Your Game On Finalists: 35 Great Open Web Games

mozilla

Congratulations to the 35 games that have been selected by our jury to be Game On finalists! These games were the top qualified entries in the Game On 2010 Competition and are being evaluated by our expert judges for prize awards. Winners will be announced on Thursday, February 3.

Due to the awesome response from our wider community, we have extended the voting period for the Community Choice award until February 1. Take 5 minutes (or hours…) to play some magnificent games and vote your favorites for the Game On Community Choice award. We will be randomly selecting three lucky voters and send you a special-edition Mozilla Labs Game On swag pack!

GAME ON!

Tips and Troubleshooting for Home Dash 1 (and 2)

Ed Lee

Thanks to the initial feedback from people trying out a mysterious prototype add-on, Home Dash felt stable enough to make an initial release today. I’ve been using Firefox with Home Dash as my main web browser for the last couple weeks, and I would consider myself a pretty advanced user that makes use of keyboard shortcuts. So, Home Dash has been implemented with that in mind — but that doesn’t mean it was designed to be keyboard only! (In fact, a number of things are still browse-only and require the use of a mouse.)

Get me back to the original Firefox interface!

Edit: Updated! Starting with Home Dash 2, you can press <alt-ctrl-shift-d> as a temporary return to the original Firefox interface. You can press it again to re-activate Home Dash. This keyboard shortcut is mainly to help you transition to Home Dash if you’re feeling lost and need to use something from the non-Home Dash interface.

First off, Home Dash is meant to replace the existing Firefox interface, so if you want to return Firefox to what it was before, you’ll need to disable the add-on. The following steps should work on all versions of Firefox:

1) Select the menu “Tools” and then the item “Add-ons” to open the “Add-ons Manager”
2) Find the “Mozilla Labs: Prospector – Home Dash” entry and click “Disable”

Home Dash entry in Add-ons Manager

Because it’s a restartless add-on that cleans up after itself, you should be able to use Firefox as if you never installed it. If you want to try out Home Dash again, just return to the Add-ons Manager and enable it. An alternative to step 1 is to open up Home Dash and enter “about:addons” and hit <enter> then continue with step 2.

And now to the keyboard shortcuts!

Home Dash detects when you’re trying to do various common keyboard actions in Firefox such as opening a new tab, selecting the location bar or search bar. This means on Windows, when you use <ctrl-t> to open a tab, or <alt-d>/<ctrl-l> to select the location bar, or <ctrl-k> to do a search, you’ll get Home Dash instead.

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If you hit the command when the dashboard is not open, Home Dash activates as below:

Command Windows Mac OS Description
Location Bar <ctrl-l> <cmd-l> Open Home Dash; selected page opens in current tab
New Tab <ctrl-t> <cmd-t> Open Home Dash; selected page opens in a new tab
Search Bar <ctrl-k> <cmd-k> Open Home Dash with the default search engine active

If Home Dash is already open, you’ll get a related behavior:

Command Windows Mac OS Description
Location <ctrl-l> <cmd-l> Select all the text in the input box to type something new; if the input is empty, the current page’s location will be filled in
New Tab <ctrl-t> <cmd-t> Toggle if a selected page should open in a new tab or the current tab
Search <ctrl-k> <cmd-k> Activate the default search; if already activated, cycle through other searches for side-by-side search

If you want to get out of the dashboard view, you can always hit <esc>. If you typed something in the input box already, it’ll clear that out first and then close Home Dash if you hit <esc> again.

Selecting a result with <enter>

After you’ve typed something into the input box, you can hit <enter> to select some result to open in either the current tab or a new tab depending on how you’ve toggled the “New Tab” button.

Visual <enter> behavior Description
Large result Select large result If you have a “top match” from history or are doing a web search, you’ll see a larger result and a preview of the page will start loading
Side-by-side search Select “left” search If you’ve activated two searches, most of the dashboard goes away to show side-by-side results
Nothing Go to that page This is useful for going to a new site that you know the domain/url or if you want to have Google figure out what the words mean

One nice thing about Home Dash is that you can type as fast as you want once you know what kind of result will show up. This means you can press <ctrl-l>, type “mozilla”, and hit <enter> to go to your top result for “mozilla” without waiting.

Large result as the first result

Managing and switching through tabs

From the tab thumbnail view at the top of Home Dash, you can somewhat arrange them by dragging them left or right to prioritize or deprioritize them. By dragging a tab to the left, it becomes an “app tab” and shows up with the #1 in the corner to indicate that it has a number for easy keyboard access. So if you frequently use one particular tab, you can drag it left and access it by just pressing <ctrl-1> or <cmd-1>.

