May 31st, 2009
In this issue…
- New Labs Design Challenge!
- Personas update released
- Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile
- SUMO: Part of Mozilla’s periscope
- Subscribe to the SUMO newsletter!
- New Labs discussion groups
- Mobiletesters mailing list
- Growing the MozEdu community
- On hybrid organizations
- Personas: Art and the browser
- Upcoming events
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
The Mozilla Labs team has launched another Design Challenge. “In collaboration with IxDA and Johnny Holland, we once again invite designers, students and design-focused people from all around the world to develop new ideas and mockups for the future of the Web.” This Design Challenge is 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?” Participating in the Design Challenge is easy: just create a mockup of your proposed solution (anything from a napkin drawing to a polished Photoshop masterpiece) and a short video explanation, upload those somewhere on the Web, then send an email with links to both to conceptseries@mozilla.com. For more information, see Pascal Finette’s original announcement on the Labs weblog.
Since the Personas project launched about six weeks ago, the team has been working with the community to improve the Personas user experience through three quick website releases and one extension update. Details about the changes can be found in Suneel Gupta’s post on the Labs weblog. “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 in our discussion group or add a solution to our newly created support wiki.”
Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile
Fennec (aka: Firefox Mobile) Alpha 1 has been released for Windows Mobile 6 and is available for download by developers and testers. It’s important to note that this is an early developer release, and is not intended for regular use at this time. As with previous releases, Madhava Enros has created a video walk through of this release. For more information, including installation instructions and a list of known issues, see the release announcement.
SUMO: Part of Mozilla’s periscope
David Tenser, Mozilla’s SUMO project lead, has written an interesting article that talks about how SUMO is a vital tool in quickly spotting and dealing with emerging problems Firefox users are encountering. “The background of this story is the problem many Firefox users experienced with anti-virus program BitDefender a few weeks ago, where BitDefender would quarantine one of Firefox’s program files, treating it as a malicious trojan.” The team first became aware of the issue through SUMO’s Live Chat system, and the Release Rapid Response Team flew into action. In less than two hours, BitDefender released an update and the problem was solved. For the full story, see David’s weblog post.
Subscribe to the SUMO newsletter!
Chris Ilias writes, “The about:SUMO newsletter is coming! You can subscribe now. If you are not actively involved in SUMO, but are still interested in knowing what is going on in the SUMO world, this is a great way to keep in the know. Just use the online subscription form.”
The Labs team is constantly on the lookout for better ways to do things, better tools, and better infrastructure. Recently they realized that the project forum system wasn’t working as well as it could, so it has been replaced. With the new system, discussions can now be read via Web, RSS feeds and email, and responded to by email or on the Web. The hope is that this will make it easier for everyone to participate in and become part of the Labs community. A full list of the Labs discussion groups and RSS feeds is available on the Mozilla Labs website.
The Mobile team has set up a new mailing list to help coordinate and discuss Fennec testing. “In the mobile environment, there are several different operating systems, hundreds of different devices, and thousands of cellular networks across the globe. The only way we can begin to test these complicated real-world scenarios is with your help. We need you to check out our milestone releases, run them on your devices, and let us know what is working and what isn’t.” You can sign up for the Mobiletesters mailing list to stay informed about ways you can help test Fennec for the upcoming 1.0 launch. This is a great way to get involved in the future of the mobile web.
Growing the community of people working on education in a Mozilla context is one of the primary goals of the Mozilla Education project. “Many of the lessons Mozilla has learned building world-class software products can be applied to how we enable and support those in education: be open, be collaborative, share in community, leverage the open web. Another lesson we’ve learned from Mozilla is that people contribute in different ways, and there is no one size fits all approach. The same is true for Mozilla and education.” David Humphrey writes about various ways the project is working to build the Mozilla Education community, discussing a number of things that we can each do to get involved and help with the project.
Mark Surman, Frank Hecker, and David Humphrey have all been thinking about and posting about “hybrid organizations” lately. Mark started the ball rolling with his “What is a hybrid organization?” post, followed by “Hybrid orgs. What’s old? What’s new?” and “Why do hybrid orgs matter?“. Frank and David followed these with “Hybrid organizations and maximizing public benefit” and “Mozilla, Education…Hybrid“. If you’re at all interested in this sort of “meta discussion” about the Mozilla Project, these posts are a great way to get involved with this growing and ongoing conversation.
Suneel Gupta has outlined a number of ideas the Personas team is looking at towards increasing the ratio of original art (vs. repurposed art) in the gallery, and providing the emerging community of Personas artists with better support and visibility. These “actionable concepts” include: adding a designer profile and dashboard, improving preview functionality, expanding the definition of a “popular” design, collaborating with other design communities, and working with other add-on authors. The Personas commuity has grown rapidly, and the gallery now contains over 5,000 designs from over 3,500 contributors. Get the full story from Suneel’s blog post.
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.
* Wed, May 20 – Online – Firefox 3.5 launch workshop
* Thu, May 21 – Online – Test Dev Thursday
* Fri, May 22 – Online – New AMO site sneak peek and testing
* Tue, May 26 – Mountain View, CA – Add-ons Meetup
* May 30-31 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend
* Fri, Jun 5 – Online – Website testing testday
* Wed, Jun 24 – Mountain View, CA – Testing Mozilla web properties
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
Related posts:
- about:mozilla – Firefox 3.5, Firefox Hacks, add-ons, Design Challenge, community scaling, Fennec, Camino, Firebug, and more…
- about:mozilla – Firefox 3.5, Fennec, Jetpack, MoFo, Mozilla Education, and more…
- about:mozilla — Firefox 3 and 3.5, marketing, trademarks, security, hybrid orgs, community store, Foundation priorities, and more…
- about:mozilla – Service Week, New AMO, Community store, 3.5 demos, FSOSS, audio/video, Design Challenge, Weave, Jetpack, Personas, and more…
- Creative Collective Design Challenge: Firefox Goes Mobile