Cheevos for Firefox v1.4 update available
7 August, 2012 § 8 Comments
Last week a new update for Cheevos for Firefox was released on Mozilla’s add-ons website. Thanks to Firefox’s amazing silent update of restartless addons, if you already have the addon installed then you’re most likely running the latest version already.
This new release brings with it a couple new features and localization support for future releases.
New achievements in version 1.4 include the Socially Awesome Penguin, Social Butterfly, and Geek Cred. If you’re into social networking you’ve probably already gotten one of the first two achievements, and the geek cred achievement is aimed at users who visit tech-related websites.
This release also adjusts the thresholds for obtaining the silver and gold medals of the Dog Eared achievement.
Localization support is new in this release, taking advantage of the new l10n API that was introduced in the Add-on SDK version 1.5. Using this API in the addon code was really easy. First, create a folder named “locale”. Inside of the locale folder, add a properties file for your first locale. For Cheevos, I used “en-US.properties”. The filename specifies the language and culture for the embedded text.
Then within the code of the addon, get access to the getText function by running var _ = require("l10n").get;. I then added _("cheevoName.description") calls. This looks inside of the properties file for the string with this key and replaces it with the associated translation.
This process was really easy, and I found the documentation on the Add-on SDK website to be very good.
Thanks to the new localization support, the next release of Cheevos for Firefox will include a Greek translation that was contributed by Tho D. Oris (sirodoht)! Big thanks and a diamond “Cheevo” goes out to sirodoht 🙂
JAWS 
Jared, I installed Cheevos as soon as it was released but I am no closer to understanding what action triggers which award (I am currently at 455 points, with 39/53 awards). Some of the awards were easy to find out but lately Cheevos is getting triggered without me actually doing something. It would be great if you can provide a URL to awards which have already been achieved along with a small write-up. Some of the URLs currently provided are all generic feature information and not related with the action at all.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve gotten feedback from other people as well saying that the hints are too hard to follow. I’m planning on making the hints and descriptions easier in the next release. Which ones are not clear to you? Knowing this will help me.
Jared, that’s a difficult one to answer as each category has multiple awards. I viewed the categories again and these ones do not ring a bell as to how and what did I do to solve it – 6deg of separation, Yo Dawg, Geek Cred. I have a gold cup for all these categories but I do not remember what I did.
My suggestion is to provide either internal or external URLs which can be opened by clicking on the bronze, silver or gold medals. Clicking on the trophy can provide more information to the user about the feature and how to customize it further. Just a random thought.
One particular cheevo which I am absolutely stumped on is the silver hunter2 achievement. Managed to get bronze and gold (which for some reason has given me the achievement complete alt text), but its really not obvious what the middle step might be.
Split Personalities seems deceptively simple, but is also really not clear how to achieve the higher awards.
Thanks for the feedback, this is really great info. I’m not sure how you got Gold and Bronze for the hunter2 cheevo but not the Silver. I don’t think Gold could have been awarded before, but I’ve just added the Gold award for hunter2 which will be in the next version. With Split Personalities, you have to try 50 Personas to get the Gold. I’ve adjusted that to 20 for the next release.
Both yours and Sanjay’s feedback has been very good. I should do a blog post asking people what they think should be changed about Cheevos for Firefox to make it easier and more fun to play.
Re: hunter2, I received bronze for allowing firefox to remember a password and gold for setting a master password. I don’t know if that helps you at all.
The only other achievements I have left which I have absolutely zero clue about are ‘Your Opinion Counts’ (tried submitting feedback, but no dice), ‘Super User’ gold and ‘Made With Notepad’ silver and gold.
Not being particularly familiar on the web-dev front, I’m probably somewhat scuppered wrt ‘Made with Notepad’, but I’ll keep searching.
Last thing is the fact that I’ve achieved 44/53 awards, however by my count, you’ve only got 50 awards listed. Having a quick peek in the github, I think the missing 3 are related to the release channels (Back to the Future), and I tried installing Beta and Aurora to see if it would reveal them, but again nothing happened.
Hope this helps!
Okay, after a bunch more Cheevo hunting, using the source code as a guide, I’ve reached 51/53 rewards, missing only Super User gold and Your Opinion Matters, neither of which I could find details of how to achieve in the source.
Also the Back to the Future achievement required me to look at the About Nightly dialogue (Help>About Nightly) before it would register the achievement. Seems like an unnecessary additional hoop to jump through, although maybe that’s the only way for the app to recognise it, I don’t know.
Still, sitting on 635 points now, which is highly satisfying, even if I did cheat a little bit to figure out how to get some of them. Is it technically cheating if it requires even more bonus hoop jumping to achieve?
I am in the same boat as you regarding the “Super User” gold award.
I have managed to get every other achievement except that one and despite looking at the code I just can’t figure it out.
Some help from the author would be greatly appreciated here!
(A little tip regarding “Your Opinion Matters”: look for “feedback” in the code.)