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On 23rd of April 2015, Mihai Șucan passed away due to metastatic cancer caused by RDEB.

My name is Mihai and I work on the Firefox developer tools. When it comes to web development, I like both server-side and client-side work. I am mainly interested in web browsers, web standards and related technologies.

Agnezar and Awebitor

I constantly mention my work with WYSIWYG editors and the fact I have my own CMS, in talks with other people. So, today I am publishing information about both projects:

  • Agnezar is the content management system I am working on.
  • Awebitor is the HTML editor I have.

I also updated other pages to link properly to both projects.

Any comments on my projects are welcome.

Announcing PaintWeb

Today I finally managed to upload and release my latest project: PaintWeb. Marius helped me with designing the GUI and with other suggestions.

PaintWeb is a client-side Web application which allows users to draw online. It makes use of some newer Web technologies, mainly the HTML 5 Canvas 2D context API. Currently, it's in its infancy, but with lots of work planned ahead.

The major decision for me was to release this project as open-source, under GPL v3. The project is now hosted on the Google Code servers.

Please contribute with feedback, bug reports and even code - volunteers are welcome!

Lots of bugs in the Web application are already known, nonetheless that shouldn't stop you from reporting them.

The Web application works in the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, Safari and Konqueror. Obviously, it also works with any Gecko and WebKit based Web browsers.

Nightly builds of Firefox 3.1 and SVN trunk builds of WebKit have the best support for this Web application.

I'd like to mention that the greatest surprise to me was that the new Konqueror 4 has its own Canvas implemention. They've done a really great job!

I am looking forward to publish more information about the project and to continue work on it.

Update 3 days later: Back in september we presented PaintWeb at a local university-organised seminar. Today we have updated the presentation and we translated it to English as well. Go ahead and download the English or Romanian presentation.

New project: ReTidy page cleaner

I did publish my latest PHP script: the ReTidy page cleaner. The script allows you to clean HTML documents exported from word processing applications. For more details look at the ReTidy project page.

Raggregator - my first widget

Hello!

Even if I am not a ((very) big) fan of the whole widgets idea, I saw the usefulness in using them for various quick info. Such as weather and news aggregation.

There are too many per-site widgets, and weather widgets.

The new Widgets competition organized by Opera motivated me to make this widget :) - who wouldn't want that PC? Therefore, I present you the Raggregator version 1. :D

Features:

  • support for RSS 2.0 and Atom 1 feeds.
  • I don't currently have support for all the 9 incompatible RSS versions.
  • unlimited number of feeds.
  • minimize any feed you want.
  • few settings can be changed in the widget (if you edit js/settings.js): number of maximum entries per feed, entry summary length, default feeds, and scroll speed.
  • easy internationalization. *All* strings are in js/messages.js. Any new translations will be gladly posted. I won't currently add the Romanian translation, I want to first finish the second version of the widget.

I have many new features planned for the second version:

  • better support for more feed versions and formats (maybe not only RSS/Atom).
  • the ability to show detailed information for each entry and each feed (beyond the "what's new at a glance"). Something like a ... full-featured feed aggregator: satisfying all my news feed aggregation needs.
  • the "minimal mode" which will act like a news ticker (scrolling the title of the feed entries).
  • per-feed settings: auto-update interval, number of entries to show, hide visited entries, hide in news ticker.
  • maybe grouped entries, acting similar to Planet Planet. This would allow the user to make a single group in which they can add as many feeds as they want. All the feed entries would then be sorted by date, showing *all* of them as one. This is something I'd prefer in many cases.
  • maybe title editing for each group, for each feed, so you can change the title provided by the author of the feed.
  • some display settings, like show dates on/off, show summaries, colours, themes, font size, etc.
  • the ability to reorder the feeds (move up/down).
  • and more...

Based on the above ideas I want to have some really important structure changes. I want the widget to be *the* aggregator. :)

After finishing the second widget version ... I might make a site-version, not just a widget (something like the JavaScript RSS/Atom parser by TarquinWJ). I won't keep it Opera-only, *but* I won't do *any* compatibility-related changes. I'll just stick to the web standards (if Firefox doesn't support them, sorry). Internet Explorer is, without doubt, out of the discussion.

Have fun using the current version. I hope I'll have time to make the second version - the above ain't guaranteed. :P

Raggregator screenshot

Download the file: raggregator.zip.

I have submitted the widget to the competition today, in the very last minutes. Yes, I've been very busy: I worked on this widget only in the last couple of days.

The experience of making the widget was really interesting. Too bad there's no support for alert, confirm and prompt within widgets. I also found a bug: crash when using mouse gestures (in the latest weekly build). The bug seems to affect any widget and any page. One another, more serious, annoyance is in widgets you can't use the title attribute for any element to show a nice tooltip. Do we have to write our own tooltip scripts for anything simple?

Good luck to all participants in the competition.

P.S. All coding is done only by me. All design is done only by my twin brother.

Update (2006/05/03): To err is human. I was claiming this widget has support for Atom 2 feeds. There's no Atom 2. There's only Atom 1. Sorry guys. I don't know how I made this mistake, because I always knew there's only Atom 1.

I found out about this mistake only now because M. David Peterson from atom-syntax mailing list published a message asking Opera staff to fix the description of my widget.

I have contacted Gautam Chandna (from My Opera staff) and he has fixed the description (the widget file is OK, no need for updating).

For those wondering if I won the competition: no, I didn't.

UserJS: ROBO Sticky 1.0

Hello!

Today I've finished my first UserJS for Opera 8+.

I named it ROBO Sticky (no good inspiration for a better name). To download, install and learn more about it, visit its "official" page.

The script is based on "Sticky-notes" by Antonio Orlando. I simply didn't like his source code. :) It adds a lot of "noise" in the DOM and I don't wonder why some people already reported it breaks Gmail.

My UserJS is almost an entire rewrite only for Opera, but it can be made to work on Firefox. Along the way I've made a lot of improvements, too many to list (bug fixes and nice behavior improvements).