Extending Extensions
I wrote a while back about our intern Luděk’s work on demonstrating how AllPeers can be extended by installing additional Firefox extensions that we call “extras”. The first extras added support for uploading images to Flickr and links to del.icio.us as part of the sharing process. They aren’t really ready for primetime, but they are good demonstrations of how one extension can extend another (in general) and how new features can be added to AllPeers (specifically).
Since then, Luděk has been hard at work writing additional AllPeers extras. It is certainly a goal for these to be useful to some AllPeers users. With a bit of luck they will also be useful for those thinking about the requirements for adding real support for extension dependencies to Firefox. And, ideally, we’ll eventually see third parties motivated to write extras for AllPeers. You can see all the extras currently available on our new extras page.
As far as the Flickr and del.icio.us extras are concerned, it occurred to me recently that a better approach would be for these (and potentially other services) to be available in a way analogous to normal contacts. So I can share an image with my friends Bob, Fred and “Flickr”. The latter would result in the image being uploaded to their website rather than being shared via the AllPeers network. Luděk seems to agree so expect to see this in a future version.
Another cool extra provides operating system shell integration. After installing it you get a new context menu option in your file manager to share files with AllPeers. This makes it quicker and easier to share files without having to go through a potentially cumbersome drag-and-drop process. It works both on Windows and on GNOME’s Nautilus, KDE’s Konqueror and Dolphin and XFCE’s Thunar (which I like to refer to collectively as “Linux stuff”).
The final extra lets you set up a special user who will automatically receive any files you share. So if you have one machine that’s always on, you can install the caching user there and be sure that your files will always be available even if the computer you shared from (e.g. your laptop) isn’t. This is an elegant solution to the “no sources” problem that plagues all peer-to-peer networks.
I hope that these will be of both educational and practical value to others. I’ll blog about other extras as they appear. If anyone has ideas, drop me a line.
3 Comments »
Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Hi
I get an error 404 and a redirection to allpeers.com when I try to download or install these interesting extension extensions !
Comment by Zaatar — 10/11/2007 @ 6:57 pm
Thanks, all files are there now.
One remark about the OS shell integration: this is a must-have ! But could it use the alreardy open Firefox window instead of opening a new one ? Thanks
Comment by Zaatar — 10/11/2007 @ 7:32 pm
2Zaatar: Which OS and which AllPeers version are you using? The intended behaviour of the shell extension is that it should open a new window _only_ if Firefox was not running before.
Comment by Ludek — 10/15/2007 @ 8:33 pm