Mozilla Open Data Competition – Winners To Be Announced on Jan. 11

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Hello Test Pilots!

We want to give a short update on the announcement of the winners of our first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition. We originally planned to announce these winners tomorrow, but will now make the announcement on Tuesday, January 11th.

Dont worry, we do have a decent reason for this postponement: the number and quality of submissions far exceeded our expectations. The depth of many of the analyses also caught us off guard, and we really wanted our judges to have ample time to not only evaluate, but also give feedback on each and every entry.

Needless to say, we are extremely excited about the level of participation in our first open data competition, and are even more excited to share the results with the community on Tuesday!

Game On Submissions: 1 Week Away

mozilla

Happy New Year Game On Community!

Friendly reminder: the finish line for the Game On competition is just one week away on the 11th of January, 2011! If you want to build a game for the whole wide Web to use, this is your chance to make that game. We’re beyond excited to see what the possibilities will be, so we’re building a gallery to show your games to the world! This gallery will be opening soon after the contest ends.

As we shared just before Christmas, Santa has been very generous with his goodies for the winners of Game On. We have a fabulous set of prizes to shower on our winners and we can’t wait to give them out. We’ve gathered together a growing list of expert judges who can’t wait to choose the winning games. The somewhat unquantifiable but most valuable prize will of course be your audience the millions of people who will be able to play your games right from their Web browsers.

So, let’s get this Game On already!

ENTER NOW

Defy Gravity: Game On Prizes

mozilla

From all of us on the Game On team, Happy Holidays! To celebrate the season, we’ve pulled together a hefty list of prizes for you. We’re not kidding when we say these prizes range from super pragmatic to gravity-defying. Without further ado, here they are:

Best Overall

The following prizes will be awarded to the best overall game.

Category Prizes

The following prizes will be awarded for best technology, best web-iness, best aesthetics, most original, best polish, most fun, and community choice.

We would like to thank the following Game On 2010 Prize Sponsors for their partnership and commitment to promote Open Web games:

As a reminder, there are just over 3 weeks left in the competition. The deadline to submit your game is January 11*, 2011. So, keep your eyes on the prize(s) and get your game on today!

Game On 2010

*UPDATE 12/30/2010: Apologies as this post originally mentioned the 1st as the deadline date. This has now been updated to correctly show that the deadline is indeed January 11, 2011

Game On 2010 – a Preview of my HTML 5 Web App, Pencilbox

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Guest post by Mozilla Labs usability researcher Jono Xia who has built a cool HTML5 experimentation of his very own

Hey, Game On 2010 contest participants — how are those HTML 5 games coming along? I can’t wait for January 2010 when I can finally see what you’ve made.

I’ve been doing some HTML 5 experimentation of my own. What I’m working on is not a game, but it is a graphical HTML 5 web app that uses several tricks that may be of interest to game developers. It’s easier to show it in action than to tell you about it, so watch this video for a preview of Pencilbox and an explanation of how it works.

Note: this is not a Mozilla project — this is a personal project I’ve been hacking on in my free time.

I’m not yet ready to put the app itself on a public webserver where you can play with it, nor have I set up a public code repository yet. (Like I said, it’s a side project, so I haven’t had time to work on the infrastructure stuff.) When I do have it set up properly, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, here’s a tarball of the source code, which is under a Mozilla tri-license. It may be of some interest if you wish to achieve a similar effect in your Game On 2010 submission and you want to see how I did it.

Happy hacking!

Chromeless 0.1

amilewski

Version 0.1 of Chromeless is now available! Chromless is an experimental toolkit to make it possible to prototype browser applications using HTML, JavaScript and related Web standards. This post outlines the features available in this new release.

