Labs Update - January 2009

rhian

January 31, 2009

4:07 pm

aboutlabs_newsletter_masthead

January 2009

Concept Series

Design Challenge

This month we announced the first of a series of Design Challenges. We’re inviting design-focused students from around the world to develop new ideas & prototypes for the future of the Web. Learn more

Design Review

Alex Faaborg and Aza Raskin posted another edition of their Design Review podcast.

Concepts of the Month

  • Liyan Chang from MIT explores several interesting concepts for improving the Firefox UI in this short concept video.

  • Maureen Hanratty and Ian Tadashi Moore from UMich have created Arclight, a Flash animation that proposes a UI for a touch-screen kitchen table.

Honorable Mentions

Useful, interesting or cool sites that we’ve come across this month.

  • iPlotz - A useful tool for creating mockups and wireframes.
  • Twiddla - A web-based meeting space with team whiteboarding and the ability to mark up websites, graphics, and photos.
  • idealist - A site for creators and designers to post their ideas and gather community feedback.

Experiments

Personas

Suneel Gupta provides an update on Personas.

Prism

Work continues on the plan to uplift a Prism-like feature into a future version of Firefox. You can follow the early specification work on the Mozilla Wiki.

The Prism experiment and platform itself will continue in its exploration independent of this effort. If you’re new to the concept of site-specific browsers, be sure to check out the Prism for Firefox add-on.

Snowl

Myk Melez provides an update on Snowl.

Ubiquity

Jono DiCarlo posted a series of blog posts exploring a new approach to verbs in Ubiquity, culminating in a proposal for new Overlord Verbs.

Blair McBride put together a high-level look at information storage in Ubiquity.

There is also now a Ubiquity command development tutorial.

Weave

Work progresses toward the 0.3 major update with full support for Fennec. Account registration has re-opened and you can now sign up for a Weave account at https://services.mozilla.com.

Jono provides an update on what’s up with Weave and the changes coming in Ubiquity with the proposed introduction of Overlord Verbs.


Weaving Your Own

Jono DiCarlo

January 30, 2009

2:42 pm

weave-ethernet-cable

We talk a lot about Ubiquity being easy to extend, what with the ease of writing your own commands and so on.

But did you know that Weave is also built to be extended?

Weave uses a generic syncing algorithm which uses plug-ins called Engines to handle different data types. The following engines are built into Weave:

  • Bookmarks (fully functional)
  • History (fully functional)
  • Stored Passwords (currently being revamped for 0.3)
  • Tabs (being revamped)
  • Form Field Entries (being revamped)
  • Cookies (being revamped)

But since the syncing algorithm is fully generic, it will work with any data you give it. Therefore, you can write a sync engine to synchronize any data you want, as long as that data is accessible from Mozilla extension javascript. Your sync engine just has to extend some existing Javascript prototypes and add some logic for reading, writing, and updating your data type. The Weave core will do the rest.

It’s more work than writing a Ubiquity command, but not as much as writing a whole new extension.

Last night I finished writing the Weave client-side API documentation that describes, in excruciating detail, how to write your own sync engine.

I hope having this API documented will inspire some people to try their hand at weaving together their own data types!

(If there’s any part of the documentation that doesn’t make sense, leave a comment or visit #weave on irc.mozilla.org and let us know how it could be made clearer.)


How to write a Ubiquity Command

Aza Raskin

January 29, 2009

9:42 pm

Want to know how to write a Ubiquity command, but don’t know how yet? Jono DiCarlo has a wonderful and in-depth tutorial on exactly how to do it. If you know just a little bit of Javascript, this will bring you from knowing nothing at all about Ubiquity development, to being able to create useful commands. The example you’ll learn here is a command that lets you bug your local congress member!


Ubiquity Command Development Tutorial


The Design Review: Chromeless Browsing (ep 2)

Aza Raskin

12:10 pm

As part of the Mozilla Lab’s Design Challenge, Alex and I have focused our second episode of the Design Review on chromeless browsing:

What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? As the Web becomes even more ubiquitous, we’ll never have to leave it. Whether it’s on touch tables, giant wall-sized screens, mobile devices, or just our computers, exploring the interactions for browsing a windowless Web will become ever-more important in the next couple of years.


