Archive for October, 2009
October 26th, 2009
Over the weekend I started checking out the newest project out of the Mozilla Labs, Raindrop. To some it might sound a little like Google Wave – however it offers much more, and is also much easier to wrap your mind around.
Here is more about the program, in a nutshell, from the developers:
When a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab. Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organized for you, not clutter your Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup. It should be easy to smoothly integrate new web services into your conversation viewer entirely using open web technologies.
I am all about the “making things easier to manage” so I eagerly anticipate learning more about what Mozilla has planned for this service. If you want to learn more about the fundamentals of Raindrop, watch this video:
Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.
What do you think? Are you excited, or does it look like another web trend that is doomed to trip over itself? Leave a comment and let me know how excited you are about Raindrop.
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© Mitch Keeler 2009 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
October 24th, 2009
Your favorite web browser is Firefox, you played with projects hosted by Mozilla Labs, probably you even hacked on them already? Now is the time to join the Mozilla Labs team to catalyze and support the work of a worldwide community working on innovations for the future of the Web.
We are currently looking for all-stars in the following roles:
Labs User Experience Designer
We’re looking for an exceptional User Experience Designer to join our rapid prototyping and incubation team, as part of an organization that’s committed to enabling new and innovative web experiences for hundreds of millions of people around the world. This position requires a designer who will thrive in fast paced environments where things are in a constant state of flux, and who will be good at prioritizing user experience issues in order to hit weekly product delivery targets.
Product Marketing Manager – Labs
You will be a key contributor to Mozilla’s outbound product marketing efforts for its innovation programs in general, and projects like the Concept Series, Ubiquity, Weave and Jetpack specifically. If you’re passionate about the Web, and are willing to roll-up your sleeves, then this position is for you.
October 24th, 2009
Your favorite web browser is Firefox, you played with Mozilla Labs’ projects, probably you even hacked on them already? Now is the time to join the Mozilla Labs team and work with the wider community on creating the future of the Web.
We are currently looking for all-stars in the following roles:
Labs User Experience Designer
We’re looking for an exceptional User Experience Designer to join our rapid prototyping and incubation team, as part of an organization that’s committed to enabling new and innovative web experiences for hundreds of millions of people around the world. This position requires a designer who will thrive in fast paced environments where things are in a constant state of flux, and who will be good at prioritizing user experience issues in order to hit weekly product delivery targets.
Product Marketing Manager – Labs
You will be a key contributor to Mozilla’s outbound product marketing efforts for its innovation programs in general, and projects like the Concept Series, Ubiquity, Weave and Jetpack specifically. If you’re passionate about the Web, and are willing to roll-up your sleeves, then this position is for you.
October 23rd, 2009
Today we’re introducing Raindrop, an exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences.
For more information, see the release announcement blog post.
October 23rd, 2009
Most of us receive messages from many online sources — email, instant messages, tweets, Facebook messages, links. Raindrop is a new, experimental Mozilla project exploring how to manage all these sorts of messages. Raindrop aims to make communications more about the person and less about the technology in which the message was created. It’s the brainchild of the team responsible for Thunderbird.
You can find Raindrop over at Mozilla Labs, among a range of other projects exploring how to innovate at scale.
October 23rd, 2009
I’m thrilled to announce that we launched Raindrop today. Raindrop is Mozilla Messaging’s experiment in messaging on the open web, hosted by Mozilla Labs. You should definitely go over to the introductory post, and check out the first few pages we’ve put up describing the goal of the project, how we’ve built it so far, and how we’re hoping to engage designers as well as developers to participate in the ongoing effort.
It’s going to be fun to have both an experimental platform for next-generation experiments on messaging, which leverages the web of the future, as well as a Thunderbird client which provides both an awesome desktop experience today, and lets more people build interesting, fun, and useful add-ons as well.
I want to make sure to express my thanks to everyone who contributed to Raindrop thus far: Andrew Sutherland who did some initial experiments a long time ago; Chris Anderson, Jan Lenhardt, and Damien Katz of the CouchDB project, who’ve been super helpful in helping us understand their awesome database; Bryan Clark, who’se done a great job juggling Thunderbird and Raindrop design leadership; Mark Hammond, who took Andrew’s original draft and built a great backend infrastructure (it’s great to work with Mark again!); James Burke, for whom no UI requirement is too much; Andy Chung, who makes everyone else look great; and Chris Beard, Myk Melez and Pascal Finette, of Mozilla Labs, for their advice, hosting, and feedback.
