Sorry for the lack of updates last month. I had been sick for a month in May due to some deadly allergies, as well as breathing the construction dust from my new apartment (and as well as various turbulent personal matters). That means I have quite a big list of blogs I have to catch up writing!

For most geeks, today is the Firefox Download Day. However, what’s more exciting to me is the release of GreaseMonkey 0.8 last week. Besides a great slew of fixes and new functions, it also revealed a new logo I updated for the GreaseMonkey dev crew a while ago.

The story began with a emoticon pack I did for Trillian back in 2001. As Trillian became popular, quite a few people had fallen in love with its emoticons, due to its vast selection and simplistic design. The emoticons were later ported to Trillian fan sites in GIF format, and of course, later leaked to the whole Internet (something you can never stop).

Eventually, the main developer of GreaseMonkey Aaron Boodman searched on Google for a monkey image, and some monkey.gif came up. Perhaps the square-eyed Trillian monkey were cute/decent/handsome enough, it begged for adoption and ended up in the early builds of GreaseMonkey.

It went full circle when I downloaded my copy of Firefox 1.5 and a friend pointed out the use of the monkey. I’m rather surprised and pleased that the emoticons had found an unlikely home, as it would be usually kidnapped by some Trillian instant messenger clones! I wrote an email to Aaron, and got a reply a while after.

The new logo is a visual update of the old happy and smug monkey… :] I attempted to keep the essence of the smile and updated it with better drawing techniques. 16×16 is a particularly difficult size, as I cannot include too many visual information – It has to be simple, clean and crisp.

The large version references the Firefox logo and Aaron’s comment on how he thought the original monkey is Donkey Kong. I expanded on these ideas and make a full logo out of it, so it looks like the ones from Firefox or Thunderbird. While Firefox ‘ruled’ the web by encircling the globe, and Thunderbird delivered a email on its beak, GreaseMonkey changed the web by swinging around and greasing up the Internet’s series of tubes (no pun intended!).

So that was the short story. I hope you like it, and like the logo as well! (If you don’t, I’m sure some Stylish scripts can fix it for you… hahaha) Either way, enjoy and go download it now!