Author: zbraniecki

So, Piotr Konieczny created a Google Planet service which is for sure a very interesting idea. We use planets, we aggregate data, and Google is the term we’re looking for. So, Google Planet is the answer.

I don’t think it’ll last long till Google will contact Piotr and ask him to shut down the planet or at least rebrand it, cause at the moment it can be easly confused with original Google web service due to design.

Anyway, if you like to know what’s on the grill there, Google planet is for you 🙂

What I really enjoy is that Firefox’s approach to new Places system is getting almost 100% similar to Flock’s Favorites solution. Yesterday, I saw “Collections”. It’s pretty good, that Firefox UI team decided to use the best modern solution that was invented by us.

What I don’t enjoy that much is that I had hard time to find any note that would confirm that Firefox uses Flock as a base for their solution. Flock is very young, we don’t look for big user base now, but what we do look for is a group of volunteers and community that could help us create a great and fresh browser. A signal from Mozilla could point potential interested people that Flock is the good place to start your story with a browser creation, especially that it’s way easier to influence our UI with good ideas than Firefox’s one. The difference is because Firefox must keep its userbase, so it’s less flexible and can’t do crazy things with UI, while we can.

The only confirmation about the thesis, that Firefox UI team is not inventing exactly the same solutions on their own I got during the Firefox Summit, after the talk about Places, I had a short chat with some guy who’s working on Places and he confirmed that they’re basing on Flock. It’s great! We invented a natural next step for managing bookmarks, and what Firefox does only confirms that we’re going in the right direction. More, it seems that IE 7 will have sth similar too! I don’t know about Opera nor Safari, but I expect them to do the same in the near future.

We are open sourced, and we are happy to see people confirming that we’re doing a nice job by implementing our solutions, but I personally would like to see some kind of “thank you” for that. For Firefox folks it means almost nothing, while for us, a small group trying to create something new, such advertisement would help a lot. So Ben, if you have some time to write a bit about how you found Flock and Favorites and why you decided to use it for Firefox, please, do so, I think that’s the way Open Source should go!

By the way, I’m just after the lecture of our internal proposal list for Flock 0.7. And I can ensure you all, that Firefox 3.0 will have the full source of ideas :)) Stay tuned, and if you want to help us, step in to www.flock.com, send us a feedback, subscribe to flock-dev maillist, join our IRC channels and share your ideas, we’re probably the best place in the world now where your crazy idea can be forged into the browser feature 🙂

I’m back in my flat, I need a lot of sleep, I’m very, very tired. FOSDEM was great, we made a lot of awesome stuff out there, I met a lot of great people, ate a lot of great food, spend around 20 hours on FOSDEM (during 2 days), I gave a talk about Flock browser, lead a session about Localization Projects that last for almost 4 hours, answered zillion questions, asked another zillion questions, and got interviewed about Flock by some television (reporter promised to mail me once it’s public somewhere).

A few notes are: Brussel is better than London, it looks very nice, beside of the fact that it’s dirty. Food is amazing once you know the places, beer is nice, FOSDEM Toilets are slightly better than last year, localizers must get used to the meeting atmosphere so they start talking more, we want/need you to speak, and speak laud!, Paul Kim is a great guy, I think that it’s a big luck for Mozilla to have him in their crew, I also had a chance to drink a beer with Peterv, Brian King and Dwayne Bailey (kudos to him for his work on Pootle!) and I heard some rumours from Gerv and Tristan that it could happen that next meeting will be a pure Mozilla meeting in Europe, outside of the FOSDEM, so we can attend to some FOSDEM talks, that are NOT about Mozilla, and COULD possibly be interesting. 🙂

More about it, plus screenshots from FOSDEM, tomorrow. Good night, FOSDEM wasn’t bad (beside of lack of Pike 🙁 ).

It seems that we must face some real problems before we can start the MozDevRoom.

First, Axel Hecht, who was supposed to lead L10n panel and the talk on the main room about XUL, cut his thumb and he will not attend at all :((((( We’ll try to get him on skype through.

Then, some bastard stole all Gerv’s luggage once he got here… Then, the flight with me, Marcoos, Staszyna, Pitreck and Anna was delayed by 3 hours! We of course missed the invite party 🙁

Then, Staszyna blocked his cell phone during a lobby session to convince his cell phone that the PIN is 0300. Cell phone won that match and now Staszyna is blocked.

Then, me and Anna went to some Italian Pizzeria where they had NO PIZZA (sic!), and I failed to find an USA-Europe adapter so I can’t charge my camera battery…

I hope that all bad is behind us and starting from tomorrow morning we will ignite some storm into our brains and share it to multiply the power of our work so once the FOSDEM is over, we will be all charged with ideas and motivation to make the Internet a better place for us all, spreading the fire of open source 🙂 Cross your fingers 🙂

Due to very trivial, innocent, wrong reason, Pike will probably not be able to attend to FOSDEM 2006. I hope that he’ll make it at least on Sunday, but he wrote that chances low.
He asked me and Kairo to lead the session, and of course I will do my best to help here. After the discussion it seems that I will lead Localization sessions, with Kairo’s help, if Pike will not be able to come, and we’ll try to deploy some remote communication with Pike during this session.
Anyway, it means that I will have way less time for myself, and I hope that me and Kairo we’ll not fail the task. CU there and let’s do sth great once we’re there, together!