WebIDE enabled in Nightly

I am excited to announce that WebIDE is now enabled by default in Nightly (Firefox 34)! Everyone on the App Tools team has been working hard to polish this new tool that we originally announced back in June. Features While the previous App Manager tool was great, that tool’s UX held us back when trying support more complex workflows. With the redesign into WebIDE, we’ve already been able to add:...

2014-08-18

Mozilla

In my last post (back in February…), I mentioned I was spending a lot of time on the side working on the developer tools in web browsers, particularly Firefox. I find that Mozilla’s values, which truly put the user first, are something I agree with wholeheartedly. Mozilla is in a unique position in this way, since all the other browsers are made by companies that, at the end of day, are looking to make money to appease their shareholders....

2013-08-25

Into the Open

I’m excited to start to focusing what time I do have on the side towards open source projects. I’m always on the lookout for good projects to help out with, but these days I always seem to come back to web browsers. In particular, I really enjoy working on tools that improve the lives of other every day. In that vein, I’d like to focus on improvements to the developer tools in browsers today, though they are vastly better today than even a few years ago....

2013-02-17

Materials, Maps, and Surfacing

Overview For this assignment, we learned how to apply materials to the objects we’ve been creating. There are many, many different ways to construct a material that you apply to 3D object. They can be procedurally generated, they can pull from textures (or maps) you create, and you can manually tune many parameters as well. Maps are a great way to control the appearance of an object because you can make something resemble a real object quite quickly by just taking a picture and doing a bit of editing....

2012-10-06

Splines, Loft, and Lathe

Overview For this assignment, we learned a few new techniques, namely how to make use of 2D shapes to give more detail to our models. Beyond simple shapes like circles and squares is the very flexible spline, which gives you a lot of control over how a line is drawn, while still be purely analytical. Shapes and Splines For part of the homework, we added some shapes and splines to our existing models....

2012-09-29