The Origin
I’m making an effort to add more content to this site so that’s it more than just a technical support page. I’d like to talk about process, too, and it seems appropriate to start at the beginning with LiveClick’s origin. Feel free to ignore this post if you’re only interested in releases and development discussion.
At some point in 2005, I switched from Internet Explorer 6 to Firefox. IE had served me well and it was superior to the alternatives at the time. But news of Firefox spread quickly and its features—namely, tabbed browsing—were too attractive not to try out. As it turned out, there was one aspect of Firefox that I truly loved: live bookmarks. By then, RSS was already popular for its standardizing of content redistribution. I just hated the RSS readers at the time. A separate program that serves only as a bridge to a web browser AND I have to manage the feed items as though it were an email client? No, thanks.
Live bookmarks changed all that. Not only did it integrate RSS feeds into the web browser so I could view the content—the whole content—as its authors intended, I could ignore the items I didn’t want to read without having to press delete or clean out an inbox. I also appreciated the ability to arrange the feeds like actual bookmarks, placing them in a subfolder with other feeds or static links to related sites.
Still, the live bookmarks system felt incomplete. The most glaring omission was a link back to the feed’s home page. For almost all my feeds I had to create a separate regular bookmark to the home page. The size of my bookmarks folder quickly accelerated to the point of absurdity. That was when I began to explore another highly-touted feature of Firefox: extensibility.
So in November of 2005, I gave myself a crash course in extension development and produced what I now call LiveClick’s “Proof of Concept” (the project was originally called MarksMan, don’t ask me why). Its only function was to allow users to treat the feed folder like a clickable bookmark that took them to the feed’s home page. Development on LiveClick continued sporadically, adding features as I needed them and fixing bugs as I found them. For months, my extension existed only for me.
By that point, Firefox 1.5 had been released and Firefox 2 was in active development. LiveClick had matured enough that I considered submitting it to Mozilla’s addons site (AMO). Since I found the extension useful, others might, too. I studied Fx2 and, to my dismay, I discovered that the entire bookmarks back end was being overhauled. The new system was called “Places.” LiveClick, as written, would not work on it. So I decided to wait. No point releasing LiveClick now when I have to completely rewrite it after Fx2 officially launches.
Not long after that, I read that the Firefox development team was pushing back Places. They had decided to keep the same bookmarks system from Fx1.5, which meant that LiveClick was going to work on Fx2 after all. And with Fx3 not due until much later, I figured LiveClick had at least a year before I had to make significant changes to it. I cleaned up the code, added a couple more features, and submitted version 0.1.3 to AMO. That was May 2006.
Funny thing about releasing a program to the public, the public often differs with you about what the program ought to do. Favicon support, update alerts, marking items as read… those were all suggested features that I never considered originally. I’m glad they’re in there now and I’ll continue to implement ideas that I think are appropriate, but it’s obvious that LiveClick has come a long way since its origin.
Posted on Dec 10 2008 at 03:54 PM
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