Firefox 3.5 is released today, representing almost a year’s worth of hard work and improvements over Firefox 3.0. Key features include faster Javascript, <audio> and <video< tags that allow media to play as part of a page with no plugins; and private browsing mode (Sing it with me: “The int-er-net is really really great…. for porn!”) Download Firefox 3.5, try it out, and spread the word!
Here at Mozilla Japan Firefox 3.5 Headquarters,1 we just launched the new and improved Light of Firefox (in Japanese, tomoshibi (灯)) for Firefox 3.5. The Light of Firefox is a real-time, interactive website which shows sparks on a map of Japan for every manual download of the new Firefox from mozilla.jp.
The name tomoshibi means “torch” in Japanese. As a new Firefox brings new technologies and possibilities to all corners of the web, so too will the tomoshibi light up the night in Japan!
The site was designed and coded by Daisuke Akatsuka of the Keio Kakehi Lab (xlab), the same fine folks who brought you interFORest.
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Now that Ubiquity 0.5 is on the verge of release, we have scrambled to demonstrate the localization-possibilities by including a couple of alternative languages for the standard feeds (and for the new parser.)
By the looks of it, the languages Catalan, Danish and Japanese are going to make it in, but we hope more will join them before the 0.6 release.
Being a localizer myself (I did the Danish translation) I know the pain of keeping up with ever-changing-, new- and deleted keys. Mostly for my own benefit, I have put together a script that helps you track changes between the templates and the translations. If you place this script in your ubiquity/localization/ folder and run it, it should list relevant information for each language.
If you want all the information, simply run the script:
python localization.py
In the current development version, this produces quite a lot of output, so I’ll paste a representative section only:
$ python localization.py ! Missing translation: da/developer.po ! 2 keys are missing in pageedit(da): ---------------------------------------------------- ["If you used the 'edit page' command to put the page into editable mode, use this command to end that mode and go back to normal page viewing. If you want the changes to persist on page reload, issue the 'save' command first."] ---------------------------------------------------- ["Saves edits you've made to this page in an annotation. They will persist on page reload. You can remove them with the 'undo page edits' command."] ---------------------------------------------------- ! 2 keys are superfluous in pageedit(da): ---------------------------------------------------- ["If you used the 'edit page' command to put the page into editable mode, use this command to end that mode and go back to normal page viewing."] ---------------------------------------------------- ["Saves edits you've made to this page in an annotation. Undo with the 'undo page edits' command."] ----------------------------------------------------
If you just want an overview and not all the details (I imagine this will be useful for project leaders) you can run the command:
python localization.py | grep -E ^\!
which again produces a lot of information but looks something like:
$ python localization.py | grep -E ^\! ! Missing translation: da/developer.po ! 2 keys are missing in pageedit(da): ! 2 keys are superfluous in pageedit(da): ! 1 keys are missing in email(da): ! 1 keys are superfluous in email(da):
The script is not yet added to the ubiquity source distribution, as there are still a lot of changes that I feel need to go in before it is production-ready. I plan to integrate more options into the script, making it easier to get the overview, getting info about only one language, or about only one template. It will also become smarter, and realize when a key has changed, and what it has changed to. Currently as the above example show, it lists each as a missing and superfluous key. As the deadline for 0.5 is looming, I don’t expect it to be ready by then.
For the adventurous localizer, I do think it will already in its present state be a big help, so feel free to try it out and report back with any suggestions, improvements or bugs you may encounter.
Happy hacking and translating,
– cers / Christian Sonne
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.
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:
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:
– Mike Connor, on behalf of the Weave development team
In my last post about Taskfox, I asked for volunteer users to try out the latest Taskfox build. For those of you that read it, you may have noticed I included no information about how to actually use Taskfox features. No mention at all. None. Zip. Nada.
And I did this on purpose.
My apologies to the people who were confused, bewildered, and frustrated by this. You were all (including co-workers!) unwitting participants in my experiment. It showed that the current interface for Taskfox features may not be discoverable enough, even for technologically savvy people. Thankfully, we think we have a solution – more on that in a future blog post.
In addition to the lack of information, the Map task was broken. This wasn’t part of the experiment – merely a mistake on my part. Same with the inability to enter spaces (thanks to a last-minute change). Oops.
So today we have a new build! Bugs fixed, some things added, and some information on how to get the most out of using Taskfox.
When you open a Taskfox build, its the same as any nightly Firefox/Minefield. It displays web pages the same, the toolbars and menus are the same, the URL bar is (almost) the same. But typing in the URL bar is where the magic begins, as you can see in the following screencast:
There are plenty of ways you have give us feedback:
Builds are available for all platforms that Firefox ships on:
Related posts:
Admit it. Even though you know the other person can’t see you, you still nod in agreement while talking on the phone. You gesture. You gesticulate. You communicate in a medium destined never to be communicated. That extra set of meanings dies a local, meaningless death.
We gesture because it’s part of our lexicon. It’s involuntary. And those gestures matter; they really do convey information. Using them wisely in the classroom, for instance, increases the rate of learning and learned material retention. On the phone, though, we do without and use carbon-heavy transit to bridge the physical gap.
Yet with technology, perhaps we can return this funny quirk-of-behavior to it’s rightful place as a communicator.
As I sat recently, nodding along to a friend’s story, I realized that my iPhone knew fully well what I was doing. It just sat in beautiful-but-ineffectual silence. Given the accelerometer and proper programming, it could be conveying my nod tactiley across the ether: If I nod, the other phone vibrates a pattern conveying the vigorousness of the nod and on screen, it shows an animated representation of me nodding; If I shake my head, a different set of vibrations goes over the line, and my representation shakes it’s head sadly (or curtly, or slowly in disbelief, or…).
