Jetpack is a Mozilla Labs project which makes it possible for anyone who knows standard web skills (HTML, Javascript, CSS) to make Firefox add-ons.

We are happy to announce that we have a winner for the Jetpack 0.5 contest. Given the fantastic group of entrants, with Jetpacks that did everything from Twitter readers to a one-click text translators, it was hard to pick a winner.

The winner

Alexander Miltsev of Moscow created a prototype for allowing Jetpacks to process large amounts of data on your computer’s graphical co-processor. Alex’s work is both creative and unusual. It digs deep into what a potential future for Jetpack can be—allowing for high-performance computing that is accessible to casual developers.

In Alex’s words: “Large data processing is occurring everywhere today. Graphical co-processors are on computers everywhere [and are used in] computational science models, searching tasks, algorithms, statistics, and audio and video processing.” By giving webpages and add-ons easy access to the raw processing power available on most computers, the range of abilities that the web can have greatly increases.

Alex’s work is an alpha-prototype that shows the feasibility of the project and it requires a custom build of Firefox to use — it’s not easy to demo. However, the code sample below shows how the technology works. In this example, we are transposing a matrix at lightening speed:

jetpack.statusBar.append({
  html: "Transpose!",
  onReady: function(widget){
    $(widget).click(function(){
      var myStorage = jetpack.cuda-storage;
      var matrix = new Array();
      var size = 32;
      for(var i=0; i<size*size; ++i)
        array[i] = i;
      var transposedMatrix = myStorage.transpose(size, matrix);
      transposedMatrix.forEach(function (v) { console.log( v ); })
    });
});

You can get more information about Alex's Jetpack on his website. For winning the Jetpack 0.5 competition, Alex is getting a brand new ASUS Eee PC netbook!

Check back in a couple days for the next Jetpack contest.

Runners Up

Elijah Grey wrote the GTranslatifier Jetpack, which lets you translate web pages and selections of text at the click of a button. He also wrote the Edit Page Jetpack, which lets you temporarily live-edit the contents of any page.

Francesco Strappini wrote a cute Jetpack called 3lyfic, which creates short links via http://3.ly and then lets you share them across your social networking site.

Panagiotis Astithas wrote the Jetstatus Jetpack, which not only gives you notifications of Twitter updates, but also lets your quickly read over past tweets in a slidebar.

— Aza Raskin on behalf of from the Jetpack Team