TapTapWrap

All timestamps are based on your local time of:

Posted by: stak
Tags: mozilla, taptapwrap
Posted on: 2012-06-28 17:08:05

I wanted to try writing an add-on for the new Firefox for Android. So I did. I saw a lot of comments in the Google Play store complaining about lack of text reflow and readability in general, so I decided to implement something that might help with that. It ended up a little different from what I had initially imagined, but it does help when you try to zoom in to a block of text by double-tapping, and it's still too small to read.

Basically the add-on grabs the text you double-tapped on, and bumps up the font size on it so that it is at least 0.5 inches tall at the new zoom level, which should make it readable. If you double-tap on it again to zoom out it gets restored to how it was originally.

You can see the source on Github: staktrace/taptapwrap, or grab the XPI. It works on all currently-available versions of the new native UI Fennec (14, 15, 16). Feedback (and pull requests) are very welcome.

If you would like to try writing an add-on, I would suggest starting at this page: Addons developer guide. It took me a while to find that page among all of the other addon-related wiki pages (and in fact I started my addon my grabbing Matt Brubeck's Phony addon and replacing chunks of it with my browser.js monkey-patching).

Posted by Pseudonymous Coward at 2012-07-02 20:31:20

Thank you! Any chance of seeing this on Firefox desktop?

[ Reply to this ]

Posted by stak at 2012-07-03 09:18:27

Not at the moment. I'd like to tune it a little further before I post it to AMO, so please do let me know if there's anything that could be improved with it.

I'm not really sure how it would work on desktop (in terms of UI interaction), thoughts on that are welcome as well.

Posted by Insertsomethingoffensivehere at 2012-07-05 00:38:01

Can we have an option to tune the increased size? I find 0.5 inches too large for my liking, and editing the XPI on desktop and uploading it to the phone is very clumsy.

[ Reply to this ]

Posted by stak at 2012-07-05 09:13:03

Good call. I added a pref called extension.taptapwrap.textsize which specifies the height of the inflated text in 1000ths of inches (so 0.5 inches is 500). I've updated the code on github and the XPI.

[ Reply to this ]

Posted by heh at 2012-07-11 03:24:00

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/taptapwrap/
right?

[ Reply to this ]

Posted by stak at 2012-07-11 06:50:24

Yup, that's the one.

[ Reply to this ]

[ Add a new comment ]