Recent work in the Ubiquity internationalization realm has focused on the upcoming Ubiquity parser which will bring some great new features to Ubiquity, including support for overlord verbs and semi-automatic localization of commands via semantic roles. It’s possible, though, that these new features will break backwards compatibility of the current command specification and noun types. Creative destruction for the win.
As we look to move forward with incorporating the next generation parser into Ubiquity proper, it thus becomes important to take a look at the current command ecosystem to see how possibly disruptive this move will be. To this end last night I wrote a quick perl script to scrape the commands cached on the herd and get some quantitative answers to my questions.
(1577 different verbs were analyzed. None of these computations below are weighted by feed popularity.)
Q: Are there a lot of commands which use more than one argument?
A: The vast majority (>85%) of commands take one or no arguments, requiring no modifiers. Only those remaining 15% will require a switch to refer to different arguments by semantic role.
Q: Do many commands introduce custom noun types?
A: 147 different noun types (lumping anonymous inline objects as one type) were detected. The vast majority of all takes (direct object) arguments were of type noun_arb_text, although many modifiers arguments used custom noun types. The other standard (built-in) noun types are well represented as well, with noun_type_language coming in at second place. Here’s a chart with all the noun types which had more than one use.
Q: Are commands with modifiers using natural-language delimiters?
A: Most of the modifiers detected were English prepositions such as “from”, “to”, “as”, “with”, but other words were also seen such as “title”, “type”, “username”, and “message” and even a handful of commands with symbols such as “@”, “>”, or “#”.
Tomorrow, Dion and I are giving a talk at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco at the Moscone Center: “Web Developer Tools: How to Be Productive Building for the Web” (Wed. Apr 1, 10:50 am). While normally Web 2.0 Expo costs money to attend, our session is free; all you need do is register for the free web2Open program. As part of our session we’ll be releasing something small; we’d love to see you there and get your feedback.
Following the presentation, we’ll be hosting a web2Open session at 12:40 pm–also in Moscone–to host a discussion about the state of Developer Tools for the Open Web and explore their future. If you’ve an interest in the subject and find yourself in town, won’t you drop in?
Here’s a video that was put together by Rainer Cvillink that shows off some of the new designs with folks around Mozilla talking about what they like about Personas:
Since we began work on the Personas experiment, the project has evolved with the support and creativity of the Mozilla community. We have been able to accomplish the following key milestones:
1. smoother integration into the chrome, including styling for the Find toolbar;
2. an expanded gallery of over 500 persona designs, including art from independent and established artists;
3. ability to create a “custom” persona locally either to keep private, or to test before submitting to the gallery;
4. an easy-to-use interface for contributing designs, with more control over text and accent colors for your art;
5. localization for the extension, which now supports Bulgarian (bg-BG), Czech (cs-CZ), Danish (da-DK), German (de-DE), English (en-US), Spanish (es-CL), French (fr-FR), Hebrew (he-IL), Italian (it-IT), Japanese (ja-JP), Korean (ko-KR), and Portugese (pt-BR).
Background
The Personas project began in late 2007 as an experiment within Mozilla Labs to explore new ways to quickly and easily personalize the online experience. With the support and creativity of the Mozilla community, the project continues to evolve and is focused on three key concepts:
1. It Shouldn’t be Hard to Make Your Browser a Little More Fun and Personal
You can download the Personas add-on in under a minute with just a few clicks of your mouse. Select a design from the online gallery that reflects your mood or interests, and when you are ready for a change, rotate it out for another style. Your choice will appear instantly with no disruption to your web browsing.
2. You Should be able to Personalize Your Entire Web Experience with Lots of Great Designs
You can personalize your homepage, blog or instant messenger, but you leave your design behind when you visit another webpage or minimize your chat. The only way to personalize your entire online experience is through your browser. With Personas, your design stays with you at each and every point of your time online. And to give you lots of great content to choose from, we have opened the Personas gallery to independent designers from around the world, and also teamed up with popular brands, including Greenpeace, Cynthia Rowley, All American Rejects, and LIVESTRONG. Here are just some of the designs for you to choose from:
3. The Artist in You Should Be Able to Treat the Browser as Your Canvas
The Personas project aims to support and promote artists and their work. We do this by making it easy for you to style the browser with your own designs and share your work with millions of people around the world. Until now, designers had to write code to customize a browser. With Personas, you can use a simple interface to upload formatted images. If you don’t have experience with formatting images, we make it easy for you to learn how (and, we’re working on tools to make it even easier!) Once you’re done creating your design, you can upload it to the design gallery for people to discover and enjoy during their next online stroll through the gallery.
