14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla's Jetpack project is starting to leave the experimental phase and become a major project for the organization. Following on the footsteps of another Mozilla Labs project Personas, Jetpack now has its very own online gallery to showcase the “Jetpacks” created so far. It was bound to happen sooner or later as the feature is crucial to the project's success, making it easy for users to find great new add-ons and for developers to show off their works.
“The Jetpack gallery, while still a beta, makes it easy to find new functionality that extends your Firefox experience with new abilities. You can browse Jetpacks by tag, author, and popularity, as well as vote on and review the ones you try. Jetpacks in the gallery have screenshots and video introductions, making it easy to get to know what you are getting before installing,” Mozilla's Daniel Buchner, Nick Nguyen, and Aza Raskin wrote.
The new Jetpack Gallery is an online repository for developers to host and promote their add-ons and, despite being just launched, everything seems to be there. This isn't exactly Mozilla's first gallery so there's no surprise here. The design could use a little spiffying up, but there's a huge search box front and center, the possibility to browse, and sort the Jetpacks by several criteria and most of the features you'd expect.
Having said that, it's pretty clear that the feature is still very much getting started. There aren't that many Jetpacks for now, under 30, and most don't look very polished. Of course, the number is likely to go up shortly as the word spreads among developers, but it may be a while before it can match the 7,000 add-ons now available in the regular add-ons gallery. The new gallery comes hot on the trails of the latest Jetpack 0.6 which brings a couple of new APIs for developers, the Menu API and the Settings API.