The never-tiring folks at Mozilla are already hard at work on implementing multitouch events in Firefox. Felipe Gomes has posted a short demonstration of very cool multitouch capabilities via a few simple use cases. Here is the clip and a few words from the man himself.
We’re working on exposing the multitouch data from the system to regular web pages through DOM Events, and all of these demos are built on top of that. … We have three new DOM events (MozTouchDown, MozTouchMove and MozTouchRelease), which are similar to mouse events, except that they have a new attribute called streamId that can uniquely identify the same finger being tracked in a series of MozTouch events.
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This very useful tip was sent by Harsha Kotcherlakota to Lifehacker.com.
The idea is to set up tabs for Gmail and Google reader that will always be open, but with a few extensions will have minimal impact on the interface while providing the information relevant to each app (site). For a full guide see the link at the bottom, but here’s the gist of it.
Using the Better Gmail 2 add-on turn on unread count display in the favicon. Then get the Faviconize Tab and the PermaTabs Mod add-ons. The Faviconize add-on will add an option in the right-click menu of the tab to “Faviconize” it, i.e. remove the text and only leave the favicon visible. The PermaTab add-on gives you an option (right-click tab) to make a tab permanent. This will prevent it from accidently closing and will leave it on even after Firefox is closed (to close the tab you’ll need to “un-perma” it). And apparently permatabs don’t load their content until they’re first selected, in other words, this setup will not cause Firefox to load up 2 extra tabs every time you open it.
This is extremely useful. I check both gmail and reader multiple times a day but don’t like leaving them open all the time because the tabs take space, but with this I can have the best of both worlds.
[Original Lifehacker Post]
Using combination of CSS transforms, transitions, gradients and :target it’s possible to create things that usually require JavaScript — such as accordion and reflections (in Firefox). Unfortunately, this only works 100% in Safari and Chrome (and I guess any other webkit using browser). In Firefox these elements behave properly, they just don’t have animations or gradients. As for IE, I didn’t bother with it at all.
Here is the page I’m going to go over. Feel free to dig into the code and if you’ve got any ideas on how to make it even sleeker let me know. Keep Reading
So this has been a pretty busy week. Of course the biggest news is me launching this site… <crickets>… or maybe not. I guess it all depends on your perspective. As for the other interesting stuff — Google is sending out 100,000 beta invites to Google Wave in September; HTC Hero has been reviewed by everyone except me; Steam is having a sale on King’s Quest and Space Quests collections, and you know I got it as soon as I saw it; and finally a small Firefox add-on that is going to change my life (not really, but it’s an attention grabber, ain’t it). Keep Reading
