Easy Firefox

Archive for the ‘Mozilla Labs’ Category

In early June we launched a Design Challenge around Mozilla Labs’ explorations in the social space. Students and UX practitioners from all around the world participated and later the wider community came together to bestow the People’s Choice Award.

Without much further ado – the Best in Class honors go to:

• Amine Zafri for Best in Class: Utility (for the solution that has the highest overall utility)
• Bianca Pamplona & João Menezes for Best in Class: Design (for the solution that has the most visually expressive concept)
• João Menezes for Best in Class: Risk Taker (for the solution that tests the limits of current thinking)
• Toby Shorin for Best in Class: Producible (for the solution that would be the easiest to ship to users immediately)

And the People’s Choice Award (as voted by the wider Mozilla Labs community) goes to:

• Toby Shorin

Congratulations to all participants, the winner of the People’s Choice Award and the Best in Class honorees in this Design Challenge!

Head over to the Design Challenge page and see the winning concepts.

- Pascal on behalf of the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Team

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Head over to the new Bespin Plugin Gallery to find plugins for Bespin and share the ones you’ve created.

The new Bespin Plugin Gallery makes it very easy to find useful plugins for Bespin and to share the plugins you’ve created.

Top lists in the Plugin Gallery

By downloading the plugins you need and adding them to the search path in your manifest file, you can easily build a custom Bespin editor with a variety of new features. Need Python syntax highlighting? Markdown conversion? Access to gists? Early testers of the Plugin Gallery have added those plugins already and there is plenty more that is possible with Bespin’s plugin system.

It’s easy to share your own plugins… just upload your .js file (for single file plugins) or zip/tar up your plugin directory (with a package.json file) and your plugin is there for the world to enjoy.

Thanks to Ryan Snyder who took the lead on building the Plugin Gallery and the rest of Mozilla’s webdev and QA teams for bringing this site to life!

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• Discuss, debate, and get help in the discussion forum.
• Chat via IRC in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org.
• Submit a bug report.
• Grab the source code and fix a bug or add a feature.

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This is a guest post from Coleman Foley, one of the participants in Mozilla Labs’ Crowdsourcing Project:

Today, volunteers from California to Sweden came together to discuss how to improve crowdsourcing, responding to a call from Mozilla Labs for volunteers to “Crowdsource Crowdsourcing“. We are practicing what we preach here. Pretty much everybody had a say in our initial discussion. Pascal Finette of Mozilla Labs got us going by telling us we should split up into three groups. From there, we took over. We got into the groups we wanted, then each group chose its own way of communicating and decided how to proceed until all the groups reconvene in two weeks.

For example, my group, which is trying to define best practices for crowdsourcing, decided to sign up for and participate in some crowdsourcing sites, and to report back on Thursday with initial findings. A second group is analyzing past Mozilla Labs Design Challenges to figure out what went wrong and what went right. The third is diving into crowdsourcing theory. We plan to fuse our findings when we get back together.

We have a wide variety of interests and backgrounds here, with an entrepreneur, a biophysicist, an electrical engineer, a couple of psychology majors, and, of course, many designers and programmers.

• I am a computer science major at Chico State who is all about usability. I blog at colemanfoley.posterous.com.
• Roei Yellin is an Israeli entrepreneur working on a crowdsourcing startup.
• Matt Evans is Mozilla’s QA Director.
• Jan Dittrich is studying for a Media Arts & Design B.F.A. at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.
• Abraham Taherivand has an Information Systems BS and an Information Management and Engineering MS. He has done a ton of things in innovation, which you can learn more about at his website.
• Jimmy Chion has a bachelors’s degree in Cognitive Science Stanford and is now near completing a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering.
• Chao Xu is majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at Stony Brook University.
• Piyush Kumar majored in Electrical Engineering and minored in Computer Science for his BS and is going to get an MS in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
• Ryan Bubinski is studying studying biophysics and computer science at Columbia.
• Peter Organisciak is working on an MA in Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta and is going on to study Information Science at the University of Illinois. His thesis is on the motivations of crowdsourcing participants.
• Zach Williams is a Psychology major at Tarleton State University in Texas, with a passion for web design and user experience, which you can see at his beautiful website.
• Joao Menezes studies Graphics/Interaction Design at UNIVILLE University, Brazil. He has participated in several Mozilla projects.
• Ola Moller studies Social/Digital Media & Concept Development at Hyper Island in Stockholm. He has led and participated in two creativity crowdsourcing projects in Sweden, which you can learn more about at his website.
• Eugenia Ortiz (who goes by Euge) is another student from Argentina. She is big on User Experience. Learn more about her at http://www.eugeniaortiz.com.ar/.
• Ajay Roopakalu is a computer science major and applied mathematics minor at Princeton University. He blogs at http://jrupac.wordpress.com/.

This is how you crowdsource crowdsourcing: gather volunteers from every part of the world and many backgrounds, let them organize themselves, and watch the magic.

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We’ve setup a space on the user voice forums for Messaging Add-ons Feedback. If you have ideas, requests, or issues regarding any of the add-ons we release through this site please leave them there.

We’ll make sure the link is available from each add-on as it is released. Thanks for the support!

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The Latest Study

Today, we are excited to announce our next Test Pilot study, the first as part of the larger Feedback initiative of the Firefox 4 Beta program. Look out for the Firefox 4 Beta Interface Study in the next few days and see below for more information, including ways you can get involved!