App tabs on the left with numbers

You can also just switch through all your tabs without actually switching tabs until you find the one you want. This can be done by pressing <ctrl-tab> while holding <ctrl> and hitting <tab> until you find the one you want then release the keys. The preview of the tab shows up on the right side of the screen to help you quickly find the right tab.

Additionally, you can get rid of tabs that you don’t want while you’re switching through them. Just press <w> and the tab is gone! A preview of the next tab will then show up ready to be viewed and/or removed. As usual, you can hit <ctrl-shift-t> to undo closing a tab that you didn’t actually mean to close.

The keyboard shortcuts for switching through tabs can work well with either/both hands:

Action Left side Right side Description
Switch Tab <ctrl-tab> <ctrl-9> Go to the next tab (or previous by holding <shift>)
Remove Tab <w> <delete> Remove the tab and go to the next (or previous with <shift>)
Select Tab <space> <enter> Select; or just let go of the <ctrl> key
Cancel <esc> <0> Stop previewing tabs and return to the current tab

Switching through tabs with previews

For an even more advanced behavior, you can first open up Home Dash and type in some words to filter out some tabs. Then when you start switching through tabs, you’ll only see the ones that matched the results. So if you want to just close a bunch of tabs from some site, search for that site, hit <ctrl-tab> and start deleting!

As this is just version 1 of Home Dash, these keyboard shortcuts might not do the same thing in future versions! But hopefully we’ll try to keep them working.

Towards Browse-Based Browsing with Home Dash

Ed Lee

Please download the latest Firefox 4 Beta to watch the WebM video.

Full-size video (1:05) downloads: webm (15mb) and ogv (9mb)

Transcript:

Home Dash is the newest Prospector experiment to improve search and content discovery in Firefox. It removes all the standard web browser interface like the location bar, search bar and tabs; and leaves behind just a Firefox logo that is used to bring up a dashboard. Here on the right-hand side, Home Dash has found my top 24 sites and organized them based on my browsing behavior. While still far from it’s end goal, this was the original idea of making a browse-based browser (as opposed to a search-based one).

In the top left corner, there’s a search box where I can type “mo”, and like Speak Words, the rest of “mozilla” has been filled in. The top sites on the right now only show those that match “mozilla” and above them are my filtered open tabs. By pointing at a site, I get an Instant Preview of the page, which now is ready for me to use and gives me feedback that I’m going to the right place. Similarly, I can also preview the matching tabs by pointing at them.

Pages from my history show up along the left, but if I feel like I want web results as well, I can click on a search icon just under the input box to get data from Google. And if that still isn’t enough, I can activate a second search to get side-by-side results with Bing. Additionally, if I keep typing, both searches will instantly update.

If you’re already running the latest Firefox 4 Beta, you can immediately try out Home Dash without restarting Firefox. You can leave feedback in this Google Groups thread and check out the source on GitHub.

This is just the first release of Home Dash, and it starts by removing the standard browser interface to give the web content full priority in the window. It moves the usual browser functionality into a dashboard that sits on top of the page and goes away after you have found what you were looking for. It simplifies some search behavior, so instead of trying to recall if a page is in your history or opened as a tab or somewhere on the web, you can just type what you want into the dashboard, and it lets you search all of those at the same time.

Additionally, Home Dash helps you just browse to (instead of typing to search) the sites you like by finding the top 24 sites and organizing them in a way that matches your browsing behavior. In the near-future, the Prospector team plans to let you customize this area by adding, removing and resizing the sites you want. This area would not be limited to just sites either — in the future you may be placing web apps and widgets and even people that you frequently interact with. With all this information, it would be useful to organize different groups of sites, apps and people into multiple separate dashboards that focus on one idea or task.

Opened Dashboard

So further in the future, if the Prospector team organizes a dashboard of sites, apps and people that are relevant to Prospector development, it would be incredibly useful to someone interested in helping out to add this “Prospector development” dashboard to their Firefox to immediately see what tools the team uses as well as ways to contact and interact with the rest of the team. So instead of searching all of the web for a website or an app, you can now just browse to the relevant information that people are organizing and maintaining.

Additionally, if you feel that the dashboard is missing something, you could start editing your own copy and adding information, and perhaps other people will find it so useful that they will use your dashboard instead of the “official” one. But before that happens, you could also just suggest to the original dashboard maintainer to combine your good ideas with the original, so that everyone benefits.

If all that sounds interesting, please help out by installing Home Dash on a Firefox 4 Beta, and leave feedback or contribute!

