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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! 🙂

PCWorld Best Products of the Year 2005 awards.

12) Mozilla Firefox 1.5
28) Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5

AviaryPL also received email that Mozilla Thunderbird was awarded by polish PC Format magazine as “Best quality” in the mail client test.

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 😉