A few weeks ago, I made my first screencast—a pitch for Ambient News on the Mozilla Labs Concept Series: The screencast was recorded with Vara Software’s ScreenFlow; the title cards were composed in Adobe Photoshop CS3 and typeset in Helvetica Neue light. I thought I’d write a few notes about some of the thoughts and experiences that went into the making of this. I intentionally gave this video a target run-time of 45 seconds. ... Read more

As some people know, it’s possible to get the latest news about our favorite sites on a single page through a fairly ubiquitous technology called web syndication. The advantage of this is that we can look at all the news we want in a single place, instead of having to visit dozens of websites per day. Unfortunately, actually setting up web syndication can be a chore—and often, a confusing one at that. ... Read more

I’m still in the middle of reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, but one of the major “take-aways” from the book is a software suite that Zittrain has been working on at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society called Herdict, which is a portmanteau of “herd” and “verdict”. From what I understand, one component of the suite, Herdict for Network Health, is a Firefox/IE plug-in that allows an end-user’s computer to tell “the herd”—that is, the other users of the software as a single anonymous entity—what sites it can access. ... Read more

One of the latest features to land on the trunk of the mozilla-central source code repository—what will eventually become Firefox 3.1—is a new mechanism for switching between tabs in Firefox when using the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab shortcut gestures. In Firefox 3.0 and earlier, pressing Ctrl+Tab brings the tab to the right of the currently visible tab into focus, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+Tab brings the tab to the left into focus. One major problem with this interface is that it’s usually modal: the user’s locus of attention is often focused on the page they want to see, rather than the location of the desired page relative to the current page in the tab order. ... Read more

I recently spent time making Parchment work properly on my new iPhone 3G. The iPhone has been my first foray into the world of the mobile web, and getting Parchment to work well on it was an interesting experience. Some of the challenges I faced involved getting the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to display properly—Parchment doesn’t actually have any text input fields on it, so by default the iPhone didn’t think that users had to enter text—and modifying some processor-intensive JavaScript code so that the iPhone didn’t think that Parchment had gone into an infinite loop. ... Read more

In my recent post on Trusting Functionality I alluded to a socially-based framework for trust that would allow software to be generative and safe at the same time. When trying to figure out a solution to this problem, I realized that there are already communities on the internet that have built-in social mechanisms for trust. Python, for example, is a language notorious for its lack of protection against untrusted code. Yet we don’t see much concern that a Python script may contain malicious code, even though it has the ability to do whatever it wants to our computer. ... Read more

Over the past few days my friends Ben Collins-Sussman and Jim Blandy and I have been having an interesting conversation about the use of Mercurial for development collaboration. Eventually one of my email responses got so long-winded that I figured it’d be best to make the conversation public. So, here’s my take on Mercurial, and some reasons for why a HG birds-of-a-feather session at the Mozilla Summit coming up next week would be very useful for me. ... Read more

One of the major challenges we face with the design of our new linguistic command-line project is that of trust. As Zittrain mentions in The Future of the Internet, this is really the fundamental problem of generative systems, and also their most valuable asset: the ability for a user to run arbitrary code is simultaneously what gives the personal computer its revolutionary power, but it’s also its greatest vulnerability. At present, because our project is still in the prototyping stage, we’re opting for freedom of expressiveness and experimentation over security. ... Read more

Yesterday I participated in the San Francisco AIDS Walk with two Mozilla interns. I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the concept of walks/runs-for-a-cause because at a surface level, the energy an individual spends running or walking doesn’t directly contribute to the actual cause they’re ambulating for. Ultimately, it seems like it’s a transaction for one’s time and energy in exchange for a cause’s publicity: rather than simply donating a few dollars to a cause, ambulating for the cause is indicative of the sacrifice of one’s time in the name of a cause (which can be more valuable than money, depending on the individual). ... Read more

Lately some of us at Mozilla Labs have been experimenting with graphical keyboard user interfaces in Firefox. Our current work-in-progress is something that we’re calling Ubiquity for the time being, though the name is by no means set in stone. This project is heavily informed by Enso, a software product developed by me and my colleagues at Humanized from 2005-07. Aside from the benefits outlined in Alex Faaborg’s blog post entitled The Graphical Keyboard User Interface, this experiment is intended to solve few other problems, one of which I’ll address in this post. ... Read more