Here's a nice tutorial that walks you through the basics of creating a Firefox extension.

Had a stellar idea for a brand new extension, but didn't know how to get started? Well, here you go... :)

A few days ago, people stumbled upon a new viral marketing site, and a WHOIS revealed that the domain belonged to Microsoft. Then came a surge of speculation, and after a few hints were dropped by people within the company, it was determined that this had something to do with a new device that Microsoft will be announcing later this week.

People continued to dig around for more hints, until finally, someone discovered an actual promotional video.. And it looks sweet. Really, really sweet. Think of it as an ultra-portable TabletPC-like device, about the size of a small notepad, that functions as a digital media player (with a nice, big screen for video), a portable gaming device (was that Halo in the video?!), a scratchpad/notebook/journal, a PDA, a GPS unit, and more. The video does a great job highlighting various different scenarios in which it can be used. From what I could tell, it even seems to have built-in Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, so that you can tether it to your cellphone's data connection when you're out in the middle of nowhere, or use a broadband connection over WiFi when you're close to home or a public access-point. Smart.



More details are expected to show up on the Origami site on March 2nd. I just hope it's priced well too, whenever it makes its way into the market. As much as I'd love to have one (assuming it's as awesome as it looks in the video), I can't really pick one up anytime soon, but I'd really like to see something like this take-off. The utility value, especially for students, would be incredible.

Yesterday, Yahoo! launched two brand new libraries for Design Patterns and User Interfaces. The Design Pattern libary describes some elegant solutions to common design and UI problems for web applications, and the User Interface library consists of freely downloadable JavaScript utilities and snippets for building rich web-apps. Lots of cool, AJAX-y goodness in there.

As some of you might know, Yahoo is powered primarily by FreeBSD servers, so it's nice to see that the UI library components have been released under the BSD license.

When I get some time, I'm going to have to take a look and see if there are any libraries that I could make use of on this blog or any of my other web dev projects.

At the same time, Yahoo also launched a new User Interface blog, and there are already a number of interesting posts about various design patterns. Subscribed!

When Microsoft acquired Giant's Antispyware product and released the first beta of what became Microsoft AntiSpyware, I was pretty impressed. It was a good, solid product with a number of useful features that no other free anti-malware application had. Realtime monitoring in a free product was a huge plus, and a community-driven effort through SpyNet was a great idea.

Then Microsoft decided to call the product Windows Defender and announced that it would be a part of Windows Vista. Now Beta 2 of Defender has been released for XP, and it almost looks like a brand new product. Fortunately, most of the changes are for the better. The UI has been greatly simplified, and the whole app has been redesigned to be as unobstrusive as possible. In fact, once installed, you won't even know it's running, because the icon in the system notification area disappears and comes up only when the user's action is required. The number of popup notifications has been significantly reduced as well, so when you see an alert now, you'll know it's important.

I was also really glad to see a native 64-bit version. It seems like Microsoft is finally taking XP x64 seriously. First the IntelliPoint and IntelliType software, and now this. All that's left for me is an x64 version of Windows Desktop Search. I hope that's in the pipeline too.

Paul's got a review of Beta 2 with lots of screenshots on WinSuperSite as well.

A few months ago, Google acquired Urchin and launched Google Analytics, a service for web traffic analysis. I was one of the early adopters, but soon realized that my own, homebrew tracking system was giving me more relevant information about what visitors are looking for when they come here, and what they find most interesting. I found that Analytics was a little too broad for my needs, and consequently, I haven't logged into my account for weeks.

Now Measure Map has become a part of Google too and is expected to launch soon. While Analytics applies to websites in general, Measure Map seems to be targeting blogs in particular, which makes me think this might be a better match for my needs. The site doesn't have any specifics yet, but I've signed up for a notification when it becomes available.