While we suggest that everyone license their designs under a Creative Commons license, we’re also now exploring a model where designers can keep their designs proprietary. The idea is that we’ll freely host content that’s contributed as open source while providing an option for paid hosting of other content. We’re still working on the details and expect to have a more formal plan and framework for this soon.
What’s Next?
Mozilla is dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. Personas extends on that mission by giving Firefox fans, both new and established, the ability to make the browser reflect their personality, interests and passions. This is the first of many steps to expand the catalog of available designs by reaching out to both established designers and the imagination of our community. After you give Personas a shot, let us know what you think. As always, we’ll be listening carefully to your feedback on how to make your browser more personal.
Get Started
Install the Personas add-on for Firefox, watch a demo, or find out more by visiting getpersonas.com. Even if you’re not a current Firefox user, you can download Personas in less than a minute and begin asking yourself: “What will my browser wear today?”
How to Get Involved
Discuss, debate, ask for help, and add to the design in the Personas forum.
Weave Sync is a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser.
Major Features
What is Weave Sync all about? In short, Weave Sync lets you securely take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers — including our mobile browser, codenamed Fennec. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs. For example:
Get the same results on the Smart Location Bar on each of your Firefox browsers, so you can get to your favorite sites with just a few keystrokes
Continue what you were doing: have the ability to open any tab you have open on any of your Firefox browsers
Keep the same list of bookmarks on all of your Firefox browsers
Easily sign in to all your favorite sites using your saved passwords (this is especially handy on mobile phones, where it’s hard to type in complex passwords)
Do it all securely: Weave Sync encrypts user data before uploading it to Mozilla’s servers, so that only you can access your data
What’s new in 0.3?
If you have not looked at Weave recently, now is a great time to jump in and try it out! This release includes a major rewrite of many of Weave’s key components since the last major release in June. A few of the major changes are:
There is nothing more brutal that the injudicious use of Comic Sans. It’s latest victim is this poster, ostensibly from the wall of the Muenster city public planning office.
It’s time to take matters into our own, typographical-enriched hands. To make a poster worthy of the message. Put your design in the comments and tag it “PosterRemix” on Flickr. I’ll send some awesome Firefox schwag to the creator(s) of the most awesome design(s).
To get your creative juices started, here are three remixes. One by yours truly, one by Meebo designer Mike Krieger, and one by Mr. Matt Wiebe.
Back in — oh, I think it was around 1991 — I had a book called Stupid Mac Tricks, which came with a 3.25 inch floppy disk of INIT files that you could drop into the System Folder on your (or your victim’s) Mac to make it do strange, funny, annoying, and useless things. It was a cool demonstration of what the Mac was capable of, and it inspired me (at age 11) to start on the road to hackerdom.
Stupid Mac Tricks was the inspiration for a presentation I did last Monday for the Design Challenge. It featured the following extensions:
Menubar Madness, which turns all your menus names backwards.
Dodgy Navbar, which makes the buttons in your navigation bar randomly reorder themselves when you click on them.
Kittens Everywhere, which replaces every image on the web with random LOLcats images.
Bookmarks and Preferences, which… actually, this one doesn’t do anything too wacky, it just shows how an extension can set bookmarks and preferences.
For each extension, I took the students through the source code, explained how it worked, and had them do a few simple modifications on each one to get a little hands-on experience. Even though you would never want to, you know, install any of these extensions (at least not on any copy of Firefox you want to be able to actually use…), each one demonstrates techniques that are very useful for advanced extension development. My intention was to make a follow-up to Myk’s Extension Development Bootcamp. Techniques demonstrated include dynamic manipulation of both the XUL and HTML DOM trees, using XPCOM, setting up event handlers, using overlays to replace attributes of XUL elements, using DOM Inspector to find elements you want to overlay, running code on page load, and using XmlHttpRequest. That’s a lot of stuff! I probably erred on the side of trying to cram too many contents into one presentation.
