At the Mothership of Demo Parties – Assembly (pt1)

mozilla

Mozilla Labs Demoparty is an initiative to foster artful exploration of open web technologies.

Final Mozilla Labs Demo Party in 2011

This past weekend marked the final event of our Mozilla Labs Demoparty 2011 – A collaboration with the giant Assembly Party in Helsinki, an arena filled with thousands of demo sceners and gamers.

Within 3 months a community of enthusiasts has put together 7 web demoparty events with us. *Applause* In this first Assembly wrap-up post we bring you a ton of material starring our very own Rob Hawkes.

What is Assembly? [Video]

Thousands of people, lots of demo competitions, hacking, gaming and a big party – The mothership of demo parties,

Click for our Assembly Impression Video by Rob Hawkes
(Sorry, Flickr Video embedd didn’t work in our WordPress install)

New Sound Visualizer Demo for Assembly

For Assembly Rob Hawkes has created a neat WebGL/HTML5 audio sound demo:


Click here to view the Sound Visualizer demo

Talk: Browserscene – Creating Demos on the web

In this video you see Rob Hawkes’ talk at Assembly. For more details view his post on rawkes.com

Slides

Browserscene: Creating demos on the Web
(Sorry, no slideshare embedd)

“Deconstructing a Browserscene Demo”

And this was Rob Hawkes’ second talk, where he talks in depth how he made the WebGL HTML5 Audio visualizer demo

(Embedd also doesn’t work, direct youtube link here)
 

Stay tuned for our other Assembly talks (and news on the online competition)! http://mozillalabs.com/demoparty

What’s next: Rainbow and WebRTC

amilewski

It’s been a while since the last release of the Rainbow add-on. We wanted to give everyone a quick update on the roadmap for Rainbow and real-time communication on the Web.

Integration with WebRTC

When we first released Rainbow late last year, we made cross-platform support for live streaming and one of our our main goals. Fortunately, many others have been thinking about this as well; we first saw Ericsson release an experiment around real-time voice and video communication built on WebKitGTK+. Subsequently, Google started the Web Real-Time Communication (RTC) project at webrtc.org, an open-source effort that provides many of the low-level platform APIs required to build support for real-time communication into browsers. We’ve been following all these developments quite closely, and we’re happy to announce that we will be working with the WebRTC group on JavaScript APIs that let web developers building real-time voice and video applications.

Standardization

Web technologies are successful only when most (if not all) browsers support a standard API. Mozilla has been a key participant in many web standards that have evolved over the last decade. Today we are working very closely with both the W3C and IETF working groups and are actively participating in the standards discussion for real-time communication. We look forward to continuing to work with other browser vendors and interested technology groups to create compelling APIs that embodies all the characteristics that makes the Web awesome!

The Future of Rainbow

Rainbow has served as an excellent vehicle to test out various JavaScript APIs for video and image capture, as well as experimentation around live audio analysis. We love the tight feedback loop that the add-on provides; we’ve changed the API in almost every release of Rainbow so far and received excellent feedback on what worked and what didn’t. We’d like to continue this style of iterative development for real-time streaming features as well. Thus, the next release for Rainbow will feature yet another (!) new API and will be built off the code from the WebRTC project.

As the project matures, and after the many UI and technology issues have been worked out, we would also like to integrate this feature into Firefox. It is a little early to tell when that will happen, but we want to do it as soon as possible!

How can you help?

We’re really excited about propelling this forward, and if you take a look at our github repository, you’ll notice we’ve been busy hacking. As always, please feel free to jump in and help out. If you’re a web developer interested in building on these technologies, we’re really interested in hearing from you. Let’s make this a reality together!

Introducing Evolution Contacts Integration for Thunderbird

Havi Hoffman

If you’ve been using Ubuntu One contacts, Google Contacts, or local address books through GNOME Evolution on Ubuntu Oneiric, you can now access those contacts from within Thunderbird with our new EDS Contacts Integration add-on!

The EDS Contacts Integration add-on in action.

Want to give this add-on a try?  Visit the project page.

Got some feedback on this add-on?  All feedback can go into this forum thread.

 

 

 

 

 

OneLiner moves navigation to the tabs toolbar

Ed Lee

OneLiner takes a different approach from LessChrome HD to achieve the same goal of giving as much space to the web page. The Firefox interface now takes up less space by moving what used to be on two lines into just one line. In order to combine the navigation and tabs toolbars, the location bar is given a small fixed size while the search bar is collapsed to a single button.

Separate toolbars before, combined OneLiner after

While the location bar functions as it did before, the search button activates an in-tab search by loading the default Firefox home page ready to search with Google. And just like when there were two separate boxes, the user has more control over when keystrokes get sent to a web search by requiring an explicit intent to search. For a future Firefox home page, the Prospector team plans to simplify searching with non-default search engines similar to the behavior on Firefox Mobile and Search Tabs.

Once you install OneLiner without restarting on Firefox, keep an eye out for some other features:

  • the location bar expands to cover the back/forward buttons when not in use
  • clicking the search button will pre-fill the search with selected text or clipboard data
  • Ctrl-K keyboard shortcut instantly activates the in-tab search bar
  • fullscreen mode keeps the one-line look that doesn’t get auto-hidden
  • fullscreen “back” extends to the top and left edges of the screen for easy clicks

As always, you can check the source on Github, provide feedback, and submit issues or suggestions!

– Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team
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Submit your Demos NOW

mozilla

Mozilla Labs Demoparty is our initiative to foster artful exploration of open web technologies.

