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.

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

Tags: fireeagle, firefox

Adding actions is so easy, so to this end please be sure to check out how easy it is to search for an address or open Minimap from Devo here.

Only possible downside to Devo is the UI doesn’t quite sit right with me at the moment (it is placed using screen x/y but would rather it stayed within the bounds of my browser window, front and centre. Also, pink and yellow text on black, hmmm). I would also like to see ranking ala quicksilver.

Don’t let that put you off though, go grab it from the AMO sandbox (and drop a comment whilst you are there).

Tags: firefox, addon, devo

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7539529.stm

Something, somewhere is going wrong with all the extensions and it is going to take me a while to investigate. Most of my time is spent developing Minimap which works in both Firefox and Flock, and I even struggle to find time to do that at present.

Therefore, I am proposing to carry out the following (unless popular demand requires otherwise):

1) Work to get BlogPlus working (high priority)

2) Work to get screengrab working (low priority)

3) Discontinue geoFlock in favour of the cross-browser Minimap. Anecdotal evidence suggests very few people use the Flickr geotagging abilities (the only part that separates it from Minimap).

4) Discontinue Flockstars - good idea, but in over 3 years of using Flock (wow, yes it’s been that long!) I have rarely stumbled across another Flockstar using it.

Flock is an awesome browser and I still use it religously for my social sites, I am in no way ‘abandoning ship’, just reassessing my course.

Best wishes, tones