Bespin Community Update: Jetpacks, Pie, Command Lines, and a Wave

smartell

1 response

And we’re back! There has been no rest for the wicked recently as we juggle big new changes, meeting great developers when presentation at great events, and companion launches.

We have been really excited to work with the Jetpack team to offer good support for extending the browser on the fly from within Bespin itself. As you can see from the video below there is support on bespin.mozilla.com itself to edit and install Jetpack features, and the Jetpack team added Bespin from within the add-on itself to give you a quick way to fly around!

This is the tip of the iceberg of course, and we can’t wait to add more features to both Jetpack and Bespin to make extending the browser a fun and pleasurable experience!

It’s always a good time for Pie!

There is major refactoring going on right now. We have been unifying what has been called the “Dashboard” and the “Editor” into one thing. Ben wrote about the Pie Menu that defines this work, but behind the hood there is a lot more. Julian and Danzat have been busy helping Ben crank on a new version of Thunderhead that groks CSS for both layout and style. It is really fun to see them implement CSS3 features and have them work. Check out the border code some time!

The details of the Pie will be changing a lot, but the unification will stay.

The command line is the bottom of the pie, and now gets more room to play with (includes history, and the chance to visually help people with their commands). Joe has a nice post talking some of the command line thinking.

Malte has continued to push on some great architecture work. We made Bespin event driven from the beginning, and he has done great work making the events cross interesting boundaries. He has written up some of this work in:

Being able to have events across Web Workers and get all the way over to a Server Side JavaScript server is fun stuff!

Surfing the Wave

Bespin has social collaboration as a core part of its vision. After seeing the early stage Google Wave and meeting the team, we are thinking about if and how there is a way we can work together. We are at an early point, but hope to give something a nice try!

You can naturally where the Wave concept fits in with our social mock:

There have also been other fun third party news. Thanks for supporting us everyone!

Ubiquity 0.5: Call for Participation

Havi Hoffman

6 responses

make_ubiquibot_more_awesome1

Labs is working on a new release of Ubiquity, tentatively scheduled for mid-June. It’s a fairly major update with a lot of changes and new features; major enough to deserve to be called Ubiquity 0.5.

The main goals for Ubiquity 0.5 are as follows:

  1. Make Ubiquity easier to learn with better organized documentation and help content, and a new interactive tutorial that walks users from zero to basic competence in a few minutes.
  2. Internationalize Ubiquity with a new parser that can handle the grammars of many languages. We’re aiming to release Ubiquity 0.5 with at least three usable languages; more are in development. This is thanks to the hard work of our extremely dedicated Ubiquity internationalization community.
  3. Implement a more flexible way of handling input that will allow for more consistency, and no more hyphens, in command names. (more about the proposed change here.)
  4. Begin doing usability research on Ubiquity as part of the new Test Pilot program.
  5. As always, fix bugs and improve built-in commands.

In order to complete all of these goals, we’ll need the help of everyone in the Ubiquity community. And I don’t just mean developers — command authors and regular Ubiquity users are just as important! There is a lot you can do to help make this release a success, even if you are not a programmer and don’t know the first thing about Javascript.

If you’ve been thinking about getting involved in Ubiquity development, either by writing code or in one of the many other ways you can contribute, now would be a great time! Below are some ways that you can get started.

If you write code…

If you don’t write code…

— Jono DiCarlo, on behalf of the Ubiquity development team

Mozilla Labs Meetup – Thursday 5/28 in SF

Havi Hoffman

5 responses

It’s time once again for Labs Night, our monthly meetup to discuss Labs projects, your projects, and the Open Web. Our May session will be next Thursday, 5/28, 6:30pm at Sandbox Suites in San Francisco at 10th and Mission

This week Labs launched Jetpack, a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play. In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know.

Join us at Labs Night to help hash out a potential future of Firefox add-ons!