This study will explore the ways users interact with the Firefox menu bar, Firefox button (on Windows Vista and 7), and toolbar controls in the main window. By understanding how users commonly interact with these controls, we will be able to streamline and simplify the user interface in Firefox 4 Beta. The aggregated, anonymous data you provide by participating in this study will directly help improve our next version of Firefox.

Test Champions:

• Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer, Firefox UX.
• Cheng Wang, Firefox Beta Support Lead.

Test Duration: 7 days

Get Involved!

• If you are running Firefox 4 Beta, you are already part of the Feedback initiative and the Test Pilot program. You don’t need to do anything else to participate in the study. The Feedback Add-On will notify you before the study starts, at which point you can view a detailed study description and choose to opt-out of the study if you wish. For more information on how Test Pilot in Firefox 4 beta works, please see the “How it Will Work” section here.
• If you are not running Firefox 4 Beta, what are you waiting for? Help test the future of Firefox by downloading the latest Firefox 4 Beta!
• This study is designed to capture usage of the Firefox 4 interface, so if you are a Test Pilot Add-On user not running Firefox 4 Beta, we invite you to get on the latest beta to participate in this study. As a Test-Pilot user, you’ll still have the ability to run the study, but some items may not record correctly. If do choose to join the study and submit your data, we’ll simply separate your data into a different bucket.
• And of course, please share your questions and suggestions in the Test Pilot discussion group or on Twitter .

Privacy

As always, security and privacy are priorities when Mozilla is dealing with user data. All privacy settings that the Test Pilot program has developed to give users control over their data will remain the same for the Feedback Add-On in Firefox 4 Beta. These include:

• Participants’ data will be transmitted to Mozilla only when they take all of the following actions:
  * Join the Firefox 4 Beta program by downloading the beta with the Feedback Add-On.
  * Submit data when the test is finished. Participants will be able to review all data before choosing whether or not to submit it.
• Test data will be stored anonymously and in aggregate. None of it will be publicly associated with any personally identifiable information.
• Participants can quit a Test Pilot study before they submit any test data.
• Participants can opt-out from all user studies or disable the Feedback Add-On itself at any time. Learn more.

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We (Daisuke Akatsuka & Gomita) gave a presentation on Jetpack to Open Source Conference 2010 Hokkaido which was held in Japan, on 26th June.

In the first part of the presentation, Daisuke talked about the concept of Jetpack and the history shifting from Jetpack Prototype to Jetpack Reboot. His talk was focused on the points that Jetpack makes the install and development of extensions easier, and is a technology which has a potential to “make your browser by yourself”.

In the second part, Gomita demonstrated an agile extension development using the Jetpack SDK and Add-ons Builder. The demo consisted of the following three parts; setup SDK, creating the simplest ‘Hello, World!’ extension, and creating more functional one named ‘Copy Title + URL’ with some standard APIs and my own Clipboard API.

Although we had little time to being asked questions, we felt that the presentation was an effective way to describe the possibility of the Jetpack technology for both users and developers who belong to various open source communities.

Slides

Jetpack —make your browser by yourself—
Jetpack SDK 0.5 Demonstration

Examples

Download complete package of ‘Copy Title + URL’ for Jetpack SDK 0.5
View source of ‘Copy Title + URL’ on Add-ons Builder Preview

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This spring we invited the wider community to develop interesting use cases around Mozilla Labs’ explorations in the space of online identity, contacts and the relationship you have with other people. Now it is time for you to vote for the People’s Choice Award!

The People’s Choice Award goes to the concept(s) which the wider community finds most interesting, most useful and most innovative – or in a single word: Awesome. Voting is easy – all you have to do, is to register your email address (which will act as your log in) and vote on four randomly selected concepts from 1 (“I don’t like the concept”) to 10 (“It’s awesome!”). You don’t need to vote on all four concepts at once – you can come back, continue voting or make changes. Simply log in using your email address.

And to say “thank you” for your participation, all registered and active voters have the chance to be one of three lucky people, who get a fat Mozilla swag-pack for their votes!

Vote now!

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During the last couple of days we received a lot of feedback asking us to extend the deadline for the “Crowdsource Crowdsourcing” project (more information about the project here and here). We would like to give everyone the chance to apply, thus we decided to move the application deadline to Sunday, July 18th. And just for clarification – you don’t need to apply as a team of students; we will form the team in the 2nd step from the group of applicants.

Apply now and help us shape the future of crowdsourcing!

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Welcome to our first release of the Mailing List Manager.

We started the Mailing List Manager add-on with a goal to help Thunderbird users find, organize, and manage messages from mailing lists. And as we’ve worked on it internally we feel like we’ve arrived at a pretty good milestone.

Now we need more help to make the mailing list manager a success. We’re looking to find issues with the current system, and answers to questions like:

• Are all of your mailing lists being detected correctly?
• Are your mailing list filters working?
• Are you able to find all your mailing list messages again?

This and other feedback will help us evaluate how this feature should work inside Thunderbird and if this feature should be included by default.

We’ll keep you updated with other posts right here about the Mailing List Manager as we update it, so keep checking back. If you’ve installed the add-on you’ll see the updates come as they are available.

So go read more about the Mailing List Manager, install the add-on, and make sure to watch the intro video.

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