cheevos | JAWS

Help improve Cheevos for Firefox

13 August, 2012 § 1 Comment

Since I started Cheevos for Firefox back in December of 2011, I’ve gotten positive feedback from people who have loved making browsing the internet their own game. I’ve also received feedback from people requesting simpler hints and more links to information about the various achievements.

In the most recent release I added localization support, and I started receiving another round of questions about how to translate some of the hints and riddles. Regardless of how the hints and riddles change, cultural differences are likely to remain. However, this is a prime opportunity to fix parts of the add-on to make the game more fun, as well as easier to learn.

If you’ve got feedback, please leave a comment below. I’m looking for times where you were curious about why you were awarded a cheevo, cheevos that seem too hard to acquire, hints that didn’t make sense, and ideas for how to add more of a post-win learning experience. If you’ve got ideas for new achievements or ways to grow the add-on in other directions, share those too! 🙂

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 🙂

How-to guide for the esoteric cheevos in Cheevos for Firefox (Part 1)

12 January, 2012 § 5 Comments

There are a few cheevos in Cheevos for Firefox that are esoteric and hard to win through normal interactions with the browser.

One example is the Yo Dawg cheevo. The hint for this cheevo is, “I heard you like browsers”. If you’ve ever seen MTV’s Pimp My Ride television show, you may recall Xzibit pimping peoples cars by redecorating their trunk to resemble their favorite hobby. Xzibit would often say lines such as, “Yo dawg, I heard you like basketball, so I put a basketball court in your trunk so you can play basketball even when you’re not at a basketball court.”

Through the power of the internet, this morphed in to a meme that represents recursive levels of repetition. For example, the image on the right could carry along a phrase of, “Yo dawg, I heard you like pizza, so I put a pizza inside of your pizza so you can eat pizza while eating pizza!”.

Well … it turns out that you can actually put Firefox inside of Firefox.

So now you know where the “Yo Dawg” achievement comes from. To see this for yourself, try the following:

Open Firefox (shame on you if you’re not already)
Copy and paste this URL in to your address bar:
- chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Hit enter

You will now see Firefox running inside of Firefox! This is a pretty cool trick, and it showcases the power of the user-interface programming language that Firefox uses to create itself.

This technology is XUL, pronounced as zool, and is very similar to HTML. Firefox also uses CSS and JavaScript. So with XUL, CSS, and JavaScript, Firefox is very similar to an extremely complicated web page that has more privileges than normal web pages 😀

I hope you learned something. If you’re not already using Cheevos for Firefox, give it a try today and let me know what you think about it.

Cheevos for Firefox leaderboard

11 January, 2012 § 10 Comments

Cheevos for Firefox is an add-on that I and others have been working on recently. The add-on turns Firefox into a game, giving out awards and achievements for using the browser to its fullest!

Based on the tweets from users of the add-on, here is a current leaderboard (note that no scores are verified):

@jankom has 270 points
@swarnendubiswas has 220 points
@goodguydan has 210 points
@paulrouget has 180 points
@raulmalea has 170 points
@curtisko has 155 points
@lepereporcher has 135 points
@weinjared has 130 points
@henrystivens has 30 points
@elefra_ has 20 points
@kpondign has 15 points
@velvetbites has 5 points

Download Cheevos for Firefox today and let the world know how much of Firefox you use 🙂

Announcing Cheevos for Firefox

23 December, 2011 § 9 Comments

Today is the release of version 1.0 of the Cheevos for Firefox add-on!

Cheevos for Firefox is an addon for Firefox that makes learning about different parts of the browser fun, as well as giving you the opportunity to brag to your friends about your pro-level web surfing.

With Cheevos for Firefox, you will gain achievements for using Firefox. Whether it’s finding hidden Easter eggs within the product, or taking advantage of the power of the world’s fastest, most extensible, most personalizable, and most friendly web browser, Cheevos for Firefox will surprise and make using the web browser more fun than ever.

Varying levels of points are awarded based on the difficulty of acquiring an achievement. See how many points you can collect!

Thanks go out to all the people who have helped test, add features, and recommend ideas for new achievements:

Download Cheevos for Firefox today and let everyone know what you think of it!