Sunday, February 7, 2010

Eclipse 3.4 on Arch Linux

2 Problems when trying to run Eclipse 3.4.2 on Arch Linux x64 (eclipse 3.5 runs great):
  • xulrunner error - was resolved by compiling an older version of xulrunner (I used 1.9.0.17) and passing parameter specifying its path in eclipse.ini:
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/local/lib/xulrunner-1.9.0.17
  • some buttons seemed to "stick", this was resolved with: export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

OpenID and Mobile Devices

When I first started sailfish.mobi I wanted to make OpenID the only login option... the idea being that users would more likely not want to provide a password to yet another site.  However I was very unhappy with the experience on the mobile device - there is no address bar displayed, so no quick way for the user to confirm that they are indeed giving their password to Google.com and not to some cleverly disguised phishing site.

There is a way to go through the options to see the page address but it is a few clicks away and even there you have to parse out the domain which is not as clearly visible on the tiny blackberry screen. 

IMHO the page's domain should be displayed in an obvious fashion when submitting to an SSL site.  With maybe an option to hide it for certain domains.

In the meantime I have just added a plain old email/password option to the site (I might put the ability to associate an openid to such a login in the future... but not sure there would be much interest, I mean if you already went through the trouble of creating a password you might as well use it)