Firefox & Google Chrome New Tabs (7)
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A number of folks have pointed me to Scott McCloud’s comic debut of Google Chrome today. Scott is one of my personal sources for inspiration: I often peruse his books, looking for insights into creating awesome user experiences. I’m chuffed (and a bit jealous) that the Chrome team got to work with him. There was a particular part of the comic that people kept referring me to: page 21, which talks about the experience for ...
Ubiquity: Thank You (10)
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Last Tuesday, the community working on Ubiquity was five people. Half of us had never met face-to-face, we spanned three continents, and had written a couple dozen commands. Today, our community is thousands strong with contributes in every time zone. Innovation is pouring in from all directions—we’ve had thousands of commands written for Ubiquity; commands that fundamentally enhance the functionality of the browser. In under a week, we have a roughly comparable number of Ubiquity ...
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Rui said:
The top 35 commands is a nice place to get some oomph out of ubiquity
Aza’s Thoughts » Ubiquity In Depth (59)
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An experiment into connecting the Web with language. Ubiquity is an experiment two parts. It’s both an interface and a development platform. Ubiquity 0.1 focuses on the platform aspects, while beginning to explore language-driven methods of controlling the browser. Read about the release here, or download it. In this post, we’ll talk first about the interface, and then the platform. For those who are really impatient, and just want to see how the prototype version ...
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joekwon said:
i like where this is going
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Kerk said:
Well after spending an hour-ish writing my Delicious command, I have to say I am even more impressed with this little Browser toy. Can not wait for some more polish.
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Tom said:
suck a dick, me!
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Tim said:
neat
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John Massaglia said:
still immature, but this is an awesome idea
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Rui said:
Looks like Aza is taking the concepts he used in Enso and taking them to the next level with Ubiquity.Even the logo is similar ;)Anyway, i'm going to give this a try. I like it.
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Fredrik H said:
Om Ubiquity funkar så kan det nog få mig att sluta med Safari på min mac.
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Paulo Pereira said:
muito bom conceito. pega um bocado em ideias do Enso. vale a pena ver.
Firefox Proposal: A Better New Tab Screen (10)
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1 month, 1 week
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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to design interfaces at scale. The amount of time saved when the tasks we do often are streamlined is staggering when multiplied by a quarter of a billion users. At the moment, I’m interested in what we can streamline in the new-tab workflow. Right now, when you open a new tab, you get a blank screen. While clean, it has a 100% probability of not ...
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jonezy said:
another in a great series of posts from Aza raskin on his design work at mozilla
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Tom said:
you should really watch these two videos as well:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6856727143023456694&ei=hVy0SIf1EI7-qwKWisDZDA&q=aza+raskinhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1360381493206287505&ei=hVy0SIf1EI7-qwKWisDZDA&q=aza+raskin&vt=lfit's a lot to watch, but it's worth it (take a week off from reading about politics, if necessary).
Firefox Mobile Design Session: Bookmarks (2)
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With over two thousand watches of the find-in-page session, and a lively discussion, the experiment into broadcasting our internal face-to-face meetings is a continuing success. It exceeded our expectations for participation and yield of quality dialogue; we’ll be trying to do more of these at Mozilla—not just for Mobile—in the future. For the third installment of the Firefox Mobile design discussions, it’s bookmark time. Bookmarks have been a fundamental feature in the browser since Mosaic ...
Ambient Information in the Browser (7)
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1 month, 2 weeks
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My browser knows a lot about me. It knows what I’m typing, what I buy, what websites I go to and how often, my calendar, and with whom I communicate. In fact, my computer probably knows more about me than I do myself. Yet, despite the wealth of information about my interests and habits, my browser rarely uses that knowledge to make my life easier. In Mozilla Labs, we’ve been starting to think about how ...
Firefox Mobile Design Session: In-page Find (5)
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This is the second installment in the ongoing experiment to open the face-to-face design meetings we have at Mozilla. This design meeting centered around in-page find for Fennec (Firefox Mobile). This feature is as invaluable tool on the desktop, letting you home in quickly on the information you’re looking for once a search engine has got you to the right page. It’s incremental nature means you never have to type a key more than you ...
