Mozilla, Upsource, SVG.js and Bluetooth LE – Snippets

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  • Mozilla updates: Firefox 24 and Thunderbird 24 landed yesterday. The release of Thunderbird sees the ESR version merged back into the main release tree and a couple of new tricks with zooming in compose windows, email supporting IDN based email addresses and ignoring message threads. There’s also six critical fixes in the update too. Firefox gets new Max scrollbars, right-closing tabs and tear off chat windows, SVG improvements, a better browser console and 7 critical fixes.
  • Upsource: The world of collaborative coding platforms is getting more interesting with the news that JetBrains are developing Upsource. JetBrains are the creators of IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, with its open source community edition along with many other IDEs all based on a common architecture. Upsource is a server platform which looks to bring their IDE’s smarts to a web platform. There’s code browsing, diffing, commit viewing, analysis and more. Plans are unclear for the platform and there’s no early access programme yet but there’s meant to be a Upsource demonstration which will let you browse two of JetBrains projects (but its down at the time of writing).
  • SVG with JavaScript: SVG is still something thats a bit of a bore to generate and deal with. SVG.JS looks to make things easier with a 9K MIT licensed library which can handle animating, positioning and transforming SVG images, create SVG text, create gradients, group elements and bind events to elements.
  • Bluetooth LE: ReelyActive have an interesting blog post about working with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and how they use it in-building location and how, with the arrival of iOS7 and its full BLE support, they’ll be able to swap out physical tags for smartphones. Next month, they present at the IEEE Conference of Local Computer Networks and publish a paper which should shed light on how we’ll be followed around in future.