If you’d like to take over development, let me know, and I’ll transfer the Slashdotter add-on to you on AMO; if nobody volunteers, I’ll be removing the add-on from AMO in a couple of weeks. (Like all of my browser extensions, Slashdotter’s source code is open source, so you could still develop your own version if you want.)

Tapsure is an extension for Firefox for Mobile that alleviates this problem by allowing you to input passwords on websites by tapping a rhythm on your touchscreen rather than hunting through the device’s keyboard.

How does it work?

Install Tapsure here, and after restarting Firefox for Mobile, log into one of your online accounts as usual. After you log in, you’ll see a notification from Tapsure:

Choose “Yes,” and you’ll see this dialog:

(If you choose “No,” Tapsure will never ask about that specific password again. If you just close the notification, Tapsure will ask the next time you use the password.)

Here comes the fun part: think of a song, a pattern, a rhythm, or even some Morse code that you want to use to log in to sites that use this password – it can be anything, as long as it doesn’t have more than a full second between taps. Got it? Ok, now tap that song/pattern/rhythm/Morse code on the screen. Tapsure will save it and close the dialog.

Now, the next time you’re logging into a site that uses that password, instead of slowly typing out your super-secure 20-character password, just hold your finger down on the password field until you see this:

Now tap out your pattern from the previous step, and Tapsure will automatically fill in your password for you. (If you tap the pattern incorrectly, Tapsure will shake it off and give you another chance.)

You can repeat these steps for as many passwords as you like – Tapsure will remember them all.

Tapsure Settings

In the add-on options panel, you can reset all of the patterns you’ve saved with Tapsure to start over. (This will also clear the list of passwords that Tapsure won’t ask you to save a pattern for.)

Is this secure?

Yes, Tapsure saves your patterns and passwords using Firefox’s built-in password manager, so it just as secure as having Firefox remember your passwords. Tapsure also has the benefit that someone could closely watch you log in to a website without knowing your password, because it’s harder to discern and remember a tapped pattern than it is to watch the keys that you press.

Couldn’t I just tell Firefox to remember the password?

You could… but if you use the same password on more than one site (which I estimate that 99.9% of people do), you’d have to type it out with excruciating care on every single site that you use it on.

Miscellaneous

Try and use a semi-unique pattern – don’t choose Happy Birthday. It’s like using the password “password.”

Tapsure probably works better on capacitive touchscreens than resistive touch screens, simply due to the fact that it’s easier to tap a quick pattern when you don’t have to press down firmly on each tap.

Tapsure was entered in the Firefox Mobile Add-ons Cup. If you want to see it win, please write to your senators and representatives.

Where can I install it again?

Or, you can search for “Tapsure” in the “Get Add-ons” portion of Firefox for Mobile.

The technical details behind the extension are interesting, but I won’t go into detail on that here, since Splashnology’s blog post describing how Ambilight for video works explains 99% of the technique.

There’s another important aspect to this extension. I’ve used it as a testbed for Fat Plug’s add-on monetization system. A Fat Plug-enabled extension will add/change ads on various websites, and, in turn, funnel a portion of the revenue from those ads to the extension developer.

There’s some controversy around this technique. Mozilla has opted to deny any Fat Plug extensions that are submitted to the Mozilla Add-ons Gallery. Website owners, I imagine, wouldn’t appreciate their ads being replaced with ads that don’t earn them any money. (Although it would harm them no more than ad-blocking extensions, which Mozilla does allow.)

However, to an add-on developer, the idea is intriguing: “What if I collected half of all the website ad revenue from all of the users that use my extensions?” A developer of a popular add-on could retire after a couple of years to the sands of Grand Cayman and spend his days writing free software that needs no monetization.

So True Colors is my testbed for Fat Plug’s technology. I won’t be uploading it to Mozilla Add-ons, and I won’t be publishing it anywhere that doesn’t make the Fat Plug integration obvious. I’m not looking to stealthily trick users into becoming my little monetization machines, which is why I purposefully wrote a simple extension that doesn’t add functionality to the browser as my first foray into Fat Plug.

If you’re interested in seeing how Fat Plug modifies ads on websites, you can install True Colors, agree to the license agreement, and then set the preferences extensions.fatplug.enableoutlinediv and extensions.fatplug.enableoutlinelink to true in about:config. Any ads that Fat Plug adds or modifies will be outlined in red for your convenience.

If you’re interested in the coloring functionality but are wary of the Fat Plug integration, you can install the extension and just not agree to the license agreement. That will keep the tab and status bar coloring functionality but disable Fat Plug’s code.

I got some great feedback after I updated URL Fixer to be compatible with Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile browser, and I’m happy to announce that I’ve been able to add Fennec compatibility to four more add-ons:

• TwitterBar: Post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar
• AutoAuth: Automatically submits authentication dialogs
• YouTube Comment Snob (still in the sandbox): Filter out lame comments on YouTube
• Slashdotter (still in the sandbox): Adds features to the Slashdot website

So far, I’ve found it pretty easy to port add-ons to Fennec, with the following caveats:

• You can’t install add-ons in Fennec by opening them from your computer; I wrote a script to copy the add-on directly into the Fennec profile, much like an add-on IV drip – straight into the bloodstream!
• There’s no easy access to the error console , but you can open it manually if you grab the address from Firefox.
• No DOM Inspector. For now, just browse the source.

It seems that all of these issues could be solved with a “Fennec Add-on Development” extension; maybe that will be my next project, unless easier solutions already exist.

1. Look and feel: I updated all of the icons for the extension to blend in with Firefox 3′s new OS-specific look and feel. The sidebar’s toolbar uses the native theme icons, and the toolbar button is specifically designed to fit in on each of Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows. (The toolbar buttons for Windows, Mac, and Linux are shown respectively below.)

   

2. Continuous updating: Feed Sidebar used to only check for feed updates when the sidebar was open; now it checks whether the sidebar is open or not (and notifies you when it finds updates). Big improvements in memory usage and performance were necessary to make this possible.
3. Offline capabilities: the extension now caches all of your feeds, so if you go offline, you still have access to all of the data that was in the feeds, and you can read it while offline. When you go offline, Feed Sidebar goes into “Offline Mode”, and automatically opens the stored summary from the feed when you click on an item rather than trying to open the webpage the item references. This features makes use of the new online/offline events in Firefox 3.

   Here is a screenshot of what offline reading looks like:

   

4. Places integration: when you add or delete a live bookmark in Firefox 3, Feed Sidebar will detect that via Firefox 3′s nsINavBookmarksService interface. When you add a new feed, it will instantly appear in the sidebar, and the reverse is true for deleting a feed.
5. Caching: as soon as you start Firefox, Feed Sidebar will fill the sidebar with the feeds you were reading the last time Firefox shut down, even if you are now offline. This is made possible via the new JSON libraries that shipped with Firefox 3.

Feed Sidebar 3.0 is now available at Mozilla Add-ons.

Usage: $ ./unused-entities.sh path/to/locale-directory/ path/to/content-directory/

#!/bin/bash

echo "Unused entities:"

for dtdfile in `ls $1*.dtd`
do
	awk '/<!ENTITY/ {print $2}' < $dtdfile | while read line
	do
		search=`grep -R "${line}" "$2"`
		if [ "$search" == "" ]
		then
			echo "${line}";
		fi
	done;
done;

echo ""
echo "Unused properties:"

for propfile in `ls $1*.properties`
do
	awk -F "=" '{if (!($2 == "")) { print $1 }}' < $propfile | while read line
	do
		search=`grep -R "${line}" "$2"`
		if [ "$search" == "" ]
		then
			echo "${line}";
		fi
	done;
done;