In addition to our Jetpack hack session we will hear progress updates on other active Labs projects and would love to hear from you! Get involved with a Labs project. Get feedback on your own projects. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. And of course, pizza :). The space has a limit of 35 people, so if you can join us please RSVP by commenting on this blog. Thanks, hope to see you there!

Open Design Lunch – Thursday 5/21 in Mtn. View

Havi Hoffman

1 response

Tomorrow Mozilla Labs will again host an “open design lunch” at the Mozilla offices in Mountain View. We’ll solicit topics from attendees at the beginning of the lunch, divvy up the available time between them, learn about each problem in turn, and brainstorm solutions.

Mozilla Labs just released JetPack, a new experimental project intended to make adding functionality to the browser as easy as writing a web page.  We’re looking for ways that the API can make life even easier for developers.  At tomorrow’s lunch, Aza Raskin will present JetPack in action and solicit design feedback on the API.

Anyone dealing with design challenges who is looking for help resolving them is welcome to join us! You provide the problems, and we’ll provide the food and feedback. (You’re also welcome if you just want to provide feedback on other people’s design issues!)

To join us, come to 1981 Landings Drive, Building K, Mountain View, CA 94043 at noon tomorrow, Thursday, May 21. Let us know if you’re coming (and how many of you there are) by commenting on this blog post so we get a sense for how much food to order.

See you soon!

— Rhian Gracey, on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team

Introducing Jetpack, Call for Participation

Havi Hoffman

39 responses

Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web.

This post has been superseded by the launch of the Jetpack SDK.

The add-ons community for Firefox is arguably one of the largest, most vibrant sources for innovation on the Web today. If you want to affect people, to reach them and make a difference in their daily lives, the Firefox add-ons platform is hard to beat, with over one billion installs of Firefox add-ons to date.

However, we’ve only scratched the surface of its potential.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Jetpack, a Mozilla Labs project to explore new ways to extend & personalize the Web.

In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know.

With Jetpack, we’re building upon our experience over the last four years empowering a community of more than 8,000 developers to produce more than 12,000 add-ons to imagine and build the next generation of the add-ons platform. We want to grow our community of developers by orders of magnitude through making add-on creation much more accessible, and yet more powerful by developing it as an extensible platform for innovation itself. Many useful Jetpack Feature’s can be written in under a dozen lines of code.

Specifically, Jetpack will be an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser (e.g. HTML, CSS and Javascript), with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

Most importantly, from a user perspective, Jetpack will allow new features to be added to the browser without a restart or compatibility issues, resulting in little to no disruption to the online experience.

As with all Mozilla Labs initiatives, Jetpack is an open source project and everyone is welcome to participate in its design, development & experimentation.

Initial Release

This is a 0.1 release, so it unpolished, unfinished, and still highly prototyped. We are planning on entirely revamping things for the next iterations within the coming days and weeks. We need your feedback, both on the particulars as well as the direction. In particular, we are actively seeking feedback on the API design.

  • v0.1 – May 2009
    • Initial Jetpack APIs with support for statusbars, tabs, content-scripts, animations, and more.
    • Support for external API libraries (e.g. Twitter)
    • jQuery support
    • Integrated development environment with Bespin, with immediate installs and a fast development cycle
    • Inline debugging with Firebug
    • This initial release of the Jetpack API does not include a fully formed security model. It is being released for testing, development, and feedback.

Getting Started with Jetpack

Developing Jetpack Features with Bespin

Other Resources

Get Involved

Mozilla Labs is a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit. The Jetpack experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started. There are many ways to join the team and get involved:

— Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, and Nick Nguyen on behalf of the Jetpack development team.

Personas Update Released

oremj

8 responses

Personas for Firefox is a prototype extension that adds easy-to-style, easy-to-change skins to the browser.

