Wednesday, December 17, 2008

TrExMa for Firefox 0.8 Preview Release

Over at TrExMa For Firefox, you can find a long awaited update to the TrExMa plugin for the popular TrophyManager game. Version 0.8 is available and this is a Preview Release.

This was an excuse to learn a little about XUL, do some jQuery and refactor the plugin. Unfortunately, it still needs a ton of refactoring, and the code is quite soupy. This is a use at your own risk version. The plugin can crash, provide a little popup saying something's wrong, and sometimes not even offer that. It's buggy. Since I'm not a XUL or UI expert, there's a lot of things that have been done in a sloppy fashion and things that cause bugs. Anyone who's using this, I would really appreciate using the issue tracker rather than sending an email over at TM or posting in those forums. Reason is, I get notified if someone posts an issue.

It allows the user to see hit players abilities for all positions and dynamically change the loss of skill for the player being out of a favorite position. This feature works by clicking on the TrExMa for Firefox label in the status bar. You'll see a little XUL window appear in your browser. If you browse to a squad screen or a transfer list screen, you'll get a list of players to choose from. Clicking on a player will present the skills for that player in all positions available.

In addition, a drop down box is available to determine what player is the best at each position. If you want to find the best ML, select ML and the plugin will produce the top 5 players on that screen in that particular position.

Quite a bit of refactoring involved brining in the jQuery Javascript plugin. I'm very happy with the integration of jQuery, it's an outstanding tool, as it just flat out works against HTML and XUL.

If you don't like it, uninstall it and reinstall 0.6.2. If you do like it, please offer suggestions and features that you'd like to see. Still on the idea block is the ability to determine your best 11 for a given formation, but that's a little ways off.

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