Tweaking Firebird and Optimoz Mouse Gestures

I have been having a lot of fun tweaking Firebird, and two things have been particularly fun to play with, the CSS controlling the Firebird user interface, and the Optimoz Mouse Gestures.

The file userChrome.css, which, because Firebird is done in XUL, is a CSS file that you can use to control the look and feel of the application. After having been away from UI design for a while, but having spent more than a good bit of time doing web design using CSS this is real comfortable. As much as web designers complain about the CSS box model, I think a tool that used CSS to do layout of desktop applications would be great. There is a nicely written Tips & Tricks page that explains how to tweak the CSS. Hmmm, add a CSS interpreter for .NET Windows Forms Layout to the list of projects I would love to do but will never have time to start.

The second part of Firebird that I have been customizing is the Optimoz Mouse Gestures. The upside of the new version of Optimoz Mouse Gestures is the new user interface for customizing the mappings. The UI is a little clunky, but I don't have any suggestions on how to improve it, and it is definitely an improvement over the old system which required you to edit a JavaScript file to change any of the mappings. Some of the mappings have changed from the last version I installed under Mozilla, for example, I like to tie "drag-down" to open a new empty browser tab, or if the drag starts over a link, to open that link in a new tab. This mirrors the functionality of Opera, where I first got hooked on mouse gestures, and is the way it worked in older versions of Optimoz Mouse Gestures. The new version did not open a new tab if you didn't start over a link, and more annoyingly, opened a new tab for all the links you dragged your mouse over, not just the one you started on. Now there is a UI for mapping gestures to functions, but in this case the function itself needed to be changed so I had to go in and change the JavaScript. In the file /chrome/mozgest/content/gestimp.js I changed the function mgB_LinksInTabs() from:

function mgB_LinksInTabs(){
  var browser = getBrowser();
  for(i = 0; i < globalOnLink.length; i++) {
    tab = browser.addTab(globalOnLink[i], getReferrer(document));
  }
  return "mgB_LinksInTabs";
}

to:

function mgB_LinksInTabs(){
  var browser = getBrowser();
  if (globalOnLink.length >= 1) {
    tab = browser.addTab(globalOnLink[0], getReferrer(document));
  } else {
    mgB_OpenTab();
  }
  return "mgB_LinksInTabs";
}

The last step was to tie this function to the gesture for "drag-down" or "D" in the gestures mapping notation, which can be done through the UI.

All in all I have been having a lot of fun with Firebird. And yes, I realize most, if not all, of this stuff can be done in Mozilla also, but with the browser, e-mail and calendar all tied into one package I was a lot more reticent to play. I'm more relaxed now that I can browse with impunity and not worry that some quirky Java program or more likely a large Acrobat file that takes down my browser won't also take out my calendar and e-mail at the same time.