ViewSourceWith, Thunderbird and mail editing

ViewSourceWith (VSW for friends) is definitively a browser oriented extension, using it with Thunderbird (TB) produces a very different experience.

VSW under TB allows users to view the mail message text (for example to inspect headers) but it doesn’t support any editing feature.

Under Firefox VSW offers textbox form editing (single and multiple lines) and I use daily the feature to edit GMail message content.

Editing rich textbox like GMail is a great feature, you can edit HTML code not only plain text, this is a great step ahead.

A couple of users asked me to add to VSW the ability to edit Thunderbird messages, not the raw view but a real edit feature in mail composition.

Well, now VSW (from version 0.3) can be used to edit Thunderbird messages, both plain text and HTML messages.

Technically speaking adding TB editing was enough easy using the nsIEditor, the same component used under Firefox with GMail.

I hope to post more details about the nsIEditor usage in VSW

GIMP doesn’t reuse running instance under Windows

A ViewSourceWith’s user posted an interesting question on forum: how to reuse an already running GIMP instance.

I’ve never incurred on this problem on my Linux box so I was very surprised.

Booting under Windows I’ve found this different behavior, very strange because the GIMP documentation explains how to obtain the opposite effect using command line switches, i.e. running always new instances.

IMHO the reuse technique under Windows is bugged so I found a workaround using the not so famous gimp-win-remote executable program present on bin directory.

gimp-win-remote checks (correctly) if GIMP is already running and reuse it.

I’m curious to know if Mac OS/X complains to unix world, if you have a Mac and would satisfy my curiosity I will update the ViewSourceWith FAQ page

Houston we have a problem: ViewSourceWith under FF3b5

Bad news for ViewSourceWith and its compatibility with FF3.0.

Due to the bug “Code running in context of hiddenDOMWindow runs unprivileged?” ViewSourceWith stopped to work when FF3.0b5 was published.

I’ve done many code modifications to adhere to FF3 requirements and now VSW 0.1b is ready.
After dozen of regression tests I’m afraid something is missed so I ask to VSW users to help me to test it deeper.

Any help is welcomed not only technical tests, for example you can share my help request in other blogs/forums.
If you would help me to test VSW 0.1 download it from here.

Tests can be done on

• Firefox from 2.0 to 3.0b5
• SeaMonkey
• Songbird
• Flock

Tests must verify

• text box editing
• page view source
• css/js view
• error console view source clicking on links
• temp files removal at application exit

Try to

• open more that one browser window closing the openers and verify if VSW continues to work
• use your daily VSW usage behaviour
• use you creativity

Platforms

• Windows
• Linux (I use Ubuntu Feisty)
• MacOSX

Please use this post to give me feedback or better land to “ViewSourceWith Open Discussion“