It’s hot down here

So I have been spending a few hours here and there since starting my internship doing this side project. It’s an extension that watches the tinderbox tree and reports back what is burning, and the status of certain tinderbox’n that your interested in.

There were a few goals I had in this release. The main objective however, is to help avoid making trips to the tinderbox page (because it’s large, and slow). For me at least, I am only concerned about Linux tinderboxes being red so I can checkout :). But others might have different needs. So I generally tried to include everything I can. But I could have made a mess of things.

I should mention that you should have a reasonably fast connection (ie. not 56K modem). Even GoogleWiFi was able to reasonably download the json and bonsai xml files that I needed to get things working. Most developers should be fine.

I mainly tried to squeeze as much information as possible into two popup menus, making use of the tooltip to show more information then would be otherwise possible. I also show what menuitems are links by giving them an icon. But it has been a bit overdone.

Anyways, here are some images to show you what you can expect.

When loading, you’ll be amused by the animated png throbber that shows up on the statusbar

Before it can be useful, you have to set it up

The options menu shows you what tinderboxes are available to be watch. For now, you will only see Firefox tinderbox. This was mostly because I was less interested in the other trees. Timeout refers to how long the extension should wait before updating. You want to keep this value to be reasonable.

The statusbar icon will show you the worst state of any of your chosen tinderbox trees.

A left click shows tinderboxes and their status

A right click shows bonsai information. From bottom to top, it shows most recent check-ins. Hovering over menuitems gives you the time/date of check-in as well the check-in message.

Sub menus show a component::file display. The reason for this was because showing the full path took too much room, so I wanted to show what I thought would give you enough information so you can reasonably take an educated guess as to what was being changed. Hovering, of course, shows you the full path and new version.

Bwahaha, the extension lives here in this insecure site until I get it up on AMO. You can also fetch the source from repository.cesaroliveira.net. Any criticisms (hopefully constructive) can be emailed. In the meantime, enjoy this most beta software :)

Tags: personal, seneca, tinderbox