Oh well. It’s all online now, so you can peruse it if you’re interested in learning more about extension development. Here’s the links:
Yesterday I presented on Ubiquity internationalization and the new parser design at the Mozilla Extension Development Meeting (Japanese), a community event organized by some extension developers in Japan. There were a couple other Ubiquity-related “lightning talks” as well, so I’ll summarize some of the interesting ideas from those talks below.
mar of Japanese SuMo fame (not that sumo) presented on his foray into the development of an improved Japanese parser based on Jono’s. One interesting approach his parser took was to split up the input on delimiters like commas and parse each “clause” and then combining the arguments for one execution. This allows certain types of fronting constructions. For example:
...を 送って、 dynamisに
...-NOM send, dynamis-to
“To dynamis, send …”
This type of input, aside from being pretty natural in Japanese, has the advantage of offering the parser an unambiguous argument parse within each clause, cutting down on the possible ambiguities.
mar’s discussion, however, also naturally touched on the limitations of the current NLParser implementation, making localization of individual commands and the suggestion of verbs quite difficult.
Hitoshi SASAKI of the Sasaki Lab at Takushoku University discussed some possible applications of Ubiquity in an educational context. In particular he demoed a `hiragana` command which takes some sentence in kanji and rewrites it in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic alphabet. What’s more, the command lets you specify the appropriate grade level for the substitution, making it appropriate for elementary school kids and non-native speakers alike. Sasaki thought the ability to access this kind of functionality right from the content page was of great benefit to this application.
Thanks to dynamis for supporting my Japanese presentation and making this happen! ^^
Note: Like many people have noted below, this post isn’t about solutions or actions you can do to save the planet. Ironically, I’m just trying to “raise awareness” here about the farce that is Earth Hour. However, a post about real solutions might show up in the near future.
The amount of time, energy, and verbiage being spent on making people “aware” of the energy-climate problem, and asking people to make symbolic gestures to call attention to it, is out of all proportion to the time, energy, and effort going into designing a systemic solution. We’ve had too many Live Earth concerts and Barneys “Have a Green Holiday” Christmas catalogs and too few focused lobbying efforts to enact transformational green legislation. If the money and mobilization effort spent on Live Earth had gone into lobbying the U.S. Congress for more generous and longer-term production and investment tax credits for renewable energy, and for other green legislation, the impact would have been vastly more meaningful.
You’ll pardon me, though, if I’ve become a bit cynical about all of this. I have read or heard so many people saying,” We’re having a green revolution.” Of course, there is certainly a lot of green buzz out there. But whenever I hear that “we’re having a green revolution” line I can’t resist firing back: “Really? Really? A green revolution? Have you ever seen a revolution where no one got hurt? That’s the green revolution that we’re having.” In the green revolution we’re having, everyone’s a winner, nobody has to give up anything, and the adjective that most often modifies “green revolution” is “easy.” That’s not a revolution. That’s a party. We’re actually having a green party. And, I have to say, it’s a lot of fun. I get invited to all the parties. But in America, at least, it is mostly a costume party. It’s all about looking green–and everyone’s a winner. There are no losers.
Earth Hour
Did you hear that Shell “supports” Earth Hour? Shell! Yes, that Shell! The one that made 450,000,000,000 dollars last year selling oil.
Did you know that in 2007, when questioned about Earth Hour’s effectiveness, the organizers claimed that it was just “the beginning”? And then, they said the same thing in 2008. And in 2009. In 2050, when half the world is underwater, they’d probably say the same thing. It’s just “the beginning”. (If you haven’t realised yet, it’s 2009 and we’re almost at the end…)
Did you realize that the words used in the Earth Hour ad, “an election between Earth and global warming” are a false dilemma?
Slacktivism
This post could be very long but you get the point. As readers of this blog, I’d expect you to be intelligent enough (ha!) to understand what’s wrong. It’s not just a waste of your time to support Earth Hour but it’s also very dangerous to condone slacktivism. Tonight, millions of people will go to bed happy thinking that they did a good thing, that they helped to save the world. But you know that’s not true. Start changing the world. For real this time.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been iterating on the idea & design of what a Firefox new tab could look like. All told, we’ve now gone through 36 different versions of the page, with thousands of particpants helping test and provide daily feedback & new ideas.
