I had a free hour during BarCamp today, so I started reworking about:config UI for Gecko based apps.
Live demo (for Gecko apps)
And here’s a wiki page for the project (it’s private project, no promise that Flock or Mozilla will want to use this approach ever!)
Comments? Ideas?
So, it seems that Opera guys spend a lot of time testing their users and their biggest problems. After many months of work they found a solution that solves it.
Thanks to great Michael Smith from Opera, I got a chance to put my hands on the newest Opera product that will probably be shiped together with all versions of Opera browser making it perfect bundle.
Ladies and getleman, I’m proud to present – the Opera anti-stress ball:
It took us short time to find a new way we can use the smashing new, web 2.0, social, Opera technology:
Movie from user testing session – thanks to Mark Wubben :]
Who said that we are not productive on XTech/BarCamp? Ah, I also downloaded latest Opera 9 beta, and it works better than ever before – congrats to Opera team! For both, a ball and a browser 🙂
I wake up around 10:00, and got to XTech around 11:00, but too late to join the Feed Experience talk, so my first talk of the day was a Microsummaries one. Also, I did miss Paul Graham’s talk about Startups and questioned if it’s possible to create a microclimat for startups in europe. He made a rather risky assumption that with time, people in Europe will start speaking one language, and local languages will be used only by old people and in small villages. With all admire to Paul, I’m with the people who think that he should first study europe culture for some time before saying such things.
I really like the idea, it does once more what Firefox is targeting in – improves the web usability in the simplest possible way. It has down to zero UI, and it may improve your workflow if you want to learn how to use it.
XBL2 talk was about mistakes in XBL, and success with XBL and what will make XBL 2 ready. For me, the most important parts was about standardization of XBL by W3C, and the plan to move xml based languages support in Mozilla to XBL. It means that once Opera, Safari, IE or any other webengine supports XBL it can just take XBL code for some language from Mozilla sources and get new language in 0 cost !!! Awesome. It seems that Opera will be the first engine to reuse XBL (2?).
XulRunner talk led by bsmedberg, was a great piece of art. He described the future of XulRunner as the opportunity to move rich web apps out of browser window to self window, and even ability to install web app, keeping it still on the web. Imagine that you could just d&d the web icon to your desktop, and launching it would open XulRunner and load the web app! You can keep to major features of web apps – like ability to easily upgrade, with desktop app behaviors. (on the last day, Hakon described similar goals for Opera). Also, we discussed the possibility of having less than 500 kb Firefox browser that would be platform independent. You could just launch it, and if your OS already have XulRunner, it would just work. No matter of the OS! If your OS doesn’t have XulRunner, it’ll just allow you to install XulRunner from the web. Simple, deadly simple 🙂 (shots: [1], [2])
He also proposed a format for expanding HTML anchors to open new windows as web apps instead of new window for browsing and a bit of future tricks for XulRunner plans. Can’t wait it! Also, during whole his talk, Benjamin had small clock widget on his screen. It was XulRunner SVG+JS based widget. That’s awesome. We did nothing specific to get widgets, and thanks to Gecko platform, we just “have” it 🙂
SVG talk was about how hard SVG is, and having canvas for simplified usage. SVG specs are huge, there’s no goal in trying to support current specs, it’s way to huge. For example Vlad mentioned, that SVG 1.2 was planned to have it’s own network support API. Stupiddddddd! We’re going to keep expanding SVG – it’ll get major improvement in Gecko 1.9 (with reworked reflow, font support on platform level, and fonts, and filters on SVG level), but we’re not going to try to support 100% of current specs, focusing on subsets and waiting for next specs. (shots: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8])
Reflow talk – David described the history of laying out text, starting from paper column layout (where width of the text was an input, and height was an output), to tables, the first revolution where width/height was based on size of internal elements. Then he described floating just to summarize the current html language is totally not prepared to solve web authors needs, basing on the example of float as a thing that should never be used to lay out the page. (shots: [1], [2], [3], [4])
It looked like a call for changes to W3C 😉
Then we took a free wine/juice/water/beer for some time and went to the dinner with Tristan (Mozilla Europe), Ian, Andy (Flock), Max (OpenLaszlo), Daniel Glazman and Laurent Jouanneau (Distruptive Innovations). (shots: [1], [2], [3])
After the dinner, with Andy and Ian we joined Nadia and landed in Mediamatic – barcamp’s place where we spend the evening till late night.
That’s all for now 🙂
Visit Foxtouch blog – thos guys are doing sth to make Firefox accessible by touchscreen that also measures distance of your hands from the screen… Isn’t is awesome?
Imagine how you could interact with your browser with your hands… And then, answer once more – isn’t it cool to focus on Open Source and discover what people are doing with your software that you couldn’t even imagine 🙂
I have a few shots from the talk on BarCamp about it that took place a few minutes ago. I’ll upload them to flickr, once timeless will give me my usb cable back 😉
I’m on the Brendan Eich’s talk about JS 2.0 – it’s great. Sorry for lack of updates, I have photos, and posts for every day, and I’ll push them in few hours. 🙂
The flight was bad, as always with LOT Airlines. I landed around 23:00, found Termie and Nadia, they got me to their place (which is awesome!), I took a shower, and went for a beer with Andy. Few beers, few hours and we were back home got some sleep. Day 0 is ready. (shots from Amsterdam: [1], [2], [3], [4])
Day 1 started at 08:30 am, shower, cornflakes, short web lurking, and went to XTech.
