurations for GPRS, 3G, bluetooth and others. Feedback on the tool and especially any pages that interact poorly with any of the provided profiles would be much appreciated. Details on how to get the tool and use it are included in the newsgroup announcement.

Aza Raskin’s Mobile Concept Video

Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin has put up a video and blog post outlining some of the ideas he has for navigation on mobile touch devices.  Designed around single finger manipulation, Aza explores some ideas about how people might navigate from tab to tab or from browser to bookmarks.  A focus on visual momentum and realistic physics round out the demo.  To learn more see Aza’s post which includes a great screencast.

Embedding

Pelle Johnsen and Dave Camp have been hard at work on Mozilla’s new Embedding API.  It’s still very very early but Pelle has posted instructions on how to build the embedding APIs for some of our supported platforms.  Right now we have working support for Qt on Windows, a separate native win32 version, GTK+ on Linux and Tristan Van Berkom has been working on support for GTK+ on Windows.  In addition, Pelle posted early doxygen docs that outline the common parts of the API.

If you want to join up with the rest of the embedding community join us on #embedding on irc.mozilla.org or the mozilla.dev.embedding newsgroup.