I did this brief Q&A. any suggestions where to put it online? --- Mouse Stroke is an extension for Google Chrome that lets you use mouse gestures to do things quickly in a browser such as opening and closing tabs, or moving back and forth between pages.
http://code.google.com/p/chrome-mouse-stroke/ > Tell me about yourself I'm a software engineer living in Beijing, China. I'm 28 years old. I'm not very involved in open source development, but I do have some projects at both sourceforge.net and Google Code, mostly tiny projects. > How did you get interested in Google Chrome & extensions? I started to use Chromium because Firefox is slow on my Debian box. Chromium is breezing fast, I love it, and started to use it under Windows too. I started to make extensions for Chromium because I wanted to port my GreaseMonkey script, a telnet emulator, to Chromium, so I can secretly browse a telnet BBS at work ;) I didn't really get interested in developing mouse gesture extensions at the beginning, I was happy with StrokeIt under Windows and Easystroke under X. However, my laptop at the office is strictly monitored by my administrator, I'm not allowed to install any software, so I decided to develop a mouse gesture extension, that is Mouse Stroke. I posted the first version at chromeextensions.org and said to myself: "that's it, the final version." But it turned out that people hated it ;), a bug in the first version killed many websites, including GMail. So I had to pick up the source and make another version, then another version. At least it doesn't kill GMail now :) Ironically, I started to use Chromium because it's fast on Linux, but now my Chromium extension still doesn't work on Linux Chromium. That's because Linux Chromium handles mouse events differently than the Windows version, which makes it impossible for the developers to control the context menu. This also applies to Mac Chromium, that's why there are very few gesture extensions that work on Linux and Mac (is there?). I'm hoping this can be solved soon but, well, I don't know when. I'm currently working on user defined strokes, most gesture extensions on Firefox have this feature, the idea is to let the user create their own gesture handling scripts. Hopefully it will be available on Mouse Stroke soon. > Do you work on software for a living? Developer, web designer? I'm a developer, my work is to develop software to process financial data. I was interested in web development back in college, mainly in PHP. I wrote my own forum software for our WoW guild, a website for our lab. I also developed a website for someone in Boston years ago. But I don't think I'm a web developer, most of my programs are written in C++, PL/SQL, and recently Perl. However, web development is fun, I'm spending more and more time on it. > Chrome extensions are only JS, HTML, & CSS + images, right? It sounds > like you are more of an traditional application developer, so is it as > easy to work on an extension instead of using C++ or Perl? Chrome extensions are JS, HTML & CSS, but it's not regular JS used in websites, Google implemented some APIs to expose the internals of Chrome, so extensions can do things like add bookmarks, move tabs around, etc., but the API set is still minimal, they still have a lot of work to do to make Chrome's extension system as powerful as Firefox's. Developing browser extensions (or web applications) are easier than developing traditional applications, because recent browsers are all packed with great developer tools. All you need is a browser and a text editor. But for traditional languages, you have to know the compiler, the linker, the debugger, you have to know different runtime environments, so many things to take care of. Besides, web/extension development is more fun and more addictive, we rely on web applications so much these days, a simple browser extension could give you enormous help. Also the users can get access to your applications easier. -- (( Anthony Bryan ... Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ] )) Easier, More Reliable, Self Healing Downloads -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Metalink Discussion" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/metalink-discussion?hl=en.
