Month: June 2006

Ian Hickson:

I love how Microsoft announce all their news long before they actually do whatever it is they announced. “Our next operating system will rock! In three years. Maybe four.” “Our browser is going to be amazing! It will ship next year.” “Our search engine will be better than the competition! In six months.” (That last one is especially funny to me since they keep saying it every six months, as far as I can tell.) But I’m especially amused by the latest one: “Our CEO will quit! In two years.”

Perfect

Also, basing on their current release management process, they may not make the CEO release on time and they’ll slip by year or two.

I spent some time during this weekend on examinating different versions of Firefox and other browsers against BenchJS.

Why BenchJS? First, it’s independent. It doesn’t use Gecko like Mozilla people would like it to be used. Second. It’s pretty generic. It tests animation, various JS functions, window open and window close, table drawing etc.
It also probably has some flaws. Like, for example some browsers may “cheat” by reporting that they finished after they finished calculations but before the result was presented on the screen and layed out.

So, on the one hand, please, remember that this is data from one benchmark test. It doesn’t say what “is faster” overall, it says what “is faster on this test”. So all “gecko is slow” people, don’t use it in your flamewars please. On the other hand, it says something. It may or may not represent the wider situation, but it’s a piece of data and we should think about it.
All results are the best ones of three tries.

Let’s get to tests.

Pracuję nad wersją pl. Oczywiście napotkałem mnóstwo problemów. Flock proponuje sporo nowych rozwiązań, które z trudem pasują do nazw w angielskim, a co dopiero w polskim. Prośba o pomoc.

Jakbyście tłumaczyli:

• Web snippets
• Add a snippet
• Photo Uploader
• Upload a photo
• Clicking Star performs “Star and Tag This Page…”
• Blog post

Na razie wybrałem:

• Favorite – Ulubiona
• Add to Favorites – Dodaj do Ulubionych
• Star this page – Oznacz gwiazdką
• Blog post – wpis

Nie tłumaczyłem Web snippets ani Photo Uploadera.

Będę wdzięczny za pomysły

Wooohoooo!

I couldn’t explain that feeling better than Anthony did! It was a long, crazy journey from Palo Alto’s garage, to Flock 0.7.

We grew, we matured, we redesigned everything for several times, we were happy, jealous, pissed off, proud, tired, nervous, motivated, unmotivated, focused, but what’s most important, we kept being excited about what we do, and we kept united together during this journey.
I’d like to thank the whole team for their incredible passion, and their patience to me when I was messing with all the code parts vertically across the components. I’d also like to especially thank Bart and Geoffrey, who made it all possible, and our QA team who did amazing job in making Flock a predictible piece of software

Read more about Flock 0.7 by Bart!

Week ago, I was invited to Microsoft Poland.

Two Microsoft people, who were described as “people from the group which takes care of interoperatibility and are not technical” are comming to Poland on Monday, for one day. They want to “talk to someone from Open Source community” about, what they described as, “business implications of standards and interoperatibility“.

Sounds interesting, huh?

And yes, I did explain to them that I’m not a spoke person for any of the Open Source projects, neither Flock, nor Mozilla, nor KDE or anything else. The replied that they don’t want to talk to people from the “top”, but from the “field” which sounds even more interesting to me.

Of course I accepted the invitation, no reason to refuse the opportunity to discuss topics that are so important for me with people, who represent the world which makes my goals harder to accomplish.

So, according to them, it’ll be 4 people private discussion, with Adam Dawidziuk (7bulls), me, and those 2 Microsoft people.

Also, the funny thing is that it’ll happen in the exact same day when we have a meeting with Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu.
This has two background things I’d like to write about.

First one, is that it means something. It’s almost symbolic. Things are changing. When I was joining Flock, my experience with Microsoft as a partner in the business world was rather sad. I was unable to get response from them about how they’re going to translate “tab” in Internet Explorer 7.0 (so we can sync with them for polish Firefox and Opera), and they were trying to employ some Open Source people (like Eric S. Raymond or my Flocker friend Ian McKellar), it proved how little they knew about the world on the other side of the bridge.

On January 2006, another friend of mine, who at the time was working on Flock with me, Chris Messina, had a lunch with Microsoft. It was 100% informal, but happened. And now, after next few months the above will happen, and comparing to Chris’s experience, it’s something way more formal. It’s not a dinner, it’s a planned part of their workday. It’s a formal meeting.

I’m curious what were the reasons for them to organize such thing. Why now. Why in Poland. Is it a part of some bigger changes in Microsoft’s direction? I hope to know more tomorrow evening.

Second thing is, that I treat it as a great opportunity to answer questions about things that might help us know more about Microsoft’s inside. No, not that ones that are “secret data”. The ones that are not written down on microsoft.com because there was no reason for this.

So, what is your opinion? What would you like to know that Microsoft can answer?

As many of you already know, Opera with it’s version 9.0 introduced technology called Widgets. What is also obvious, Gecko has everything needed to display such “Widgets”. Some time ago, in a comment on Quiris blog I predicted that it won’t take long to make it happen on Gecko.

Then, during XTech, Benjamin Smedberg presented talk about future of Web apps, and mentioned that the SVG, stylish clock in the top right corner of his screen is launched in XulRunner.
So, here we have next step of this story. Two days ago Benjamin posted on mozilla.dev.apps.firefox a proposition for standarizing Widgets around Opera’s API (with some modifications), and via WHATWG.

Yes. I will be mentoring one of the Mozilla Summer of Code projects.

Jan Matoušek from CZilla applied, I decided to mentor it and the project was accepted!

The project will focus on creating easy to use, polished and extensible XuLRunner based loclaization tool. As the start point Jan decided to use my L10n:Tool project. The tool will be able to run as stanalone XulRunner based app, or as an extension for any(!!!) of Gecko applications, and make it easier to localize it.

We want to make it work with jar’s, plain directories in chrome, localize, translate, synchronize versions, add groupwork and later add project specific code (CVS sync with Mozilla repos, SVN sync with Flock repos, Addons.mozilla.org sync for extensions?).

We have plenty of ideas and I’m sure that we will help many people with this project. It’s really awesome that Google decided to pay people for creating open software. It (as always with Google) perfectly fills empty area of software that would not be created in any other situation (We don’t have L10n tool for how many years?).

I’ll spend some time during the weekend to prepare the environment. We want to have SVN and a Wiki for you all to give us a feedback.

Thank you Jan for applying! Thank you Flock for allowing me to spend my time on this, Thank you Google and Mozilla for accepting this project!