Campers in front of Apple store

I heard a lot of buzz about new Apple store opening in Sydney. I am not a fan of Apple. Some of my colleagues are. Well most of them since Atlassian started equipping its staff with Mac Pro, MacBook and MacBook Air computers.

So this morning I thought I would go and have a look at the folks camping in front of this store that was due to be opened tonight

And yes, there they were. Sitting on the foldable chairs, covered with doonas and in sleeping bags.

I really felt sorry for them. Trading their (life)time for something they can already buy from a nearby store - there are already stores here that sell Macs.

Losers!

But then it dawned at me. What a great opportunity, once in a lifetime, to spend a night with your friends doing something unusual - to (legally) camp in the middle of the city. Priceless!

Firefox 3

I, like many others, downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday. It was an attempt for a Guinness World Record titled Spread Firefox. The result was more than 8 million downloads in a single day. Quite impressive!

I did not have time to install it yesterday as I was on a holiday, busy attending Google Developer Day 2008. See my photos on Flickr. I met there with few fellow developers, like Dmitry Baranovskiy, who you can see speaking at Web Directions South soon and Carlos Mari, Director of Carlos Labs.

So I installed Firefox 3 today. I must say that I am quite impressed with the browser itself and with the ease of upgrading. I expected few hiccups on the way but it was all smooth.

Out of my 31 add-ons installed on Firefox 2 only six do not work. The six that no longer work are:

• AutoCopy
• ColorZilla
• EROnline (Exit Reality)
• Firebug
• Google Browser Sync
• Link Alert

I am going to miss AutoCopy and ColorZilla dearly. I am sure that Exit Reality will release a new plug-in real soon.

And for Google Browser Sync - it's a real shame that this is discontinued. But I knew this in advance, therefore I backed up my bookmarks and returned back to my favorite Foxmarks

In case you wondered what add-ons I use and currently have installed, here is a list:

• Download Statusbar
• Dummy Lipsum
• Dictionary English (AU)
• Dictionary English (US)
• FlashGot
• Forecastfox
• Google Earth
• Google Gears
• Google Notebook
• Greasemonkey
• Html Validator
• IE Tab
• Live HTTP Headers
• MeasureIt
• meebo
• Mouse Gestures
• Operator
• PDF Download
• Personas for Firefox
• Quick Locale Switcher
• Redirect Remover
• Total Validator
• User Agent Switcher
• Web Developer
• YSlow

Happy browsing, everyone!

PS: I also installed Skype 4.0 and it is very sleek!

JIRA Issues Google Gadget

It's been a while since my last post. You may have been wondering what I've been up to. Well, I was busy spending my free time developing my first Google Gadget.

I must say that the Google Gadgets documentation, especially the Developer Guide are well written and easy to follow. Development itself was a smooth ride. The only hiccup I had on the way was at the beginning when I realized that my gadget was being cached and I had to figure out hot to switch caching off.

Have I read the docs from the beginning, I would have discovered the Developer Gadget (developer.xml) that let's you control gadget caching.

I work with JIRA on a daily basis. I work with it in order to keep track of issues: bugs / tasks / new features. I also work on it - meaning the source code of JIRA as I am one of the developers on JIRA team at Atlassian.

Last week on Thursday and Friday we had out traditional Fedex days. We were let loose to develop anything we wanted. There were no boundaries for creativity. For the results (useful and/or cool stuff) see our developer blog.

I decided to create a gadget that would display limited number of JIRA issues. So I finally got to finish JIRA Issues Gadget 1.0 as well as develop the Add To Google JIRA plugin that would allow integration as painless as possible. I already blogged about it at Atlassian Developer blog.

Google Gadgets can take user preferences and persist them. My idea was to pass these in the "Add To Google" link in order to allow JIRA users to place JIRA Issues gadget on Google Homepage pre-set with current search filter in JIRA.

But them I hit the wall. Passing user preferences in the "Add To Google" link was not implemented yet.

Anyway, I managed to ease the pain a bit. With Add To Google (JIRA plugin) you won't be able to add Google Gadget with one-click operation, but you will have the URL you can copy and paste into the user preferences of the gadget.

At 4pm on Friday all Atlassian developers presented their hot creations to each other.

For more information read JIRA Issues Gadget page. Add To Google plugin source code can be found at Atlassian's public SVN.

BTW: If you want to work on JIRA or other Atlassian products, let us know. We are hiring.