The following video is a introductory screencast which will give you an overview of the project’s goals and design:

(
{“base_state”: {}, “video_url”: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrRYWfJLJuA”}
)

What’s New

This release includes new APIs to allow you to do the following from within your browser prototypes:

  • Track the page load progress of inner browsers
  • Receive notification about the security state of Web pages (whether a page is served over SSL)
  • Capture images from DOM fragments
  • Toggle to full screen mode
  • Log messages to the console
  • Save data to the user profile
  • Convert user input into valid URLs
  • An experimental API to support the Background loading of web pages
  • Support for Windows, OS X, and Linux

These new features in this release come in two forms: JavaScript libraries that are programatically accessed, and conventions that allow you control your application by manipulating the DOM. Chromeless v0.1 includes a collection of examples which demonstrate these new features.

In addition to these feature-related examples, you’ll also find more complex demonstrations, including a browser that displays thumbnails of open tabs which are rendered with a fisheye effect.

Package and Bundling your Browser Prototype

Chromeless v0.1 also provides an option to “package” your browser script in a ZIP file, that you can deploy on your computer. See the README to learn more.

The Road Ahead

Our goal is to allow developers to quickly prototype new browser designs using Web standards and JavaScript. Future releases of Chromeless will work toward this goal by adding new features which will make more interactive prototypes possible. We are keen to receive further feedback which will help shape the future of the project.

Happy browser hacking!

Updates to F1, more accounts!

amilewski

Today we’re releasing another update to F1 with some added features. For starters the settings page now opens in a  new tab, allowing for more room and easier configuration of your accounts. We’ve also added Yahoo Mail and Google Apps integration into F1. Lastly we’ve also implemented a couple user options:

  • Users can now enable or disable a keyboard shortcut for the F1 share panel – it seemed to make the most sense to use the F1 key for this! By default this is enabled, though it might not work for all keyboard configurations on OSX.
  • Users can choose to automatically bookmark the links they have shared. Shared links get grouped into unsorted bookmarks, and can be filtered to show only shared links by searching F1 in the bookmark manager. By default this setting is enabled.

Existing users should upgrade their add-ons (click on “Find Updates” in the Add-On manager).

Let us know what you think of the updates, happy holidays and happy sharing.

Mozilla Open Data Competition – Deadline is This Friday!

mozilla

Hi all – just one last reminder that the submission deadline for the first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition is this Friday (Dec. 17th). If you haven’t started working with the data, its not too late! You still have a few days to get started at the Official Competition Page, investigate the data, and submit an awesome visualization!

We are also happy to announce a third, special partner judge, Brian Suda. Brian is an informatician currently residing in Reykjavík, Iceland and author of the book, A Practical Guide to Designing with Data. Brian and our other distinguished partners, David Smith of Revolution Analytics and Andrew Vande Moere of Information Aesthetics, all look forward to seeing your submissions!

Good Luck!

Experimental addon offers new email addresses within Thunderbird

amilewski

A while ago we ran a survey, and found out that two thirds of the people who download Thunderbird expected us to give them an email address as part of Thunderbird. It makes sense, as all of the “new email” alternatives that consumers have (Gmail, Hotmail, GMX, etc…) package email addresses, storage & service with their interfaces. They’re quite surprised to find that we don’t. Of course, for enterprise users used to the notion of an “email client” like Outlook, Thunderbird’s model makes sense but for many people first trying Thunderbird, the first question we ask them — “What is your email address?” — is unexpected. We suspect that not only do new users expect us to give them an email address, but they like being able to try out new software with a blank slate. That way, it’s easier for them to decide whether they like the software without right away needing to a) trust the software with email addresses and passwords, and b) trust the software to not “mess up” their accounts.

A Prototype

A screenshot of the addon.
Here is our first attempt to fix that. In partnership with our friends at Tucows/Hover, we’ve built a new account creation feature, which allows new users to set up new email accounts easily. The addon replaces the default New Mail Account dialog (found by going to the File » New » Mail Account… menu entry) with a new dialog which allows people to purchase a new personalized email address. (Don’t worry, if you decide you don’t want to pay for an email address and prefer free ad-supported email services, we also have links to the most popular email providers, and we hope to integrate them further in the process at some point. And if you’ve
already got an email address, you can just click the “Skip this” button at the bottom, and be taken to a slightly-prettier version of the previous New Mail Account dialog.