In this latest iteration, we’ve continued to refine the concept taking into account all of the feedback we’ve received in comments, blogs, IRC conversations, and hallway talks.
The Latest Edition
The main feature we’re exploring in this iteration is in-line search for the sites you search often.
If one of your main uses of a site is to perform a search (e.g., Technorati, Wikipedia, or Twitter) then the new tab page should help you perform that search more quickly and efficiently. Instead of first navigating to the site and then performing the search, you can search instantly without the need to install a search provider (or even for a site to provide one).
We’ve implemented this feature using Places, the feature introduced in Firefox 3.0 that enables the Awesome Bar. Our heuristics are still a little rough — and they won’t find every site search — so we are looking for feedback. What sites that you search often and appear on your new tab page don’t have in-line search?
We’ve also continued to explore ways of keeping the new tab polite. In an attempt to not break your train of thought, the cognitive shield hid the frequently accessed sites until you moved the mouse. Although the implementation got in the way of the idea (the shield looked clickable, and people got frustrated as it vanished as they tried to use it), the feedback indicating that hiding the ambient information of the new tab page was a major detractor: We had underestimated the power of gaining information at a glance.
We’ve taken another tack this time at not breaking your train of thought by using default fonts and a Firefox-gray background. Instead of taking the over-the-top cognitive shield approach, we are trying to make the page “fit-in” to ameliorate a visually jarring experience. After a couple days of testing and feedback, it seems to work. What do you think?
We’re now working with the Firefox product team to explore potential inclusion of a feature like this in an upcoming Firefox release, and what that might look like.
Prototype
Step 1. Download and install the latest development build of Firefox 3.1.
Step 2. Download and install the latest version of the New Tab prototype.
Step 3. Let us know what you think, including what works, what doesn’t and how we can improve the design.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been iterating on the idea & design of what a Firefox new tab could look like. All told, we’ve now gone through 36 different versions of the page, with thousands of particpants helping test and provide daily feedback & new ideas.
In this latest iteration, we’ve continued to refine the concept taking into account all of the feedback we’ve received in comments, blogs, IRC conversations, and hallway talks.
The Latest Edition
The main feature we’re exploring in this iteration is in-line search for the sites you search often.
If one of your main uses of a site is to perform a search (e.g., Technorati, Wikipedia, or Twitter) then the new tab page should help you perform that search more quickly and efficiently. Instead of first navigating to the site and then performing the search, you can search instantly without the need to install a search provider (or even for a site to provide one).
We’ve implemented this feature using Places, the feature introduced in Firefox 3.0 that enables the Awesome Bar. Our heuristics are still a little rough — and they won’t find every site search — so we are looking for feedback. What sites that you search often and appear on your new tab page don’t have in-line search?
We’ve also continued to explore ways of keeping the new tab polite. In an attempt to not break your train of thought, the cognitive shield hid the frequently accessed sites until you moved the mouse. Although the implementation got in the way of the idea (the shield looked clickable, and people got frustrated as it vanished as they tried to use it), the feedback indicating that hiding the ambient information of the new tab page was a major detractor: We had underestimated the power of gaining information at a glance.
We’ve taken another tack this time at not breaking your train of thought by using default fonts and a Firefox-gray background. Instead of taking the over-the-top cognitive shield approach, we are trying to make the page “fit-in” to ameliorate a visually jarring experience. After a couple days of testing and feedback, it seems to work. What do you think?
We’re now working with the Firefox product team to explore potential inclusion of a feature like this in an upcoming Firefox release, and what that might look like.
techupdates
says, Haven't used Firefox 3.6 Beta lately. Might delete, as it can't use Ubiquity right now anyway.
John Wohn
says, Wow. Mozilla Ubiquity is like Mac Quicksilver for the web http://sn.im/tdk79 Why doesn't this get more press? Looks full of potential.
Randy
says, @spamboy I also think Opera is on to something with their new tab system and Mozilla's Ubiquity is intriguing http://bit.ly/4jtCN0 <endtabs>
satyrmakeSearchCommand(): Prevented script evaluations in chrome://ubiquity/content/hiddenframe.html as well as "No chrome package registered for ..." messages.
satyrstandard-feeds/search: Added previews to answers/ask/bing/IMDb. Applied the patch at #816 to google-image-search with some corrections.
