Chipmark Development Blog

We’re contemplating having nightly builds for the firefox plugin so users can test the latest development version. Depending on the demand, we’ll implement this as an auto-compile on our servers, available in some specific, public location.

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We’ve been a little publicly quiet this year (2009~2010 academic year). Most of the effort this year has been in back-end maintenance, improving, code refactoring, documenting, etc. We will announce and address this in the coming months. So, a quick update:

There is an official update to the Firefox plugin in the review process at Mozilla right now. We have a couple more fixes in the pipeline as well (5 API error bug, open in all tabs, etc). There’s also about to a release of a completely refactored IE plugin, hopefully within a week or two.

The 2009-2010 Chipmark team is starting up, and we’re proud to announce progress on a plugin update for FireFox that’s compatible with 3.5, available on our download page. It’s by no means rock solid stable, but it works with Windows and Linux. We will strive to release a more stable Beta in the near future, once our new FireFox plugin team is fully assembled and briefed.

A big thanks to all Chipmark users who have stuck with us through yet another developer-less summer with a poorly timed FireFox update. We hope to accomplish many cool and useful things this year - stay tuned for another blurb that will have more details as to our development plan for the semester.

Happy Chipmarking~

• In the next two weeks we hope to update our servers.
• Updating our development tracker to better suit our needs.
• Changing the server code to better handle timeouts.
• The Firefox plugin is being re-factored to make future development easier, and stable.
• Following the server updates we plan on a series of micro-releases. The releases will contain specific features requested on the forum.  Each release will only contain ONE new feature (i.e. micro).

Be sure to check back in the coming weeks for more information!

First off I would like to thank our forum bug reporters for their helpful catches, especially you crash.

As of yesterday we have posted the latest version of the Firefox plugin. In this version we knocked out the bugs crippling the use of our plugin.  So, ideally you will no longer see time out issues in any of the major functionality.  Also Chipmarks with blank names or URI’s will no longer be allowed to add.  Our goal for this release was to get the most critical bugs in  the Firefox plugin fixed.

We did have to prioritize with this release.  We have 4 developers this spring, which is a step up from the fall, however we could not get to every requested feature or fix.

I will be posting more tomorrow regarding the next release and issues with this release.

The long awaited Firefox 3 Beta Plugin is finally here!

This release fixes the following problems

• “Sticky” tool tips that displayed recent mouseover text
• Multiple error messages when a new window is opened (in most cases)
• More informative error messages when things do go wrong

This release was a bug fix release only and does not include any new features.

In order to fix some of the errors we were having, we were forced to revert to synchronous database calls. This may result in a slight performance decrease of the plugin, but in our testing we did not notice anything significant enough to cause a problem.

General:

• Support for bookmarklets.
• Require users to solve a CAPTCHA before registration
• Fixed performance problem related to spam

Internet Explorer:

• Support for Vista when the User Account Control is either on or off
• GUI style changes

ALPHAs:

• The Firefox 3  browser required a complete rewrite of the Chipmark plugin. We have released an ALPHA of the latest build for Firefox 3. Please try it out and let us know what you think.
• The new manage interface uses the ExtJS framework and attempts to provide some improvement over our current management interface.

General:
-Multiple pending buddy list requests handled.
-Shared toolbar folders no longer forced on recipient’s toolbar.
-The Facebook interface has been correctly sized in Internet Explorer.
-Toolbar items are now consistent between FF, IE, and the web interface.

Internet Explorer:
-Plugin no longer crashes when hiding menus.
-Fixed default folder selection in folder properties window.
-”Keep me logged in” has been fixed.

Firefox:
-Middle clicking items in the “top ten” and “recently added” menus now opens links in tabs.
-Middle clicking chipmarks within toolbar folders now behaves correctly.
-Icons now display on toolbar chipmarks.
-Toolbar folder menus no longer overlap when switching between folders.
-Easy import duplicates have been eliminated.

Chipmark had some technical problems during the past 12 hours or so. These issues started when I installed a new SSL certificate on the server. The last step of this installation is to restart Tomcat, which I did. Unfortunately, one of the problems with Tomcat is that it is perfectly legal for it to fail to shutdown. Well, I ended up having to do a hard kill, which corrupted our database. To make a long story short, we fixed the problems, and it appears that Chipmark is up and running again. If you noticed any issues during the past 12 hours, we apologize. We do our best to keep things running smooth, but there are occasional bumps in the road.

–Zak

There will be another outage, as the topic suggests. This is to complete the testing which was
scheduled and then cancelled last week. Again, we apoligize for the outage, and we hope this will be the last.

–Zak