A Pragmatic Perspective by Nino D'Aversa

0.7 Release Update

I have gotten some feedback from Doug on my bug. I have made changes where appropriate and submitted two revised patches. I have two active attachments: one for all my work on the Geoposition that is contained in the mozilla-central tree and another one liner for the preference I added to the mobile-browser tree as per Doug’s suggestion. I was unsure as to how to approach this since to my understanding I can’t put all these changes in one patch since they exist in two separate repositories. Saturday is also a notoriously bad day to ask questions as most people are off having a life outside Mozilla.

I’m rolling this change into my 0.7 release and whatever other changes I make to my Geolocation work. I plan to work on the Camera API project in tandem with these revisions. I will post more detailed specs on the Camera API once I iron out the details with Brad in the coming week.

0.6 Release: Geolocation Support for Fennec on Windows Mobile

I feel I am on top of a very small mound, beneath me a bit of work I’m proud to say works pretty well, ahead of me my 0.7 release, but let me take a bit of time to show off my 0.6 first.

I have added Geolocation Support to Fennec for Windows Mobile.

Through simple JavaScript, Geolocation data can be accessed and used in a variety of ways, currently I am just spitting out the data to the page every time it’s updated (note: which I have currently set to 3 seconds since the WindowsCE GPS API doesn’t have a callback event for location changed).

So let’s see Geolocation in action…

We start-up Fennec…

Then navigate to a page which asks for Geolocation information, Fennec prompts us to ask if we would like to share our Geographic data with this site, we say yes of course!

Once the request is accepted Fennec turns on the GPS Device and starts reporting our location…

This is just cool! No other way to say it, it opens up so many possibilities for relationship we can have with the web. I’m glad that in some small way I can contribute to that.

Now to set my sights on my next target: Camera support for Fennec! — and fix all the stuff Doug finds wrong with my patch (you’re too fast I couldn’t even blog about it!). Back to the lab…

0.6 Release Update

I am happy to report that my 0.6 is coming along quite nicely. After the geolocation prompt in Fennec was addressed by Doug I now have a prompt when I hit a sample geolocation request page in Fennec with my patch applied. I have been testing my patch and found a problem with the way I was dealing with the FILETIME stuff, more specifically converting from FILETIME to UNIX time. FILETIME is defined as the number of 100-nanosecond intervals from January 1, 1601 whereas UNIX time is the number of seconds from January 1, 1970. FILETIME as such requires a 64-bit integer whereas the UNIX time only requires a 32-bit integer. I have sorted out the conversion and have tested it, it works! I plan to spend some more time testing my GPS stuff to ensure its correct and plan to put up the revised patch on my bug by this Friday’s deadline. Also at that time I will produce some screenshots of the GPS in action.

0.6 Release Goals & Tel: link support r+

Brad looked over my latest patch for tel: link support on Windows Mobile.

I’m happy to report I got an r+ on it and its marked [checkin-needed].

Glad that stuff can land now, good feeling.

With this out of the way I plan to work with Doug to get my GPS stuff working properly so I can submit a full working patch for his review as my 0.6 release coming up this Friday. Stay tuned for updates on this over the next few days.