Skip to content

2019

Making EMF models serialized in XMI available in JSON with emfjson

This post is archived. It is left as is and won't receive updates.

This summer we had two interns in our team at the Software Engineering Lab who started creating a web application for our TouchCORE tool. I have wanted this for a long time. Not only does it allow you to model in your browser, you can also do this collaboratively! For now class diagrams are supported but more supported will be added in the future (for example for sequence diagrams and feature models).

Migrate (Legacy) Thunderbird add-on to MailExtension for Thunderbird 68

Like with Firefox, Thunderbird is also changing add-ons to WebExtensions (called MailExtension there). Thunderbird 68 introduced this requirement. Users on older versions still are not offered the latest version through the automatic updater so it stayed below my radar.

Recently, some users of my Toggle Headers extension reached out to me asking whether I intend to update it for Thunderbird 68 and later. I finally got a chance to migrate it and it was fairly easy in my case.

The easiest way is to convert it to a MailExtension with legacy support that allows to keep the old XUL stuff. The main changes I had to do were:

  • Replace install.rdf with manifest.json: This is really straightforward given the documentation

  • Add a legacy key to the manifest. Some examples showed "legacy": true but that did not work. Instead, you need to specify:

    "legacy": {
    "type": "xul"
}

  • In the chrome.manifest I had overlaid mailWindowOverlay.xul. This had to be changed to messenger.xul. See the note on overlaying.

With this, the extension can be packaged up (now with a nice little ant build script that automates this) and uploaded to Thunderbird's add-ons site. Luckily, there it passed the review with no complaints and version 2.0 is now available.

I think it should be possible to accomplish this without any old XUL stuff. There is a MailExtension API documentation that outlines commands. Since users mainly use the add-on for the convenient key shortcut (H) this seems feasible. But that's for another day 😅.

  • in iOS
  • 1 min read

How to drag music and videos onto iPhone/iPad using iTunes

This post is archived. It is left as is and won't receive updates.

On an iPad I previously simply dragged some videos on to the device in iTunes to copy them onto it. For some reason this did not work for my iPhone when I tried to do the same. You can of course add the media to the iTunes library and select to sync it on to the device that way. But if you don't want to manage your media through iTunes that's cumbersome.

To be able to do this without using the iTunes library, the option "Manually manage music and videos" needs to be enabled. You can find it on the Summary page of your device under the Options section at the bottom. Click Apply after and now it should work.