2010 will be amazing.
October 22nd, 2009
Do you like being able to virtually grab a page and scroll up or down it in your browser? Now, some other programs have this ability (such as most PDF readers out there) however the web browser does not, until now. The Grab and Drag add-on for Firefox will enable grab and drag scrolling, flick gestures, and momentum scrolling in Firefox.
This comes in really handy for tablet PCs, where your pen is taking the place of your mouse. You can though use it with your mouse too, as it comes ready for 1, 2, or 3 button mouse support.
Grab and Drag gives Firefox a new way to browse, and also has plenty of options to tweak till you get it just the way you want it. You can pick it up on the Firefox Add-ons site or MozDev.org.
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© Mitch Keeler 2009 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
October 22nd, 2009
A week full of announcements:
I’ve been so busy working on the Thunderbird 3 release that I forgot to blog about this new development: I’m pleased to announce that Mozilla Messaging has engaged Philipp Kewisch, lead of the Calendar project, to help drive the release of a version of the popular Lightning calendar add-on. The plan so far is for Philipp (who’se in school, but somehow finds time to do Mozilla work after that) to help fix bugs, drive the release, and generally make sure that people who want to upgrade from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3 will find their favorite extension working there.
If you’re keen to help, let Philipp know, and participate in test days, help QA release candidates that will show up, and if you can, chip in with patches!
October 20th, 2009
Today, Mozilla is excited to join the organizations listed below to endorse the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) specification. We are also implementing this specification in Firefox 3.6 and beyond.
The official endoresement and supporting organizations can be found below. Hacks.mozilla.org also has a full post about WOFF implementation for Firefox 3.6 and beyond.
We endorse the WOFF specification, with default same-origin loading restrictions, as a Web font format, and expect to license fonts for Web use in this format.
Bold Monday http://www.boldmonday.com
Commercial Type http://commercialtype.com
Emigre http://emigre.com
Emtype Foundry http://www.emtype.net
Fonthead http://www.fonthead.com
FontShop International http://fontfont.com
Hoefler & Frere-Jones http://typography.com
House Industries http://houseindustries.com
Incipit http://incipit.com
Incubator http://vllg.com/Incubator
The Indian Type Foundry http://www.indiantypefoundry.com
International Typeface Corporation http://itcfonts.com
Jeremy Tankard Typography Ltd www.typography.net
John Downer http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/2007production/Bios/DownerBio.pdf (PDF link)
Klim Type Foundry http://klim.co.nz
KLTF http://kltf.de
Kombinat-Typefounders http://www.kombin.at
LettError http://letterror.com
Linotype http://linotype.com
Lux Typographics http://luxtypo.com
Mac Rhino Fonts http://www.macrhino.com
Mark Simonson Studio http://www.ms-studio.com
Monotype Imaging http://fonts.com
Okay Type & Design http://www.okaytype.com
OurType http://www.ourtype.be
Process Type Foundry http://processtypefoundry.com
Thirstype http://vllg.com/Thirstype
Type My Type http://typemytype.com
Type Supply http://typesupply.com
TypoNine http://typonine.com
Typotheque http://typotheque.com
Underware http://www.underware.nl
Village http://vllg.com
October 20th, 2009
Here is a quick tip that is not that well known. If you want to start private browsing in a hurry, and you don’t have time to dive through the menus to start it (Tools > Start Private Browsing) then just type about:privatebrowsing into your address bar.
There you have it. Once you have done so, it will ask you if you want to switch into Firefox’s private browsing mode. You could also save about:privatebrowsing as a bookmark, so you have easy one click access to the private browsing mode, without adding any extra add-ons to Firefox.
Now here is my challenge to all of you out there, does anybody know a quick way to stop private browsing, and return your browser back to normal (other than the traditional menu method). If you do, leave it in the comments!
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© Mitch Keeler 2009 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!