14 DAY TRIAL // A few months back, the Mozilla Labs team launched a Jetpack extension contest for developers to spur interest in the community and also to showcase some of the emerging platform's advantages, notably its ease of use and simplicity. Mozilla now announced the winner of an Asus Eee PC netbook, developer Davide Ficano for his JetColorTab jetpack, as well as the other notable entries.
"With over 50 entrants to the 50-line challenge, there were more than enough good jetpacks to choose from. Jetpack developers continue to forge ahead in creating new and different jetpacks," the Mozilla Labs Jetpack team wrote. "This time, Davide’s jetpack mojo pushed him ahead of the pack for the win! Davide will receive a slick ASUS Eee PC netbook for his effort."
The contest was introduced along with Jetpack 0.5 in September. The scope was to design the most interesting jetpack extension within 50 lines of code or less. Quite a few developers entered their creations, but the Mozilla team managed to work down to just three apps which stood out. The three developers and their jetpacks are: - Makoto Terada’s JetpackFeatureInstaller - Davide Ficano’s JetColorTab - Aurélien Manca’s JetTabs
The winning jetpack isn't exactly the most useful or the most practical add-on out there. It enables users to add colors to their tabs, not the first add-on to do that and certainly not the last, but they have to manually select a color for each tab they have opened. And that's it, that's all it does, at least, for now. In any case, Davide has an Asus netbook headed his way and all three finalists will get a bunch of Mozilla swag. Jetpack has advanced by two version numbers since the contest started and some "exciting Jetpack platform developments" are apparently being announced very soon.
Mozilla Jetpack 0.7 for Firefox is available for download here.
