Here comes the hero of Christmas!

Holidays are coming soon and unfortunately for me and all Firefox theme users we no longer have a custom Christmas theme. All that's left are some Personas backgrounds which in my opinion don't look that great when combined with the default theme. I have mentioned this before in one of my previous posts and what I've written is about to become a reality.

I am making a Christmas version of my Purple Fox theme ( preview below ).

In other words I will try to become the hero of Christmas and create a modified version of my Purple Fox theme which will include this awesome Christmas design. The idea came to me back in July when I was on a holiday with my family high in the Rila mountain.

All I can say is : I am happy with my theme. By far I have only created a custom toolbar background and I'll see if I can add custom Christmas icons to the add-ons manager as well. Also I will be uploading the theme around November 15th. It takes a week or two for an add-on to get reviewed. In other words you'll have a Christmas theme somewhere around November 20th. I will remove the Christmas version in January 2012. After that you should download the Classic Purple Fox theme with the 2 sub-skins.

Large preview of the theme: http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/536/large.png
More info soon. I'm looking forward your comments! : )

Firefox 8 is out! Review in few sentences.

Version 8.0 of our favourite browser has been released. The folks from Mozilla are following the fast release cycle. Soon I will be moving to Firefox 9 beta but I thought it would be nice to make a post about what is new in Firefox 8 is a few short sentences.

1. Again there are no changes in design so it safe to update. My themes are compatible. Hope you like them.
2. Speed has been slightly improved compared to version 7. It feels a bit faster.
3. Guys from Mozilla fixed some bugs

What's new in Firefox 8:

The latest version of Firefox has the following changes:

• Add-ons installed by third party programs are now disabled by default
• Added a one-time add-on selection dialog to manage previously installed add-ons
• Added Twitter to the search bar for select locales. Additional locale support will be added in the future
• Added a preference to load tabs on demand, improving start-up time when windows are restored
• Improved performance and memory handling when using <audio> and <video> elements
• Added CORS support for cross-domain textures in WebGL
• Added support for HTML5 context menus
• Added support for insertAdjacentHTML
• Improved CSS hyphen support for many languages
• Improved WebSocket support
• Fixed several stability issues
• Fixed several security issues

Please see the complete list of changes in this version. Web and extension developers should also view the curated list of platform changes. You may also be interested in the list of changes in the previous version.

That's basically all users. Changes are not that big but I guess Mozilla is trying to take small steps in Firefox development. I still think that this should be version 4.0.4 but hey I'm just a theme developer. I can't do anything about this.

Have a nice day! : )

One million Green Fox downloads

My first post this month and I have some awesome news. Green Fox has reached 1 million downloads. Thank you very much for trying the theme and special thanks to those 50 000 people who are using it. First Blue Fox reached 1 million, after that Bloody Red and Pink Fox and now Green Fox. I sure am happy. I've been waiting a lot. Close to 1 million downloads is Purple Fox. It has 700 000 downloads and nearly 100 000. Again thanks for for using my themes and BIG thanks to those who have donated . : )

Web - Goodies slowly growing and improving !

I haven't been posing anything on my blog lately and somehow I felt that I need to update you visitors and theme users out there.

Not much work has been put in theme development lately. Sure there are some things which I need to work on but for the last 2 weeks or something I've been focusing on my website http://web-goodies.comli.com/ With it I'm trying to collect video tutorials from the internet and put them in one place. Hopefully these tutorials will help you learn how to create your own website or improve you web-design or image editing skills.

If you have visited before you'll notice the difference. Each page has more content, new tutorials have better description, I've added a comments section (users can use their tweeter, facebook or google + accounts to comment), share buttons, floating menus, improved backgrounds and much more. 

Design before :
http://web-goodies.comli.com/lessons/gimptuts/gimp-lesson-1.html

Design now :
http://web-goodies.comli.com/lessons/csstuts/css-lesson-1.html

As written in the title this site is slowly growing. It has 64 tutorials and nearly 100 pages. I am almost done with the updates and after that I'll probably pay more attention on theme development again. I need to fix few things in Orange and Pink Fox.

That's all for now. Be sure to check the site :  http://web-goodies.comli.com/
Have a nice day! : )

Custom themes and Personas at the same time is possible!

I haven't been posting anything here last week but now I have found something which may sound interesting to you. I've been searching Firefox stuff on the internet a lot lately. I love visiting mozillazine.org .People are friendly and there's always someone who can help you when you have problems with Firefox, extensions or theme development ect.

While reading the theme development forums I've come across an interesting article called: Custom themes and Personas at the same time is possible!

When I first saw the title I said to myself this probably requires some Firefox modifications but I was surprised to see that  a developer with a nick name David.Vincent has developed and add-on which allows you to use a custom theme and a personas skin at the same time. I tried it and it works. There's only one tiny problem. It requires multiple restarts. Anyway the add-on is called Toggle Persona and you can download it from the Mozilla add-ons site or by clicking here : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-persona/

Here's how to use it :

This simple add-on install a button in the add-on bar.
With this button you can enable/disable Personas with one click (Grey : Persona disable - Blue : Persona enable).
This add-on works with default Firefox theme and all other themes (if they support Personas).

Instructions for personas for all themes :
* Choose a Personas in the galery (or in your themes manager if you already have downloaded personas)
* Restart Firefox.
* Select your theme in the theme manager.
* Restart Firefox.
* Enable Persona by clicking on the add-on bar button ('P' button icon must be blue).
* Restart Firefox.
* That's all. You have now a new style theme.
If you want to test an other persona, you must repeat all the steps from the beginning.

This add-on avoid to enter in the 'about:config' and toggle the preference 'lightweightThemes.isThemeSelected' to true. For novice users it is better, and confirmed users will save time.

If you have no Persona in the Themes Manager, the button will stay blue even if you click on it. It is not a bug.

If you don't want Persona display just for a moment, disable it with the button. Restart Firefox.
When you want to come back to the Persona, no need to reinstall it. You have just to enable Persona with the button. Restart Firefox.
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As you can see the developer has given very detailed information about how to use Toggle Persona. I tried it and everything works great! Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-persona/ ,give the add-on a try and give the developer credit (write a review or something) .He did a really really nice job. It's not easy to create add-ons, trust me! : )

Download Toggle Persona from : HERE!