Edit: If you want some Tips or need to do some Troubleshooting, check out this followup post!
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Mozilla Labs in 2011

pfinette

Over the last couple of months the Mozilla Labs team discussed, argued and brainstormed the broad topics which we see on the horizon for 2011 and beyond – and want to explore this year. We came up with the five themes below. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, comments – head over to our forum and join the discussion.

General:

We’re exclusively interested in projects which deliver clearly identified user satisfactions & values, solve user needs and optionally fix a broken current state. We take risks and believe that failure of individual projects is part of our mission and core to how we do things.

Process:

Our projects flow through three distinct and interlocked states – from Ideation to Experimentation to Incubation. Projects can and will drop out of the process at any given state if we decide the project fulfilled its purpose.

Themes:

For 2011 we identify the following guiding themes:

Apps & the Web Economy

Apps are quickly becoming a significant way for users to interact with the Web. We are bringing apps to the browser and the Open Web; adding what’s great about apps to the browser and what’s great about the Web to apps as well as exploring new features and interactions.

Do it for Me

With the browser being the central broker of our online interactions we have the unique opportunity to simplify the users’ life by automating interactions. Under the umbrella of “Do it for Me” we explore interactions which delight the user and find the balance between automation and direct user control.

The Web beyond the Browser

We see and further expect the Web to expand beyond the browser – users consume the Web through new device classes (mobile phones, tablets, TVs, etc) as well as through new classes of software such as apps in new ways. We are exploring this space, build tools to do so more efficiently and build prototypes.

You & your Friends (Social & Identity)

The Web becomes more and more interwoven with the social fabric. We explore this topic from multiple angles, using the browser as a central starting point.

Shared Data (Test Pilot)

The browser is often the ideal place to capture relevant data which, if aggregated, can help both users and developers gain valuable insights into trends and behaviors. We explore this space through the established Test Pilot program.

Student Outreach: Update on Bauhaus Universities ‘Open Interaction Design’ course

dchinniah

Bauhaus University logo

Back in November we reported that Mozilla Labs would be supporting a group of 15 students from Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany as they embarked on a course of ‘Open Interaction Design’

Today we like to give you an update to the students progress and other activities that are in the pipeline.

Background

The ‘Designing for Action’ course – conducted by Prof. Jens Geelhaar and Jan Dittrich – challenges the students to design solutions to overcome today’s problems of information overload while surfing the internet and the re-findability of the valuable webpages.

The course teaches the basics of interaction design and challenges exploration into the design of user-centered software in the open.

All phases of outputs and course-ware will be released to the public under Creative Commons open licensing via the Media Faculties Wiki. This includes:

What’s next?

The students are very close to completing the first phase of the project. Mozilla Labs have arranged various means to support the initiative via multiple channels:

  • social media coverage (blogs etc.)
  • guest lectures
  • mentoring
Paper prototyping

Paper prototype UI elements

Social media coverage

We will actively publish blog posts outlining the Phase 1 outputs from the different teams. These posts will include:

  • initial concepts
  • sketches
  • wire-frames
  • prototypes
  • user testing

Guest lectures

We have lined up two exciting guest lectures for the students. These will be conducted by:

We hope to be able to provide video from these guest lectures at a later date. Be sure to watch this space!

Mentoring

We have lined up a handful of internationally recognised UX professionals to provide the students with some mentoring feedback – with focus on a few core usability lens.

After a initial virtual group meet, each mentor will have two teams assigned to themselves. They will conduct in-depth reviews and feedback for their teams as well as make themselves available for ‘open hours’ once a week.

Going forward

The students will continue to refine their concepts based on the upcoming results from prototype testing as well as all the mentoring feedback sessions.

After this further refinement phase, the final outputs will be presented around March.

Remember, you can always follow the students progress on the course by visiting the universities course wiki or stay in touch with updates by following @MozConcept on Twitter.

Vote Now: Game On Community Choice Award

mozilla

Hope you’ve had a chance to check out some of the games in the Game On Gallery over the past couple weeks. We’ve been having a lot of fun playing them ourselves and productivity is at an all-time high score!

Here’s a quick and friendly reminder that this is your last week to VOTE for the Community Choice Award. We created this category for you – the game player community – to rate the sheer awesomeness of these games.

So if you haven’t already voted, here’s how to do it:

1) Click on the Big Red VOTE NOW Button on the Game On homepage

2) Register for a Game On account

3) Vote Away! You’ll be shown 5 random games to evaluate.

Have fun playing and choosing your Community Choice favorites!

GAME ON: VOTE NOW!