The Personas project launched six weeks ago with a friendlier look and feel, improved functionality, and an expanded set of categories. Since that time, we have been working with the community to make the Personas user experience better and have done so through a series of three quick website releases, and one extension release. Here are a few of the key modifications that were made since Personas 1.0:

  • Added Designer Detail Pages: the Personas community now has over 7K designers that have submitted over 10,000 designs. As the gallery expands, it becomes increasingly important for each designer to have their own personal space within the site to display their creations. We solved this problem by creating designer detail pages for each artist (see graphic below).
  • Localized in Additional Languages : the Personas extension is now localized in Polish, Serbian, Turkish, and Chinese. This is in addition to the other 12 languages that were supported during the last launch, including Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. In the future, we plan to localize the website with these languages.
  • Ported to Thunderbird: thanks largely to the contributions of Huang Yaoquan, Personas can now be installed on Thunderbird. Integrating the extension into Thunderbird is a work in progress (see buglist), and Huang and others are continuing to make progress.
  • Enabled Sharing: it is now easy for you to share Personas art work you admire with your friends. Each design’s detail page now has a ShareThis link.
  • Pagination: as the Pesonas gallery continues to expand, it became increasingly important to organize the art in a way that enables you to browse all designs without performance issues. We included pagination in the All/All section of the gallery so that your browser loads the full gallery in sections, rather than 10,000+ designs at one time.

lee-tom-personas

What’s Next?

The Personas project will continue to evolve quickly with your ideas and feedback. If you have thoughts on how to make Personas better, please discuss and debate them with the community in our discussion group or add a solution to our newly created support wiki. We will continue to update you with the progress of the project.

– Suneel Gupta and Toby Elliott, on behalf of the Personas development team

Personas Gallery Welcomes Its 10,000th Art Design

Chris Beard

3 responses

Earlier today, the Personas community welcomed it’s 10,000th art design and 7,000th artist into the Personas gallery.  The project launched six weeks ago with a friendlier look and feel, improved functionality, and an expanded set of categories. Since that time, Personas has been downloaded over 3.5 million times and now has over 1 million active daily users.

stats-05142

block-of-designs1

Personas enables artists to treat the browser as their canvas. An important goal is to continue to provide artists with the tools they need to create original art, and share their work with a global audience. As part of this effort, we recently added “designer pages”, which gives each Personas artist an easily shareable page that showcases their creations.

madonna-designs

The results have been inspiring. Many artists in the Personas community have been able to attract tens of thousands of active, engaged users of their art. Here are just some examples:

groovy-blue

fireflies1

paint-splat

carbon1robot

What’s Next?

Between now and the 20,000th design, we’ll be actively looking for additional ways to give Personas artists a strong, easy-to-use platform for their work. If you have ideas, please discuss and debate them with the community in our discussion group. Finally, if you have an inner-artist, join thousands of others in the Personas community by creating your own Persona art work and sharing it our gallery for millions of people around the globe to enjoy.

– Suneel Gupta and Toby Elliott, on behalf of the Personas development team

Introducing the Design Challenge: Summer 09 – “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser”

Chris Beard

7 responses

Design Challenge: Summer 09

Design Challenge: Summer 09 – together with IxDA and Johnny Holland

After our successful inaugural Design Challenge in Spring ’09 – more than 50 students from all around the world participated and submitted nearly 20 prototypes – we are happy to announce the next Design Challenge today.

In collaboration with IxDA, a network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design and Johnny Holland, an open collective talking, sharing and finding answers about all aspects of interaction design, we once again invite designers, students and design-focused people from all around the world to develop new ideas & mockups for the future of the Web.

About the Design Challenge

The Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. Our aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Open Web as a whole.

For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.

However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.

How it works

To participate in the Design Challenge you need to create a mockup of your proposed solution. A mockup can be anything from a napkin drawing, to a wireframe, to a polished graphic.

You also need to create a video explaining your idea(s), presenting the mockup and showing how your idea works.

To register your entry: Upload your mockup and your video to a website such as Flickr, Vimeo or YouTube and tag it with “mozconcept”. Send us an email to conceptseries@mozilla.com with links to both your mockup and your video. (To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all content and contributions will be licensed under appropriate open source licenses.)

