Jetpack 0.6 adds two major APIs to the arsenal: a secure preferences system and the ability to add and modify menus. With these new APIs — and the numerous bug fixes since the last release — we hope to see even more innovative Jetpacks in addition to the hundreds already written.

Menu

An important part of many add-ons is creating menu items — both at a system level and for context menus. In Jetpack 0.6, we’ve tried to make this painless.

Jetpack Menu API Tutorial

For example, adding an item to the Tool’s menu requires just one line of code:

jetpack.menu.add("Hello World!");

For a fully useful example, check out the Pixlr Image Editor Jetpack, which lets you edit any photo you find on the web with a right-click.

If you want to dive in, you can read the Menu API documentation.

Settings

Most Jetpacks require a couple of persistent settings, like user names, passwords, and preferences. The Settings API tries to be unobtrusive — you tell Jetpack what kind of settings you want and Jetpack takes care of the interface.

For example, include the following code for settings in your Jetpack:

var manifest = {
  settings: [
    {name:"username", type:"text", label:"Username"},
    {name:"music", type:"boolean", label:"Music", default: true },
    {name:"volume", type:"range", label:"Volume", min: 0, max: 10, default: 5 }
  ]
};

Jetpack will automatically build a UI for it:

And your Jetpack will be able to access the settings via:

jetpack.storage.settings.username
jetpack.storage.settings.music
jetpack.storage.settings.volume

This is a first iteration of a settings implementation, more will be coming soon. For more details, read the Settings API proposal document.

Download

If you already have Jetpack installed, update to 0.6 via the “Find Updates” button in the add-ons manager. If you’re new to Jetpack, you can get Jetpack automatically by installing any Jetpacks or by downloading it directly from addons.mozilla.org.

Participate

Mozilla Labs is a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit. There are many ways to join the team and get involved:

• Report a bug
• Grab the source code and fix a bug or add a feature
• Discuss, debate and add to the design in the Jetpack discussion group
• Join us in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org

– Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, Daniel Buchner, and Nick Nguyen on behalf of the Jetpack development team.

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