Let’s Play Some Games!

mozilla

Thanks to everyone who took the time to create games with Open Web technologies that truly show off the power of the Web. After reviewing over 160 submissions to the first Mozilla Labs Game On Competition, we’ve selected 124 games to showcase in the Game On Gallery.

We built the Game On Gallery so that people who use the Web everyday can access and enjoy your games. Starting today, registered users of the Game On website can vote on their choice for the winner of the Community Choice prize category. Over the next couple weeks, our expert judges will be selecting winners for the other prize categories. Winners will be announced the first week of February.

We hope you have as much fun as we have playing these amazing open Web games!

Check out the Game On Gallery today!

Mozilla Open Data Competition – Announcing The Winners!

mozilla

[Note: cross-posted on the Blog of Metrics]

Back in November, Mozilla Labs and the Metrics Team together launched the first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition. While we set out to discover creative visual answers to the open question, “How do people use Firefox,” we really didn’t know what level of participation to expect from the Mozilla and data analysis communities. In fact, we were overwhelmed by both the number and quality of submissions – so much so that we had to give ourselves an extra few days to thoroughly review them all!

In all, we received 32 high-caliber submissions. The “visualizations’ took a number of forms, from tools to easily query the data to interactive web applications. They also covered a broad range of important topics, from plugin memory consumption to user web activities. You can find all 32 submissions here; entrants, if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the page as our panel of judges has left feedback on each and every submission.

Needless to say, we want to thank all the participants – your work has made our initial open data competition an overwhelming success and many of your insights will directly help the Firefox team develop a better web browser. In thanks, we’ll be sending this awesome Firefox t-shirt to each entrant:

We also want to thank our 3 partner judges: David Smith, Revolution Analytics; Andrew Vande Moere, Information Aesthetics; and Brian Suda, author of A Practical Guide to Designing with Data. The success of the competition was largely due to your help in publicizing the event and thoroughly evaluating the entries.

And now…lets get to the winners!

Grand Prize

Survey Participants vs. All Users – Contributed by: James Fiedler

While deciding amongst the 32 entries was difficult, the focus on a single, very relevant and important question distinguished this entry. James focused on contrasting survey participants with all users (critical as we often use survey data for segmentation), then set up a simple and helpful environment for the user to explore and discover interesting conclusions of their own. This submission is exactly the type of work we were hoping for: an elegant visualization that presents data around an important and complex question in a clear and easy-to-understand way. James will receive a $300 Amazon gift card for his excellent work.

Finalists

Test Pilot Explorer – Contributed by: Lon Riesberg

One of the more creative entries, Lon created a custom “explorer” that essentially “plays back” time-ordered events as animated plots and includes filters to customize what data is shown. This explorer really shows how you can “see” user behavior on a mass scale, and while we had some quibbles about some of the details of the visualization itself, we found it to be a powerful and enjoyable data exploration tool. Lon will receive a set of all 4 Edward Tufte books for his work.

Firefox Usage by Age – Contributed by: Tom Haynes (University of Michigan)

Tom’s entry also focused on one particular element of the data. His execution sets this submission apart, as his visualization doesn’t try to encompass everything, but tells a clear, specific story around how Firefox usage times vary across age groups. Tom will receive a set of all 4 Edward Tufte books for his work.

Honorable Mention

Given the number of worthy submissions, we decided to hand out 5 Honorable Mention Awards in addition to the original 3 prizes. For varying reasons, we thought these entries were particularly valuable and each team will receive Tufte’s latest book, Beautiful Evidence, in recognition of their great work. Good Job!

Firefox browser – Event Sequences – Contributed by: Benoît Pointet

Firefox 4 beta UI Component Use vs. User Expertise – Contributed by: Nicolas Garcia Belmonte, Maria Luz Caballero

Browser Usage Over the Course of a Day Contributed by: Christian Kreibich

Bookmark a Lot, Browse a Lot – Contributed by: Eugene Tjoa

Firefox Plugin Memory Consumption– Contributed by: Diederik van Liere and David Eaves

Again, thanks to all the participants, judges, and everyone else who helped make this first open data competition such a success! Participants should receive an email within the week with details on how to receive the prizes and t-shirts.

And keep refining those data hacking skills – there will be more open data competitions in the near future!

Game On Submissions: Now Closed!

mozilla

Thanks to all who entered the Mozilla Labs Game On 2010 competition – submissions are now closed. Come back Wednesday, January 12th to see the entries and vote for the community favorite! Stay tuned to @mozlabs and our blog for announcements – and get some rest! You deserve it!

Game On!
* Update: Originally, we posted that gallery would open on Tuesday, January 12th – and as many of you probably noted, we meant Wednesday the 12th of January. Sorry for any heartburn that caused. *