The first talk was awesome. Simon was presenting the JS framework that seems to be great. After few minutes of lurking, I see that their library is not that great (Animation module seems to be very poor),
but it’s still worth contributing and I’m considering using this as a JS lib for Bugzilla. (shots: [1], [2], [3])
They also made a poor job on browser detection, and I hope it’ll get better now.
Next talk was led by Termie on behalf of Alex Russel from Dojo. Termie’s speedtalk was without of slides which was good, because if people would be forced to try to understand termie at his speed talking, and scan the screen, they’d be doomed. Termie/Alex was talking about Web 2.0/Ajax culture, reasons behind it (it’s evolution, not revolution, it’s the logical next step, not a buzzword).
Short break, and we got to OpenLaszlo talk. OpenLaszlo seems to be very, very powerfull platform, with possible drawback on code cleannes. It allows you to create rich web applications and then select the result technology (actually – flash or dhtml/ajax). It could be extended to work with XUL, XAML etc.
Next talk was about Hijaxing. I’m happy that someone did a talk about the way I believe Ajax should be developed. It was basicly against-ajax-lock-in talk about creating pure HTML code first and the putting fancy Ajax on top of it to simplify the world for ajax-capable browsers. Actually, in my work on Bugzilla UI, I’m doing even one step earlier: I model the UI first, do usability, review, then code pure, accessible HTML, and then put Ajax on top of it. I’m using this approach since my first Ajax-y work, and this made me not understand W3C freaks screaming that Ajax is “not accessible” – Ajax has nothing to do with accessibilty or it’s lack. If you want to create accessible page, you can. Also, “Web 2.0” is also about standards, usability and accessibility, so it’s obvious that more web 2.0 means more fun for people with disabilities.
Then we went for a lunch with Pike, Termie, Andy and Gijs. Lunch took us a bit too much time, so we missed Developing Enterprise Applications with Ajax and XUL.
I didn’t like the Adobe’s talk, which came next. Possibly, I’m just too much anti-flash and sad-that-adobe-focused-on-flash-instead-of-svg, but the talk was pure marketing and I never enjoy marketing talks.
Then, after next small brak, the talks went crazy, not following Schedule at all, which makes it impossible for me to report what happened. The lightning demos didn’t show anything new to me, but it’s nice to see people focusing on usability and user workflow quality more these days.
After the talks we got for a free wine/juice/water+small junks of food sponsored by Mozilla, and then we went for a dinner with Michael from Opera, Tristan, Ian, Termie, Gerv, Gijs and Hish. Dinner was great, food was good, and beer was … well, beer 🙂 We got some pictures of toast made by Opera, Flock and Mozilla all together! :] (shot: [1])
From dinner place we did move to drinking place, and then to another, another, and we ended around 2 am with Ryan from Technorati, Ian and Andy walking amsterdam streets and steping in every possible pub on our way 😉 It was great.
Today, on 8:00 pm I’ll leave Warsaw Airport on my way to Amsterdam where I’ll join the Flock Amsterdam Team (Termie, Ian) in the X-tech quest.
The bad news is that I just got email from Alex Russel that he won’t be there. 🙁
My personal schedule:
Tuesday:
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday & Sunday: Barcamp Amsterdam II
Groovy!
We’re glad to announce that AviaryPL team (new website is in production) prepared the Polish localization on SuSe Linux 10.1 for Novell Poland. Four people from AviaryPL – Wojciech Kapusta, Marek Stępień, Stanisław Małolepszy and Wadim Dziedzic was working on this since December 2005.
Our team prepared global, deep review of SuSe Linux 10.0 localization and then full localization of 10.1. We’re sure that it’s the most localized and the best localized release of SuSe Linux in Polish. If you followed the progress, you probably noticed that there were some delays and many RC versions. Well, it was a lot of work for those four guys and I’d like to thank them for this. Nikdo started dedicated thread on SuSe forum.
This experience was extremly usefull and it will for sure bring us to our ultimate goal – to rise the quality of using software in Poland. It’s also probably one of the last archivements of the team under my lead. More news on those two topics very soon.
AviaryPL team hope you’ll like shiny new SuSe 10.1 in Polish 🙂
14 czerwca, w Warszawie, odbędzie się pierwsza w Polsce konferencja w całości poświęcona Web 2.0 (przy pełnej akceptacji niejednoznaczności tego buzz-worda).
Mam nadzieję, że tematyka okaże się dla Was ciekawa, a ponieważ będę mówił tam o Web 2.0 z punktu widzenia epicentrum (jakby mówić o kinie popularnym z punktu widzenia Hollywood), chciałbym lepiej odnieść się do tego jak Polacy patrzą na to zagadnienie.
Bardzo by mi pomogło gdybyście podali w komentarzach swoje największe wątpliwości i pytania dotyczące Web 2.0.
P.S. Flamy będę jak zwykle kasował.