The Design Review Episode 2: Chromeless Browsing

Question: What are the important requirements for designing a chromeless browser?


Design Review and Windowless Browsing

cbeard

11:03 am

Alex Faaborg and Aza Raskin have posted another edition of their Design Review podcast.


The Design Review Episode 2: Chromeless Browsing from Alex Faaborg.

If you’re a student, be sure to check out the Design Challenge we announced this week, as this round is all about exploring windowless browsing.


Bookmark icons for Macs and other Ubiquity commands

Abimanyu Raja

8:35 am

I didn’t know people still used the commands I wrote back in August last year. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau reminding me, they are working again. The FoxyTunes and StumbleUpon command sets let you control the respective extensions. So, you can play/pause/skip songs playing in iTunes or SongBird using Ubiquity. The get-lyrics command searches for the lyrics of the currently playing song. But this is the cool one – Keyscape which lets you navigate Google search results by just hitting a number.

In addition, I created 3 new straightforward commands:

  • Bookmark icons for Mac – By default, bookmarks don’t have icons in the toolbar on Macs. Once you install this command, just restart to get beautiful icons.                              
  • SharedCopy – A simple bookmarklet command that lets you annotate the page using SharedCopy.
  • Gothere.sg – Very useful for those in Singapore. It lets you do a search for directions on gothere.sg, which is probably the hottest startup in Singapore. They mapped the whole of Singapore street by street just because Google’s maps had a few inaccurate street names!                                    Ubiquity command for gothere.sg

The entire list of my commands can be found here. Two super-exciting commands coming up next week!


How do People Use Tabs?

Jono DiCarlo

January 28, 2009

12:57 pm

I saw a great presentation yesterday by Patrick Dubroy, who presented some preliminary results from his research on how people use tabs in the real world.

[UPDATED: You can now read Patrick's whole presentation on his blog.]

The sample size was small (22 people) so we should be cautious about any conclusions we draw from this study, but it’s pretty exciting to have any real scientific data at all on this question (as opposed to anecdotes, personal observations, etc.) The study also points in some exciting directions for further research.

The big thing I took away from Patrick’s presentation was that among heavy web users, tabs are enabling new styles of browsing behavior that rely less on bookmarking and less on the back button. According to Patrick, the back button is getting used less and less as the years go by, and for all but two of his test subjects, switching tabs was a more common action than hitting “back”.

This change seems to coincide with the rise of web applications, where a user might spend a long time interacting with data on a single page. Web applications live comfortably in tabs (I always keep gmail open in my leftmost tab, for instance) but did tabbed browsers help popularize web applications, or did web applications help popularize tabbed browsing, or neither?

One anecdote from the presentation really stuck with me: apparently some users love opening multiple links in separate tabs, but they use a laborious manual workaround to do so, because they don’t know about command (or control) -clicking a link to open it in a new tab. This tells me that the feature needs to be more discoverable somehow.


Another video

Jono DiCarlo

12:34 pm

Aza interviews me about Ubiquity and Weave. I do a bad Frank Zappa impersonation and some air guitar.


Ubiquity command development tutorial part 1

Jono DiCarlo

12:31 pm

This is a tutorial I made to walk new command developers through the process of writing a Ubiquity command and sharing it on the Web.

Ubiquity Command Development Tutorial 1 (on Vimeo).

You’ll notice that I break my own rule here and give the command a hyphenated name. That’s because I did the recording several weeks ago, before I started working on the naming conventions stuff, and only today got around to finishing the video editing. I’ll fix the command’s name when I make part 2 of the tutorial, which will explain how to use noun-types, asynchronous requests, and other advanced stuff.

EDIT: If the vimeo link above doesn’t work for you, try this one instead.


Weave and Ubiquity This Week

Aza Raskin

January 27, 2009

1:20 pm

Jono DiCarlo of Mozilla Labs explains what’s up with Weave this week, and the exciting changes coming in Ubiquity with “Overlord” verbs.


Jono DiCarlo: Ubiquity and Weave


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