Ideally, there would be a natural mapping between my head’s actions and the feeling on the receiving phone—a nod should feel like a nod, a shake should feel like a shake. I’m not sure if that’s possible with the current iPhone, but given three shake-and-shimmy locations creating a facsimile becomes feasible.
Even if we can’t create a natural mapping, the brain’s plasticity comes to the rescue. When you use a tool, you’re brain actually represents that tool as an extension of your body. Similarly, when you’re brain gets consistent input from a real-world sensor, it quickly learns to map that into a sort-of six sense. As long as there was a different feeling for the different types of nods and head shakes, and a way to learn which means what (say by looking at the screen), your brain would soon process the vibrations into their gestural meaning subconsciously.
You’d just know that the other person was nodding agreement.
A nod-aware phone would make my daily communications that much more humane, and technology that much more human.
Of course, I’d still feel silly gesturing with my hands.
This doesn’t have anything to do with Ubiquity or user-interface design, so it’s not really on-topic for this blog, but I thought I’d let you all know that I’m getting married tomorrow, to Sushu Xia! More info is on evilbrainjono.net, my personal blog.
After the wedding, I’ll be back at work for one week, then I’ll be gone on a honeymoon trip from July 4 – July 26 (and with minimal connectivity) for most of that time. So if you need anything from me, you’ll have to find me before I leave or after I come back.
Finally, Mitcho made this lovely wedding registry for us:
tinyurl.com/jonosweddingregistry.
Here is a three-dimensional version of the Ubiquibot logo, based on Sebastiaan de With’s icon design.
I made it out of styrofoam and paint in a burst of inspiration one Sunday afternoon. It’s my new desk mascot.
More importantly, I wanted to share the link to the Ubiquity roadmap that I wrote. It lays out the big picture of our plans for Ubiquity development and what I think should be the key features and approximate release dates for each version from 0.5 through 1.0.
It’s just a proposal; it’s not set in stone. In fact, quite the opposite of stone: it’s on a public wiki, so everyone is free to edit it. Go ahead; give it a read, and if you find a key feature that I’m missing, or you think a certain thing needs to come much earlier or much later, please leave a comment on the Discussion page, or here on this blog, or just go ahead and add something directly into the roadmap wiki page itself.
Something that I am trying to combat with this roadmap is the dread specter of Scope Creep. The thing about Ubiquity is that it’s such a general-purpose platform… tool… interface… thingy that it’s easy to think of a hundred different directions in which it could be extended. I would love to have a version of Ubiquity that was voice activated, could launch external applications, ran on my cell phone, supported Opera and Google Chrome, and accepted input in the form of questions as well as commands! But we simply don’t have the developer resources to go chasing after every cool feature. If we tried, we would lose sight of the core mission. Some tough choices are in order.
That’s why, at the start of the roadmap, I laid out the three goals that I see as core to the Ubiquity project. Those are:
If it’s not tightly related to one of these three things, then as cool as a proposed feature might be, I think it’s out of scope.
That doesn’t mean that we’ll never work on stuff like voice input, or making Ubiquity run in Thunderbird. (In fact, we’ve already done some experiments in those areas.) I’m just saying that when developer time is limited, those things have to come second to the core goals.
What do you think?
As many of you know, earlier this week we released a preview of version 0.5 (0.5pre). We’re going to stress test and refine this release through the weekend and push the official 0.5 out next Tuesday. This release will have fully localized commands for Danish and Japanese, as well as parser settings for a number of other languages. Read this Labs blog post to learn more about the 0.5 release and how to test it.
It’s not too late to add localizations for other languages to 0.5, though. Localizations help make Ubiquity more “natural” for more users, offering a new level of ease and familiarity to the already powerful Ubiquity. We have a new tutorial to help you localize commands.
To help encourage command localization, we now have gettext-style po template files for all the bundled command feeds in the hg repository. You can find these files in the ubiquity/localization/templates directory of the repository, or on our online hg repository.
If you complete some localizations (even incomplete) for your language and would like to submit them into the repository, for the time being, you can post them on this trac ticket.1
I’ll be looking forward to seeing your localizations! If you have any questions, feel free to ask on the ubiquity-i18n Google group or on irc.mozilla.org#ubiquity. ^^
In the post-0.5 future we’ll be rethinking how best to organize these localization files and give commit access to as many localizers as possible. ↩
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Snowl 0.3pre2, the second preview release of the next version of Snowl (the messaging-in-the-browser experiment), is now available. This version includes a number of bug fixes and spruces up the river view with two improvements.
First, the view once again groups messages into time periods, although it uses a different approach. Version 0.2 grouped messages into four time periods: Today, Yesterday, Last Seven Days, and Last Four Weeks. That made it hard to browse older messages, and in the case of the latter two periods, it didn’t map well to the weekly and monthly groupings by which people typically structure their time.
This version groups messages by day (with plans to support grouping by week and month in the future) and lets you traverse them using buttons on the toolbar:
Second, you can once again view all your subscriptions at once. To do so, select the Subscriptions item from the list of collections:
Try out Snowl 0.3pre2 and let us know what you think! But don’t forget that this is a preview release of a labs experiment, not a stable release of a finished product, and there are bound to be bugs and other issues.
Post your thoughts on Snowl to the discussion group, and file bug reports on the problems you encounter. Or join us for discussion in the #labs IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org. And if you’re interesting in hacking on Snowl, check out the source code.
- Myk Melez on behalf of the Snowl team