During the Design Challenge you can discuss your ideas with fellow designers on the Mozilla Concept Series forum. To inspire and help you during the challenge, Johnny Holland will post articles with background information on their website throughout the challenge.

All submissions will be presented on the Design Challenge website and honors for “Best in Class” in the categories Innovation, Execution, Interaction, Producible plus a People’s Choice Award will be bestowed.

You find all the details on the Design Challenge website.

Important Dates

  • May 14th, 2009 – Launch of Design Challenge: Summer 09
  • June 21st, 2009 – Submission deadline for mockups & videos
  • July 8th, 2009 – Announcement of “Best in Class” and “People’s Choice” selection

Getting Involved

If you’re interested in participating, please do join us in the Concept Series discussion forums. Also follow us on Twitter: @mozconcept, @ixda and @johnnyholland.

You’ll find more information on how to participate on our Design Challenge website.

If your school/university is interested in participating, please contact us directly at conceptseries@mozilla.com.

— Pascal Finette, on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team

Open Design Lunch – May 14 in Mountain View

Chris Beard

3 responses

Tomorrow Mozilla Labs is hosting an “open design lunch” at the Mozilla offices in Mountain View. A open design lunch is an informal lunchtime discussion about specific user experience design problems in web sites, web apps, desktop apps, and other things folks are working on.

We’ll solicit topics from attendees at the beginning of the lunch, divvy up the available time between them, learn about each problem in turn, and brainstorm solutions.

Anyone dealing with design challenges who is looking for help resolving them is welcome to join us! You provide the problems, and we’ll provide the food and feedback. (You’re also welcome if you just want to provide feedback on other people’s design issues!)

To join us, come to 1981 Landings Drive, Building K, Mountain View, CA 94043 at noon tomorrow, Thursday, May 13. Let us know if you’re coming (and how many of you there are) by commenting on this blog post so we get a sense for how much food to order.

See you soon!

— Myk Melez, on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team

New Labs discussion groups!

Chris Beard

4 responses

The Labs team is constantly on the look-out for better ways to do things, better tools, and better infrastructure. One thing we realized is that the forum system we were using for project discussions wasn’t working as well as it could, so we decided to change it about a month ago. The old forum we were using was OK, but it didn’t really give us the flexibility we wanted. With the new system, discussions can now be read via Web, RSS feeds and email, and responded to by email or on the Web. Our hope is that this will make it easier for everyone to participate in and become part of the Labs community, and we’ll continue looking for other ways to improve it further.

New Mozilla Labs discussion groups:

  • Mozilla Labs – If there’s a Labs project, idea, or topic you would like to talk about and there doesn’t seem to be another place for it, post it here!
  • Bespin – The Bespin project is developing an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing. (project site)
  • Concept Series – Concept Series and Design Challenges. (project site)
  • Personas – A new add-on that gives Firefox a dynamic, lightweight theme system. (project site)
  • Prism – Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop. (project site)
  • Snowl – Snowl is a prototype extension that integrates messaging into the browser. (project site)
  • Test Pilot – Test Pilot is an idea for a new user testing program for Mozilla Labs that aims to build a 1% representative sample of the Firefox user base for soliciting wide participation and structured feedback for Labs experiments. (project site)
  • Ubiquity – An experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. (project site)
  • Weave – Weave is a Mozilla Labs project to explore ways in which the browser can broker richer experiences on the Web, by integrating more closely with online services. (project site)

Another project we’re currently working on (along with the WebDev and QA teams) is a revamp of the existing Labs website, with a whole new look and feel and a more flexible backend infrastructure. We’re tracking progress and keeping docs and whatnot on the Mozilla Wiki here: Mozilla Labs Site 2.0. This is a multi-stage project, and we’ve just started the development phase of stage one.

If you have any questions or comments about the new discussion forums or the Mozilla Labs site project, please leave a comment here, email me at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com, or post a note in the Mozilla Labs discussion group.

— Deb Richardson, on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team