As we’ve mentioned before, Ubiquity 0.2 has fairly broad, visionary goals that won’t be fully satisfied for some time. So we’re going to be pushing its changes to the 0.1 line at more regular intervals as we continue to develop it. By “pushing its changes” we mean that we’ll effectively be disguising our work-in-progress 0.2 as a 0.1.x release. For instance, Ubiquity 0.1.5, which we released about a month ago, is essentially the same thing as 0. ... Read more

Yesterday Tempura left a good question as a comment on my blog post concerning Ubiquity’s experimental support for Python: What about http://pyxpcomext.mozdev.org ? They bring Python in an xpi for all major plattforms, without the need of an local installed interpreter. Using PyXPCOM was actually a potential option we had considered, but we ended up going with jsbridge for a number of reasons: PyXPCOM uses XPCOM as its means of communication between Python and the Mozilla platform. ... Read more

A few weeks ago I wrote about Ubiquity Feed Plugins, which are basically just a way of separating the user interface of subscribing to a new feature from the implementation of the feature itself. As I’ve written about before, one of the things I’ve missed about the Mozilla development environment is its support for the Python programming language. Aside from being humane and having a great community, it has functionality that could complement the Mozilla platform quite nicely. ... Read more

When searching for a documentation system to use for Ubiquity, we looked at a number of tools. None of them particularly satisfied me; all the ones I saw required a build step to convert raw source code into formatted documentation, and I wasn’t very pleased with the typography of the generated content—though obviously the aesthetics were customizable through CSS, none of the default stylesheets left me dying to read the documentation I created. ... Read more

I’ve just released the first preview release of Ubiquity 0.2, which implements some of the functionality outlined in the Ubiquity 0.2 Architecture Proposal. In particular, we now have support for something called Feed Plugins, which makes it possible for Ubiquity to draw from a much wider range of functionality: imagine, for instance, if end-users saw Greasemonkey and CoScripter scripts no differently from standard Ubiquity command feeds, and used the exact same interface to subscribe to and use functionality that’s been implemented with any number of web technologies. ... Read more

Much simpler than the one for 0.1.3. Read more about this architecture proposal at Ubiquity 0.2 Design: UI and Security Extensibility, and feel free edit the document or join in the conversation on ubiquity-core!

To prepare for some of the upcoming changes to Ubiquity, I took some time this morning to document the architecture of what’s about to be released as Ubiquity 0.1.3: The full prose to go with the above diagram is on the wiki. The tool I used to make the above diagram is called OmniGraffle, and has been recommended to me over the past few years by most of my friends who use Macs. ... Read more

One of the most interesting races for me this past election season was that of the four seats available for the San Francisco Board of Education. The voter’s guide put out by the city included profiles of each candidate, and of the fifteen running for office, only seven of them had a website. Six of them were essentially static, electronic versions of standard campaign brochures. The last was that of Rachel Norton, whose site consisted of a frequently-updated blog with comments enabled—and which the candidate actually responded to. ... Read more

We’re currently working on Ubiquity 0.1.3, a release that improves Ubiquity’s responsiveness and adds skinning support. In preparation for this, I’ve just released the first Ubiquity 0.1.3 Release Candidate. Please feel free to download it—you’ll automatically be upgraded to each new release candidate as it becomes available, as well as the final 0.1.3 release. Any bugs that you can report either to our bug database or our mailing list would be much appreciated. ... Read more

Mike Beltzner recently wrote an excellent blog post that puts the newly-released Firefox China Edition in a cultural context: I'm used to a very search-based culture, and was shocked to discover that search - while still important - was a secondary task for all of my Chinese colleagues. Their normal pattern would be to first visit an authoritative source (a portal of some form, either a media hub, a news site, or a topic-oriented site like one for music) and then drill into the information presented. ... Read more