It's All Text! v0.6+

2007

Mar

I wrote It’s All Text! for myself. When Firefox 2.0 was released it broke MozEx so I went looking for a replacement. The others weren’t very good. So I set about fixing MozEx. It was then that I realized that MozEx had way more stuff in it than I needed and some parts were just a pain to maintain.

The author of MozEx got it working with FireFox 2.0 eventually. But I had this itch because I saw things I can improve.

Now it’s three months later and I’ve released version 0.6.1 now that Addons is back. This will be my release candidate for 1.0 because I have fixed the four most annoying problems:

The edit button is in the right place. If it isn’t perfect, it’s really close. Even for GMail and Wikipedia.
Right clicking on the edit button lets you pick a file extension.
When the user first starts or the editor isn’t in the right place, it explains to the user what happened and what to do about it.
The rules for when and what to refresh finally seem right. At least for me… ;-)

The last big bug I want to do something for, even if I can’t fix it, is the “Mac OS X select an editor that actually is a .app directory” problem. It’s hard for me to work on because I have to borrow my wifes Mac to work on it.

The versions up to now, as flawed as they have been, have actually gotten some really good feedback both in ~~comments~~ on this site and on addons and even from blogs in Switzerland and Japan! Note: I have been told that the addons comments are still in the process of being moved from the old site to the new one.

Jason Barnabe, the author of the excellent Stylish extension for Firefox has helped design an API for It’s All Text! so that you can use an external editor in Stylish or in any other extension that decides it wants to support It’s All Text!

Finally, if you design a website, you can add the attribute itsalltext-extension to any textarea and it’ll be the default extension used for that textarea (don’t forget the leading dot, .). You can see it below in the “Leave a comment” box.

I want to thank everyone who has given me all this great feedback. Even people telling me it doesn’t work is helpful. Every comment spurred me on to make it better so I really owe it’s current level of usability to all of you. Please, give yourselves a hand.

I can’t wait to see what feedback I get next. Yay!

Ciao!

Previously: It’s All Text!

EDIT (2007/04/04): I’m so stupid. Thankfully, Robert Daeley explained exactly what I didn’t understand about Mac OS X. I need to use /usr/bin/open on Mac OS X. Now that I understand what open is and why it should be used, I will finally have that part of Mac OS X fixed in short order. Now I just need to figure out make the close button not be display: none in preferences. Grrrr.

Mentions (till Addons gets trackbacks):

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