Web Directions North » Blog Archive » Crowdsourcing a Better GMail by Gina Trapani

• Gina is the leader of the Better GMail software project.
• The “Stone Soup” story is a great paradigm for open source software development.
• The idea for Better GMail started out with using Greasemonkey script to tweak the functionality/design of GMail.
• Stylish – Greasemonkey for CSS styles.
• Great resources:
  • http://userscripts.org
  • http://userstyles.org

• Gina showed us a number of excellent Greasemonkey scripts for GMail.
• Greasemonkey is great, but is too much work for most users.
• It would be great to install these scripts as Firefox extensions.
• User script compiler – takes Greasemonkey scripts and turns them into Firefox extensions. Good first step, but not simple enough.
• So she created Better GMail. A compilation of a lot of Greasemonkey scripts for GMail into a Firefox extension. Very easy for users to install.
• Gina became the liaison between Greasemonkey script developers and users.
• Babelzilla – online community of volunteer translators for Firefox extensions. Gina received 20 extensions when she asked the community for help translating Better GMail.
• Better GMail blog post was in the top ten most popular blog posts on the Gawker Media network for 2007.
• Also spun off Better GCal, Better Flickr, etc.
• One hitch in the road: major code changes at GMail were going to break all the existing GMail Greasemonkey scripts, as well as Better GMail.
• GMail decided to provide an API to developers to allow them to create Greasemonkey scripts that didn’t rely on markup (more future-proof) and allowed the developers time to rework their scripts before releasing the GMail changes to the wild.
• First company to really jump on the API was Remember the Milk (online to-do/task lists).
• http://diveintogreasemonkey.org to learn more about Greasemonkey.
• http://ginatrapani.org/workshop/firefox

Posted by Jeff on 30/01/08 at 5:20 pm