!! Updated Release Info

Following up on my previous State of iPod for Firefox 2 post I thought I’d give everyone an update. Things are not going very well for iPox.

The tab bar is just not playing nice. We either have tabs and errors, or no tabs. So that’s no fun. iPox will not have the close button on each tab for a while yet and that drop down menu on the tab bar is also missing in action.

!! Updated Release Info

People have been asking about iPox for Firefox 2 for literally months now. So here is the status. It’s in progress.

I have updated the the install files and saw the freak out when Firefox 2 got a hold of it. I’ve started working out the issues and it’s not easy. So far I’ve un-themed more than I’ve fixed. The theme changes documentation isn’t perfect and by applying all the updates, it just makes iPox worse.

Firefox 2 is now in release candidate 2 so people are giving a whirl left and right. Even I’ve tried it but I’ll save my mini-review for later.

One issue that people have is that their extensions don’t work. Then they complain to the Firefox team which does no good. What you really need to do is contact the extension developers. It’s up to them to update their extensions, not the Firefox team.

For those that can’t wait for a developer to update their extension, you can do a few tricks to update Firefox extensions yourself. It’s not to hard and works great for those extensions that you can’t live without your favorite extensions.

A while ago I posted about a Halloween theme I found on Deviantart. It was a port of my Hallo Halloween theme from MacOSX to Firefox. It looked pretty good, until I installed it. Then it was lacking in many areas. So, I reworked it and am now tesing HalloFF, my Halloween Firefox theme.

HalloFF is a little bit of iPox, a little bit of MidnightFox, a little bit of Hallo and some Nightmare Before Christmas characters all thrown together, mixed up and ouput into a new theme. It hasn’t gone though a lot of testing or quaility checking, but since Halloween is so close, that’s hard to do.

I’m starting a whole new set of theme tutorials. Check out the iPod Remix post for all the details.

This is a basic ‘how to’ tutorial for creating a Firefox theme. It’s not intended to be overly detailed as it’s not really that hard. In no time at all, you could get a basic theme created for Firefox.

***Important***
Before submitting a theme to Mozilla or making public, please contact the author in order to ask them if their elements are free of rights. Firefox is Open Source, Themes are often MPL/GPL but icons and pictures belong to their respective authors! Play nice people.

iPox version 0.7 was released today and is just waiting for you to grab an update.

The biggest update in this version is the addition of buttons. Firefox buttons are now slick white buttons that are based off a mockup from my Firefox buddy Greg. Other updates include an alternating background for the bookmarks and sidebar windows. It helps with readability a bit. The folder icon was also re-drawn from scratch and looks cleaner. Many other smaller updates were fixed/updated to bring a better user experience.

So what’s next for iPox? Probably Firefox 2 support. Lots of people ask for it and it is coming.

Are you using the iPox Firefox theme? If so, are there any areas that bug you? Or that are not themed? I’m working on the next version and I’ve made a few nice updates. However, I have a tendency to miss a few things.

So get your iPox feedback in now in order to possibly get the edits in the next version. I’m closing in on 1.0, however I’m not sure if that will come before or after Firefox 2.

Ohh and I’ll start iPox for Firefox 2 as soon as the first Firefox 2 release client comes out so don’t expect it to soon.

Really, it was all my fault, but Apple could do a bit better job at warning a guy.

I was playing around with the new iTunes 7 when I came across my iPod stats. Pretty nifty. I clicked on the Music tab and decided to sync a playlist. My wife hates it when she downloads or rips a song and I don’t get it on my iPod. So I decided to sync the ‘Recently Added’ playlist.

Yes, there was a warning message, however I interpreted it to be related to that playlist. After all, I didn’t click the ‘All Songs and Playlist’ radio button. Two seconds later, my iPod was wiped clean.

Good news for all the Firefox users who, for whatever reason, choose to stick to Firefox 1.0.x. iPox now installs on Firefox 1.0! It has been tested (a little) and seems to work just fine.

For those of you who are on beta builds of Firefox 2.0, I have had a third party test it out and it doesn’t work well. Firefox 2.0 support will come as the browser gets to release candidate status or at least someplace closer to the final. It’s just to early to be building a theme for a browser that the Firefox team is still putting together.

I was surfing around Deviantart yesterday and I found a mangled version of iPox. Someone took iPox and Vista Fox and merged them.

Let me just say that I don’t care if you mod my theme, but I do have a few requests. First, please ask. Second, make sure you update the install files correctly.

My biggest issue with this edited theme is that they didn’t know how, or didn’t bother to, update the install files. So when you install it, it overwrites iPox as it has the same install names.