soledad penadés

January is over, what have I done with it?

Well, to start with I've been working with the fantastic people from Firefox DevTools. We're preparing a new feature for the App Manager and I'm really thrilled to be a part of this. I'm not going to disclose what it is yet until I have something to show (it's my way to make you all download a Nightly build, tee hee), but I believe it's going to be GREAT.

Then I've also been lending my brain to other projects. First, localForage, our library for storing data using the same interface from localStorage, but asynchronously and with better performance (by using IndexedDB or WebSQL if available). Or just falling back to localStorage otherwise (sad face, sad face).

The other project I'm involved with is chatspaces, "a snazzy chat app". I've done some (yet unfinished) work with implementing push notifications using Simple Push, and I'm also working on outputting better GIFs (i.e. smaller but with same perceived quality). If you're up for a slightly bumpy ride, you can try out chatspaces today.

"Generating better GIFs" means that I'm spending quite a bit of time in Animated_GIF, a library for creating animated GIFs in the browser. I implemented a couple of features like dithering and custom palettes past week and I'm pretty happy with the results you can get. I still have some more work to do before it's a totally awesome library from README to code to examples, but it's already used in somewhat popular places like chat.meatspac.es which you might have heard about ;-)

And I've also written an article for Mozilla Hacks. If you liked my previous article on unprefixed Web Audio code, I think you might like this one too. It should be published some time soon (fingers crossed).

There are more things that I've been doing this month like attending LNUG's meetup, helping people with their Firefox OS apps, improving documentation for X-Tag, and finding+filing a bunch of bugs... all of which make me terribly happy as I feel like I'm making an impact. Yay! :-)