Operator 0.9g (Release Candidate) available

29 February, 2008 (12:38) | rdfa, firefox, microformats, operator

I’m making a release candidate for Operator available hoping that I can shake out any last bugs in it. It’s available here. Note the release candidate is English only. I have it on Babelzilla at this moment getting translated.

First the caveat - RDFa support is not baked in this version (as in RDFa the old way doesn’t work, and RDFa the new way doesn’t work). That’s mainly because the RDFa spec was in flux. I think it’s done now and hopefully we’ll have the RDFa parser before I release the official 0.9.

So what is going to be new in 0.9? Lots of bug fixes and improvements to general interpretation of how microformats work. I detailed this in a previous post, but here are some highlights:

  • Songbird support!
  • Fixes to make sure things work in Firefox 3
  • Menus no longer magically disappear on some pages
  • hCards supports nested menus to access actions (more logical than trying to use adr for multiple addresses)
  • Nested microformats are now handled per the spec as best we can figure it out
  • Performance should be much better (and it has been in my experience)

I hope some people will try this out and let me know how I did. I’m trying to get 0.9 out next week for SXSW. Thanks!

ONE MORE THING: If your microformat is hidden (via CSS or otherwise), it will no longer display in Operator by default! You need to turn on the “show hidden microformats” preferences. See this post.

Comments

Comment from Daniel O’Connor
Date: February 29, 2008, 1:19 pm

Did you kill off the adr handler (I assume for performance reasons)?

‘Locations’ doesn’t detect Plain Old ADR.
If I re-add ‘adr’ via the data formats tab do I get my list of items (’Addresses’ icon) - but no actions are available there anyhow…

Comment from Daniel O’Connor
Date: February 29, 2008, 1:25 pm

Doesn’t appear to place a logo in the status bar of a popup window; even when explicitly checked.

FF3b3

1. Options -> [X] display icon in location bar
2. Open a new tab
3. Open a new window via javascript (window.open)
4. Open a new window via keyboard shortcuts

Expected:
In all cases, the location bar should have an operator icon / context menu

Actual:
Only in case 2

Comment from Daniel O’Connor
Date: February 29, 2008, 1:27 pm

Actually, scratch that, not even case 2 works as expected.

Comment from Daniel O’Connor
Date: February 29, 2008, 1:38 pm

Inconsistent behavior in microformat detection

1. Hit our stupidly secret internal site I can’t link to so of course you’ll have a hard time reproducing this
2. Wait for page to load (Approx 4 seconds)
3. View source
4. Create a new html document
5. cut & paste source in
6. view in firefox

Expected:
It detects both geo & adr results in the same fashion, both over network and local

Actual:
It only detects the ADR results over the network, but everything for the local file

Other things of note:
* Have added ‘adr’ data format, which is off by default
* Doing view-source, cut & paste means all of the images, css, etc aren’t there for the local one; and the window.onload() happens much faster

If I find this happening on the public interwebs, I’ll provide a better test case

Comment from mkaply
Date: February 29, 2008, 1:40 pm

The adr handler is still there, but you have to add it manually if you want it.

Basically I found that in most cases, the adr was really part of the hCard so I made it so that the hCard action could handle multiple adrs.

Originally I added adr support for hCards that had two addresses so you could map them both.

Now Google Maps on hCard shows both addresses.

Comment from mkaply
Date: February 29, 2008, 1:41 pm

As far as the other problem goes, can you go to about:config and turn on:

javascript.options.showInConsole

and tell me if you get any errors in the console when things don’t display?

Comment from mkaply
Date: February 29, 2008, 1:47 pm

The location bar icon is working for me on FF3 B3. Note it only appears if there are microformats on the page.

It is appearing to the left of the favorite star for me…

Comment from Daniel O’Connor
Date: February 29, 2008, 2:02 pm

@ location bar; you are dead right, the change from ‘faded green cross’ to ‘wide open stretches of location bar’ + show hidden microformats == off caught me by surprise

Comment from Daniel O’Connor
Date: February 29, 2008, 2:04 pm

@ adr handler - sorry, I’m whinging about the actions not being there even when I’ve re-added it as a data format. I’ll do a screenshot if that’ll clarify

Pingback from Operator 0.9g at notizBlog - a private weblog written by Matthias Pfefferle
Date: February 29, 2008, 3:36 pm

[…] gibt seit heute einen Release Candidate von Operator 0.9. Neben Performance-Verbesserungen und einigen Fixes wurde hauptsächlich die Erkennung von […]

Pingback from microformatique - a blog about microformats and “data at the edges” : Operator 0.9g - release candidate
Date: March 1, 2008, 9:26 pm

[…] Michael Kaply, developer of the excellent Firefox extension, Operator, has released version 0.9g, a release candidate for 0.9. […]

Comment from Martin Hassman
Date: March 2, 2008, 4:09 am

When Removing duplicates is checked the browser goes incredibly slow during filling updates on twitter.com. This was’s so bad with the 0.8 version.

Comment from mkaply
Date: March 2, 2008, 9:19 pm

Removing duplicates can be really expensive. I’ll take a look at the specific twitter case and see if I can figure something out.

Can you give me a link?

Comment from Martin Hassman
Date: March 3, 2008, 10:42 am

You have to register in twitter.com to test it. Start following 5-10 people to have page full of messages with mixture of vcards. Then on the http://twitter.com/home try to write some message in editbox - there is long delay after every keystroke. It was really better before I upgraded to 0.9g version. In fact I had ‘removing duplicates’ turned on for months and never found a big problem until this upgrade.

Comment from Tomm Eriksen
Date: March 4, 2008, 9:55 am

On MacOSX, Operator 0.9g causes a minor misplacement of the location bar:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14547408@N00/2309587643/

Pingback from Elias Torres » Blog Archive » Chinese Visa
Date: March 4, 2008, 9:36 pm

[…] implementation so I can catch up with the latest specification which Mike Kaply needs for Operator 0.9. BTW, I must say that the RDFa Task Force is now a well-oiled machine going through test cases, […]

Comment from adrianbj
Date: March 6, 2008, 3:40 pm

Hi Mike - a question about the .ics file that is produced from the Events>Export Event option. It contains this entry:

X-WR-CALNAME:

I am sure you have your reasons for doing this, but I prefer that way the ics file is handled when this line is not present. This may just be the way Outlook 2007 handles things, but with that entry, it creates an entire new calendar for the ics file, but without it, it simply creates a new event that the user can save to their existing calendar. This behaviour seems more useful to me. Thanks.

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