Mozilla Add-on Collector

Add-on Collections is a new feature of Mozilla’s Add-ons site. From the Mozilla blog:

In November, we launched Fashion Your Firefox, which was a collection of add-ons that we felt were great for a novice user just getting started with customizing their browser. Now, we’d like to take it a step further and let anyone create their own collection of add-ons that can be shared with their friends, posted on blogs, and featured on the Firefox Add-ons website.

Working with Briks, I was the lead developer for the Add-on Collector extension, which allows Firefox users to share and discover add-ons from within the browser. I’m very pleased at the result and the positive feedback that we’ve been getting so far. That people are using it to discover new add-ons is great.

Some more coverage:  Mozilla Blog – A week of collections, Lifehacker’s Firefox Add-on Packs, New York Times Gadgetwise Blog.

o2sms

I have moved the o2sms project to SourceForge. Hopefully this will diversify maintainence and ensure continued development should I drop off the planet :) If you want developer-level access, please contact me.

o2sms is a program to send SMS messages using the websites of Irish mobile operators.

Webtext – The o2sms for iPhone

Today, my first iPhone app was released to the App Store. Webtext, an SMS (text messaging) client for the the iPhone.

Like o2sms, it allows customers of o2 Ireland, Vodafone Ireland and Meteor Ireland to use their free “web text” allocation to send messages nationally (internationally in the case of o2). Unlike o2sms, this application supports many other providers (hence the move away from the name “o2sms”), so users in other countries can use their local provider’s web text allocation.

What’s more, Webtext supports actual proper bulk SMS providers, like Clickatell and VoipBuster. These providers expose an API, which is infinitely more robust than screen scraping. I bought a tenner’s credit on Clickatell and I’m using it to send international messages from Spain to Ireland. This reduces the cost from €0.60 to €0.03 per message, and all from the comfort of a familiar looking app. It even appears to come from my real number, so replies arrive as normal.

I’m aware of Vincent Coyne’s Eirtext. I think Webtext improves on his effort by providing a familiar interface and by supporting many more providers. 

This app is free for the next while. Check out Webtext and let me know what you think (and leave some positive reviews in the App Store)!

Wurd Pres

Finally got around to migrating my old “home brew” blogging system over to Wordpress. It should be easier to maintain this way. Let’s hope I write more too.

o2sms has fixed meteor support.

Version 3.32 has fixed meteor support.