Mouse based Ubiquity

Now this is a great idea from the folks at Mozilla labs:

Mouse-Based Ubiquity from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Although I love what they have done with the Graphical Keyboard User Interface (GKUI) original Ubiquity, at the end of the day browsing the internet is first and foremost a mouse based operation. No matter how many addons we install to get around this fact, including the excellent GKUI based Ubiquity, it is down right near impossible to spend a good browsing session on the internet as it exists today without having to turn to your mouse at some point.

I would love if Minimap could be designed around the approach of the mouse based Ubiquity, and if it gains enough traction or becomes part of Firefox, I will most likely move development to mapping based Ubiqs.

Auto Dial 3D

Proof of concept Firefox/Flock addon:

Auto Dial 3D from mctones on Vimeo.

Available from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9882

Firefox: Genius Loci

I was extremely interested to see what Mozilla would announce for the Geode project, and the result is surprisingly simple, yet incredibly powerful.
Now I can imagine a world where one commutes into work, pulls out their laptop, starts up Firefox and it notices that you are at your office so goes about setting your ‘Work’ profile into action: change homepage to company intranet, alter your bookmarks toolbar to the ‘Work’ bookmarks toolbar, enables that rubbish toolbar extension they keep on insisting you use, the list could go on.
After a hard days slog, you go back home, start up Firefox and it changes your homepage back to Facebook, puts your ‘home’ bookmarks toolbar back, and finally disables that ridiculous toolbar from work.

Next day we get on a plane, arrive at a new city and check into the hotel. We log into the hotel wifi, start up Firefox and it recognises that this location is not one of your saved profile places. All of a sudden I am being offered up possible websites to visit for food, entertainment, local travel, weather etc. I spend an hour or so getting familiar with the city and planning the next few days.

Couple of quick examples, but you get the idea.

Location, Location, Location is *not* just about mobiles. Getting information when you are out and about is different to when you are away from the house. No matter how well implemented mobile Safari is or Fennec turns out to be, they will not be able to beat the experience of sitting at a cafe, in a hotel or round a friends house with a laptop and getting a richer experience (you can argue until you are blue in the face; 3.5″ of touchscreen is never going to be as rich as 15″ of macbook pro, period).

I look forward to seeing how this progresses, and hope that a geolocation API is available to addon developers in the near future, not just webstes.

In terms of Minimap, this doesn’t mark the end. Minimap is very much about location in web pages, Mozilla’s offering is about the location of you. I see very little function overlap at present, if anything this can only help to make Minimap better once I hook into Firefox’s locating abilities.

Big congrats to the team for developing this.

Firefox; FUEL but no FHIG!

Mozilla support developers well, with MDC an excellent resource. A giant step forward was taken with FUEL (Firefox User Extension Library) in Firefox 3, but for me the serious missing piece in the puzzle; where is the FHIG (Firefox Human Interface Guidelines)?

Mozilla have always been protective of their brand (perhaps overly), and went to great lengths to produce platform specific versions of Firefox 3 that differed, whilst retaining an overiding Firefox look. Conversely however, they let developers loose on the product with very little in the way of user interface guidelines.

As a developer, I not only want code snippets to get functionality working, but also guidance on how best to fit my addon into the parent browser.

As an example, lets take a look at the XUL <panel> element. With vast improvements to this element, I see it’s use massively increasing in extensions (and indeed we can see it used a lot in Firefox 3 such as the bookmark dialog and securty info dialog). Up until now, people used <window> or <dialog> which, by their very nature, retained the look of the operating system windowing. However, the power (but arguably weakness) of the <panel> is that it allows developers to pretty much create any style ‘window’ they like.

The image below shows a screenshot of the bookmarks dialog in Mac OSX

Now lets compare it to a screenshot of the ctrl-tab extension. Not much different, both are opaque greys, albeit slightly different shades. My Minimap Preview Panel uses the same colours and opacity as the bookmarks, so a little bit of consistency is possible.

Lets look at Ubiquity.

Again, an opque grey, so all is ok right? Well not so fast. Is it ok to call them consistent just because we have slightly transparent grey dialogs? To me the devil is in the detail: different shades of grey, different opacity, different border radii, and in the case of Ubiquity no border radius at all.

Now lets throw a real spanner in the works: look at the Linux or Windows bookmark dialog.

Hmm, it’s not grey, but a colour designed to match the operating system. Now the differing panels of minimap/ctrl-tab/ubiquity start to stand out.

I’ll not go into showing examples too much more, but you get the picture. This discussion can also be applied to the colour of textboxes, of the drop down arrows used in the bookmarks dialog etc.

Perhaps a FHIG could have guidance on the use of <panel>, with a supplied class from the global skin people are recommended to use. For example <panel class=”dialog” /> will produce a panel that matches that used by the bookmarks dialog, and developers can rest easy that their extension is going to match the look and feel of the parent browser no matter what operating system it resides on.

In addition, if developers really want a grey <panel>, then supply us with a default recommendation such as #333, opacity 0.8 so that extensions can begin to look and feel part of the same ecosystem, without us having to go crawling through the source code or other extension code to see what is already being used.

I for one am not saying I have achieved some state of zen with Minimap, far from it (as anyone looking at it and my underlying code will agree!), it would just make my life a hell of a lot easier in the long run if Mozilla supplemented FUEL with FHIG.

Tags: firefox, fuel, fhig, ui

Fire Eagle and Minimap

I am pleased to bring to Minimap the power and simplicity of Fire Eagle. Due to hit the addons.mozilla.org site soon, now you can access and update your Fire Eagle location right from within your favorite mapping addon. Learn more.

Tags: fireeagle, firefox