extension tutorial

http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/toolbar-tutorial/

XUL tutorial:
http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/

Technique Research

Fortunately I found this Firefox Extension Tutorial (http://businesslogs.com/technology/firefox_extension_tutorial.php), which saved me a lot of time from going through some step-by-step tutorials on how to build a firefox extension.

This good tutorial is an overview of the development of a firefox extension. There is a good explaination of what firefox extension is and what technique it includes in the article, "Firefox extensions are simply extra XUL(XML User Interface Language), CSS, and Javascript files that sit on top of the default interface and replace or extend its functionality."

XML, CSS and Javascript are used just like in web design, which I am very familiar with. Firefox made the entire program as extensible as possible, which made extend its function a lot easier. And Mozilla is so committed to web standards that they actually built the entire user interface of their web browser in XUL ("XML User Interface Language") and then styled these XUL widgets using CSS, which made modify its UI as simple as web design. Also, the best thing is Firefox and a lot of its extensions are open source, which made building an extension not neccessary from scratch.

So I think building a firefox extension is not very hard. In the next couple of weeks I'm going to make my extension happen!

Market Research

After talking with Amit, we agreed on the first two things in priority need to be done soon.
1. to find out if this kind of firefox plug-in already exists.
2. to get a general idea of how difficult to actually build this.

Today, i did market research about firefox plug-ins(they call them extensions), the result is there is no such a plug-in the same as i want to build.

Surprisingly I found some helpful extensions for my project which will save a lot of my time I think, as well as some interesting ones.

Helpful for my projects:
Aardvark- https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4111/
Print It! - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/282/
Print Context Menu - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2594/

Interesting ones:
Internote - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2011/
Nuke Anything Enhanced - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/951/

Also found some helpful firefox extension tutorials, really good to get started quickly:
http://roachfiend.com/archives/2004/12/08/how-to-create-firefox-extensions/
http://businesslogs.com/technology/firefox_extension_tutorial.php
http://www.rietta.com/firefox/Tutorial/overview.html

Tomorrow I'll go through these tutorials real quickly, to get a general idea of how to build a firefox extenstion and how hard it is!