Online Competition

Besides severall events we also run an online competition where you can win quite big prices like a flight for 2 persons to the Alternative Party in Helsinki, Makerbot Ultimate Kit, Books, T-shirts, Angry Birds and what not.

Deadline is August 7th, 2011!!

Submit your demo and compete in the following categories: “Main Web Demo”, “Single Effect Demo” (or 1k), “Audio Demo”, “CSS3 Demo” and “Animated Gif + SVG” – Hell yeah! Read more about the compos here

Also, don’t forget to check out our great team of judges, their voice will determine the winners to 50%, the other 50% will be voted by you – the community. (We’ll let you know when the community voting starts)

Last stop: Assembly Demoparty

Btw, after 6 demoparty events, our last stop in 2011 will be a cooperation with the Assembly demoparty in Helsinki!! More about the Assembly cooperation here

No go and submit your demo!!

Love, your Demoparty Team

Snaporama extends the life of your tabs

Ed Lee

We’ve recently been experimenting with how to use Tab Groups (aka Panorama) more effectively. Today, we’re releasing an add-on called Snaporama. This add-on lets you instantly take a “snapshot” of all the tabs you have open, and later lets you open up a snapshot into a new tab group. This is based off an existing feature in Firefox that lets you bookmark groups of tabs. The workflow is designed to be as simple as possible.

1. You have a set of pages open that you’d like to snapshot for later.

2. You click the camera icon to create a snapshot and give it a name:

3. Later on, you go to your snapshots gallery and open a snapshot into a new Panorama group:

4. That’s all folks! This is a first release and while we’d like to add a few bells and whistles, the priority is on keeping things simple and easy to use. We’d love to hear back from you about what you think, and the source is available on Github.

Introducing the WebFWD Fellow Program

pfinette

Since we launched Mozilla’s WebFWD accelerator program four short weeks ago we spoke with numerous people who either applied, were thinking about applying or who contacted us with questions and suggestions. One common comment we heard over and over again was: “The Bootcamp is great but I would like to have a longer-term, slightly less high-touch engagement with you”.

So this is what we’re introducing today. In addition to the 4-week Bootcamp we are launching a 6-month Fellow program. As a WebFWD fellow you will receive mentorship from key Mozillians, our awesome mentors, attend workshops on topics such as scalability, security, marketing & community building, learn how to run your project based on the lean startup methodology, become part of the WebFWD community and much more.

As the Fellow program does not require your physical presence in one of our offices you can literally apply from anywhere in the world.

We are extremely excited about this extension of our original WebFWD idea and look forward working with you!

Read more about the Fellow program as well as our Bootcamp on the WebFWD website, apply here and follow us on Twitter for last-minute updates.

—
This is a cross-posting from the WebFWD blog

Zaphod 1.2 available

mozilla

For a brief time, version 1.1 was available for Firefox.  With Firefox’s new rapid release cycle, it became out of date shortly after it was approved.  Ah well.

A new version has been submitted.  It improves the handling of timers, has some bug fixes, and includes the latest version of Narcissus.  Most importantly, it supports up to FF version 8.0. It is pending approval, but you may find it here.

Workshop at Assembly Demoparty Helsinki

mozilla

That’s right – We’re partnering with the famous Assembly Demoparty in Helsinki, August 4th till 7th!!

Mozilla Labs Demoparty is our initiative to foster artful exploration of open web technologies – Participate at a local event and/or submit your demo to our online competition (deadline very soon) http://mozillalabs.com/demoparty

Mozilla HTML5 Sessions

http://www.assembly.org/summer11/seminars/sessions

For Assembly participants we offer 3 HTML5 seminars that will get you going (and blow some minds) with open web technologies and what’s possible nowadays on the web.

Rob Hawkes

– Rob Hawkes, our very own Mozilla Evangelist, will be teaching best practice in using HTML5 canvas not only for creating web based games. Rob Hawkes on twitter

Mr. Doob

– Mr. Doob, demo artist and designer, will give a “behind the scenes” of http://ro.me Mr. Doob on twitter

Visy, Visa-Valtteri Pimiä

– The demo scener and artist Visy will explain his WebGL (art) work, like MKULTURA Visy on twitter

Web Demo Competition at Assembly

Only for Assembly participants: Submit your web-based demo and win Mozilla swag + 300 EURO!!! Read more on the assembly website

Happy Coding! 🙂 your Demoparty team

Tab Focus: Automagically Organize Tab Groups

Havi Hoffman

We love using Panorama to organize our tabs, but sometimes, we add and remove tabs and move around so quickly that before we know it we already have too many tabs open to want to fire up Panorama and reorganize things by hand. This is where Tab Focus steps in. Its easy to visualize the tabs you have open as a tree based on what links you follow between pages.

For example, my browsing window from below can also be seen as a tree.


is really just…


So at some point at I was looking up the Mozilla Blog and then checking my code on Github, but then I got distracted by Pokemon and now I want to focus on reading about them. All I do it call TabFocus (by clicking on the eye in the addons bar or the hitting shortcut ctrl/cmd + shift + L).

… while keeping all the other tabs in their original groups!

This is currently a really early idea and we would love to have your feedback on how it works for you and how you would make this better. Are we losing track of links, would you rather carry over everything in that domain, etc. We’d like to know how you think of tabs as “related” when you have one too many open. So go ahead install the addon from here and as always, feel free to have a look at the source code here.

– Abhinav Sharma on behalf of the Prospector Team.