Doublestitch – A Simpler and Cleaner Pocket for Firefox
Posted: February 19, 2016 Filed under: Uncategorized 10 CommentsI love Pocket and I love Firefox.
But two things were driving me batty about the Pocket feature built into Firefox:
1. The design of the popup experience when you save a page to Pocket is… unfortunate. It stays up far too long, and it doesn’t go away when you switch tabs. Yeah, it stays open for a given URL even when you’re on a tab with a completely different URL! But regardless of whether you think that’s as crazy as I do, I never want to add tags so just don’t need it at all.
2. The Pocket toolbar button doesn’t indicate whether you’ve already saved the page or not. You have to click the button to figure it out. Now this might not be a problem for everyone. But the way I use my browser can best be described as “tabsplosion”. I don’t know when or where these tabs come from, or how they get there, or whether I saved it already or not. So this tiny piece of ambient visual signal would be useful for me.
So I took a couple of hours over the last few evenings and scratched the itch. I made a Firefox add-on which does the following:
* Adds a new Pocket button to the toolbar. (You can remove the old one by right-clicking it and choosing “Remove from Toolbar”). Mine is red. I want to make one that has nice gold double-stitching on it…
* The new button shows a check mark badge when the page is already saved.
* You can click the button to either add or remove the page from Pocket.
* No popup.
That’s it. Simple, clear and out of your way.
INSTALL HERE (WARNING: Experimental side-project software. You’ve been warned.)
Source code: https://github.com/autonome/doublestitch
If you try it out, let me know if you find any bugs or have any ideas for improvements!
dietrich.ayala 
I installed this and then my computer imploded. I am typing this on a pool of red matter whose pseudopods reach up to greet my fingertips. I can see the bones of my hands as I hit each letter. Feature or bug?
FEATURE.
Will it work in private mode and/or with cookies disabled?
Easily the silliest “feature” of Pocket is not only does it completely fail to work if Firefox is configured to never remember history, but it fails silently and doesn’t even suggest what might be the problem.
Hm, this *should* work in that configuration. I will test and report back!
No, it doesn’t! That configuration is basically having your browser in private mode permanently. I learned a whole lot about add-ons behavior in private mode. I will try to add support, but the OAuth flow is already hacky and private mode makes it much harder.
I wait in hope. 🙂
The most promising cure for tabsplosion I’ve seen so far is OneTab, but this sounds much more appealing.
Any reason for not submitting this as a patch to Mozilla?
I filed this bug a while back: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1194293
But I don’t have the time to wage the campaign to get an entirely new design accepted, let alone code it in a way that meets the requirements of shipping to hundreds of millions of users.
So instead I scratched my own itch. And if the core team wants to test-drive alternate designs, they now have a way to do so 🙂
hmm…this seems to send every url to pocket to identify whether it has been pocketed before. while it’s arguable in some ways whether that is important, it is non-obvious to users. This is why the bookmark stuff in socialapi and the pocket implementation in both never handled this well. One way to deal with this could be using annotations to note that the url is pocketed. while that wont catch past information, it would going forward. You could also slurp up all the pocketed urls from pocket and annotate those in order to get that history.
Yep, is not great. The next version will download your saved URLs from Pocket and keep a local cache to mark what is saved. I’m intentionally not integrating with any of the internal history/annotation services, since that’d be a lot of work that’ll expire when XPCOM in add-ons expires.