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cuqui said:
Video is a low information density medium, so for this video we are trying Viddler which allows viewers to make in-line comments to increase its time-information density. The hope is that you guys can annotate, call out interesting sections, or providing feedback on ideas discussed. (Thanks to Patrick and Ian for suggesting this change) WOW Aza Raskin used one of my ideas , yeah!!!!!
A Glipse Into The Mobile Firefox Design Process (4)
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Designing at Mozilla is an interesting process: We are commited to doing design in the open and involving community in a fundemental capacity, yet we must avoid design by committee. To design in the open, we use tools like IRC, wikis, blog posts, and open bug trackers, yet we also have small face-to-face meetings. The tools we have are a great start, and I think we can do better. I’m just not sure how. For ...
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jonezy said:
this is a very cool idea, seeing the design process that other developers go through.
How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use (10)
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1 month, 4 weeks
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One of the great things about the web is the relative ease with which one can set up a new service. In social bookmarking alone with have Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, Mister-Wong, Newsvine, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon, to name a few. That’s great for competition, and that’s great for users, but it’s not so good for bloggers and content creators. What are you to do if you want readers to promote your content? Kevin ...
Mobile Firefox and Designing Without Modal Overlays (5)
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In the concept video I recently did for laying out the interface paradigms for Firefox Mobile, I listed five guiding principals. Touch it with your finger Large targets are good Visual Momentum and Physics are compelling Typing is difficult Content is king It’s these principals that inform the design of new features long after the original design as been coded, released, and iterated on. In discussions with the perspicacious Mike Beltzner, another design principal emerged. ...
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Dave said:
sometimes you read something at the end of a project and you just kick yourself. This piece on modal overlays is one of those pieces. I hope you are luckier than me. The patterns presented I have experienced before, but reading it hear brought it into my context view from the right angle.
Aza’s Thoughts » Firefox Mobile Concept Video (3)
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Firefox is coming to mobile. The innovation, usability, and extensibility that has propelled Firefox to 200 million users is set to do the same for Firefox in a mobile setting. User experience is the most important aspect of having a compelling mobile product. Every bit of interaction and pixel of presentation counts when typing is laborious and screen sizes are minuscule. Many of the standard interaction models, like menus, always-present chrome, and having a cursor, ...
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Fredrik H said:
Coolt koncept för Firefox Mobile.
Blogging and Hiring (1)
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2 months, 1 week
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I’ve been very quiet since joining Mozilla. Too quiet. I’ve been catching my breath and getting up to speed. It’s time, however, to start blogging again. I’ll be blogging here, but I’ll be mirroring the posts on the Humanized blog for a while. Be warned that the new blog has a temporary look, meant to be replaced soon by the awesome work of Naz Hamid. I should also point out that Atul has already begun ...
Aza’s Thoughts » Sharing Streamable Functionality (6)
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2 months, 2 weeks
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Question: How do people share on the net?Answer: They use services like Del.icio.us, Facebook, and Twitter. They IM, Email, and RSS. They advertise, search engine optimize, and chain letter. But it all comes down to communicating URLs.Now, that might seem to be a trivial conclusion. And it is—the URL is the unit of location for the Web. But as we began to think about how to share new functionality for the browser (read Ubiquity commands, ...
ContextFree.js & Algorithm Ink: Making Art with Javascript (2)
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3 months, 1 week
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In honor of the the release of Firefox 3, I’m releasing ContextFree.js today, along with the demo site Algorithm Ink. ContextFree.js is about drawing striking images—and making art—with minimal amounts of code. An introduction to ContextFree.js & Algorithm Ink Computers programs lost something important when displaying a splash of color stopped being one line of code. As a kid, I remember being able to type “plot x,y” on the Apple II to throw up a ...
What If… It Was Easy To Write Firefox Extensions (1)
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4 months, 2 weeks
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Writing extensions is labor intensive. Even as a veteran web developer, I feel trepidation at the thought of diving into the boiler-plate code, wading through the XUL world, and restarting Firefox uncountable times. There are tools out there to mitigate some of these problems—like Ted Mielczarek’s Extension Wizard, and Mark Finkle’s FUEL—but they feel like fresh frosting on a stale, left-out-since-last-Thursday birthday cake. Developer extroadinare, Atul Varma, said it best: “I hereby classify restarting Firefox ...