The purpose of this prototype is to gather as much feedback as possible, to help us decide whether this feature would work well in Thunderbird. Of course, being aimed at people who don’t currently use Thunderbird, we’ll have to seek out more representative users, but we still would like input from readers of this blog.

A note about money: running high quality email services cost money, which comes either from paid services or from ads. We hope to be able to offer a variety of email providers as part of Thunderbird, making it easier for users to choose what model works best for them.

We’ve also thought about offering Thunderbird-branded email accounts, and may consider that in a future release of this addon.

What’s Next?

With your help, we’re hoping to get this add-on built directly into future versions of Thunderbird so please try it out and leave your feedback. For installation, more information and a screen cast explaining the add-on, check out the Get An Account project page.

The Mozilla Labs Newsletter is here

pfinette

This has been in the making for a bit… The all new Mozilla Labs newsletter is (finally) here!

This newsletter is a bit different to the average newsletter – it’s more like an email update Mozilla staff send out to folks like you, who are interested in the latest Labs experiments, stuff we are working on and things we are thinking about. Plus sometimes random stuff that gets us excited!

We don’t have a preset schedule for this newsletter – sometimes you will get a few emails a week and sometimes you won’t hear from us for a few weeks in a row. Rest assure you will only receive emails from Mozilla Labs.

You can subscribe to the newsletter from any page on http://mozillalabs.com – the signup box is in the lower righthand corner.

And to wet your appetite – here are the first two newsletters which we’ve sent out:

Introducing Open Web App Manifests, Version 0.2

mozilla

We’re hard at work on Open Web Apps, pushing toward a release early next year which will allow us to start full integration with application and store developers. We’ve hit a significant milestone and wanted to take a moment to solicit feedback on our recent revision of a central part of the system: the application manifest format.

Applications manifests are small JSON documents that describe applications: These documents express both how an application should be displayed in the users’ browser and what it can do. Defining the syntax of these documents has been a high priority for us, given that they are an important integration point for app developers, app stores and browser vendors.

Online manifest validation

Try out the online manifest validator!

The second major revision (version 0.2) of the application manifest format is now complete. In this post we will provide an overview of some of the most significant changes since the last version. Additionally, we have built an online development tool that gives you a way to interactively explore the specification and build your own manifest files.

Two Types of Apps

As we have worked through more prototypes of the Open Web App infrastructure and numerous discussions with the wider community, it has become apparent that there are two different classes of web applications:

Bookmark applications are more like traditional Web pages. While they may have a slightly different design, they really have no specific code modifications that differentiate them from normal websites.

Published applications are more customized, they have been carefully designed to provide a specific user experience and rely on features provided by Open Web App APIs.

This distinction and its implication on the application manifest format is important. We believe both types of applications are vital: Bookmark applications give developers a way to easily distribute apps and provide users benefits of discoverability and manageabilty. Published applications can provide a richer user experience (send notifications, simplify searching and interact with other applications the user has installed) through the use of APIs.

This separation is present in the updated specification in the form of a short set of requirements that an application must satisfy to attain the published status. This is exciting as it provides a safe way for the community to contribute and share bookmark applications, while also making it possible to secure published applications and grant them greater capabilities.

Simplified Application Scope

“Application Scope” defines where on the Internet an application resides. It allows browsers to determine whether a given URL falls inside of the application scope of any of the currently installed apps. A well defined application scope is useful as it enables the browser to help a user navigate and can further determine which pages will have access to the additional capabilities granted to an installed application.

Version 0.2 of the application manifest schema further streamlines the definition of application scope: Bookmark applications have no scope, and for published apps a single url (the base_url) of an application defines its scope. This simplified model is easy to understand and enforce.

Digging Deeper

We encourage you to read more, the full details of the updated manifest format are available on github, along with a reference implementation of a manifest parser.

The main goal of this release has been to preserve important use cases while simplifying and securing the format. We’re thankful for the feedback thus far, and look forward to community review as we work toward our integration release. Please join us in our IRC channel #openwebapps at irc.mozilla.org.