This document summarizes lessons learned from redesigning the Firefox browser interface in 2006. It discusses how the redesign angered many users and led Radiant Core to realize that good design requires an open process that considers internationalization and usability. Key lessons included designing for an ecosystem, focusing on discoverability and user passion, and allowing other developers to improve the design through add-ons.
Future trends: What's Next for the InternetIlya Baraev
DOWNLOAD PPT FOR ANIMATION AND CORRECT LAYOUT!
Lecture given at Tampere University of Technology, Finland on 02 December 2010.
Does not contain reading notes.
Future Trends: What's Next for the Internet (2011 Update)Ilya Baraev
DOWNLOAD PPT FOR ANIMATION AND CORRECT LAYOUT!
Lecture given at Tampere University of Technology, Finland on 11 November 2011.
Does not contain reading notes.
TDWI Keynote: Outside In - The Future of Business Intelligence innovationmark madsen
The real future of business intelligence rather than the retro future we've been building, and where to look for inspiration and innovation in the future.
A short ITGS lesson based on the Dragon's Den TV series. Students must devise a (realistic) new use for a common technology (including QR codes, GPS, RFID), analyse the potential social impacts, and then pitch their idea in hope of winning the prize.
Find more ITGS resources on my website: www.itgstextbook.com
Future trends: What's Next for the InternetIlya Baraev
DOWNLOAD PPT FOR ANIMATION AND CORRECT LAYOUT!
Lecture given at Tampere University of Technology, Finland on 02 December 2010.
Does not contain reading notes.
Future Trends: What's Next for the Internet (2011 Update)Ilya Baraev
DOWNLOAD PPT FOR ANIMATION AND CORRECT LAYOUT!
Lecture given at Tampere University of Technology, Finland on 11 November 2011.
Does not contain reading notes.
TDWI Keynote: Outside In - The Future of Business Intelligence innovationmark madsen
The real future of business intelligence rather than the retro future we've been building, and where to look for inspiration and innovation in the future.
A short ITGS lesson based on the Dragon's Den TV series. Students must devise a (realistic) new use for a common technology (including QR codes, GPS, RFID), analyse the potential social impacts, and then pitch their idea in hope of winning the prize.
Find more ITGS resources on my website: www.itgstextbook.com
Watch with English closed captions: https://youtu.be/zifGZaFRKL8
In this talk, I explain how AI is going to transform design in the upcoming years. By the end of this talk, you should have a good understanding of what is AI and how it works, how it is being used in creative ways right now, and how it will affect your life as a designer in the upcoming years.
Follow me on:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aubetony
Medium: https://medium.com/@tonyaub
This talk was given on April 6, 2017, at Web à Quebec, in Quebec city:
https://webaquebec.org/programmation/design-intelligence-artificielle
Academic Libraries as Makerspace: 3D Printing and Knowledge CreationKathlin Ray
As part of an ongoing plan to transform an underutilized science and engineering library into a lively incubator for student-faculty collaboration and innovation, staff at the University of Nevada, Reno decided to launch a bold initiative: build a 3D scanning and printing “makerspace” and make it available to the entire campus. The service has been wildly successful with 3D printers running 24 hours a day. Furthermore, positioning the library as a place that facilitates knowledge creation beyond text based tools and resources has been a game changer. Students are highly motivated to learn new skills in order to take advantage of new technologies (Lynda.com gets heavy use); they experiment and iterate quickly to perfect their designs. Even better, students from engineering are now rubbing elbows with people from fields such as biology, computer science, geology, and even art. Like the printing press and the personal computer, 3-D printers have been hailed as a revolutionary device that will ultimately transform the way the world operates.
The real value of open source: ROI and beyondJeffrey McGuire
The slides from my presentation, "The real value of open source: ROI and beyond" from LinuxWochen Austria and Drupal Business Days Vienna 2012. - jam | Jeffrey A. McGuire | Acquia Manager of Community Affairs | jam@acquia.com
There is a phase change approaching is the way human society is organized, flipping from centralized hierarchical organizations chiefly represented by the nation states, towards more efficient, flexible, and resilient forms of decentralized, peer-to-peer structures, the Network Society. What traditionally we thought were functions that could only be organized centrally, from energy production and distribution, manufacturing and food production, finance, education, health are now being radically rethought as the guiding principles behind the technological evolution of innovations such as the Internet are now pervading everything.
Not only a novel interpretation of ongoing changes, but also a guiding set of principles to evaluate the degree at which new ideas are well aligned with the these unstoppable developments, the lessons of the Network Society can inform the decisions of individuals, corporations and policymakers to design future-aware action plans navigating times of turbulent change.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
49. “You know you've achieved
perfection in design, not when
you have nothing more to add,
But when you have nothing
more to take away.”
50. “You know you've achieved
perfection in design, not when
you have nothing more to add,
But when you have nothing
more to take away.”
-- Antoine De Saint-exupery
I’m Jay Goldman from Radiant Core, the company responsible for the official theme for Firefox 2. I’m going to talk a little about our amazing experiences working with the Mozilla crew, what we learned about Open Source projects, some really important stuff about design, and at least one cowbell joke. But first!
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This is an important piece of computing history - where is this from?
WAIT FOR ANSWERS, GIVE OUT A T-SHIRT
The classic IBM "THINK" sign was said to be a permanent feature of IBM offices around the world until the 1970s. The "THINK" concept as company mantra originated with IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Sr. in the 1940s and was often parodied outside of IBM when this high standard went occasionally unmet.
Today we’re not going to talk about THINKING, but rather about a very closely related skill.
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Everyone in this room is a designer, although you may not consider yourself to be one. The word itself is so overused that it has become practically meaningless. Visual design. User Experience design. N-tier database system design. This isn’t a talk about design itself, which would go on until Web8.0, but rather a talk about how to do good design in the traditional, visual sense. On to the next question!
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What is this?
WAIT FOR CORRECT ANSWER AND GIVE OUT T-SHIRT
How many Canadians in the house? We’re going to let you in on a dirty secret folks: we are in ur tech industry, slowly taking away your jobs. No, seriously.
Canada is important for two reasons. The first is because (CLICK TO SHOW LOGO) it’s the home to Radiant Core. The second is because it’s also home to...
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What is this?
WAIT FOR CORRECT ANSWER AND GIVE OUT T-SHIRT
How many Canadians in the house? We’re going to let you in on a dirty secret folks: we are in ur tech industry, slowly taking away your jobs. No, seriously.
Canada is important for two reasons. The first is because (CLICK TO SHOW LOGO) it’s the home to Radiant Core. The second is because it’s also home to...
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What is this?
WAIT FOR CORRECT ANSWER AND GIVE OUT T-SHIRT
How many Canadians in the house? We’re going to let you in on a dirty secret folks: we are in ur tech industry, slowly taking away your jobs. No, seriously.
Canada is important for two reasons. The first is because (CLICK TO SHOW LOGO) it’s the home to Radiant Core. The second is because it’s also home to...
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Thirty million people. Now, we’re still a little smaller than the US, but no matter how you look at it, that’s still a lot of people.
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Okay! Question #3. Who is this handsome devil, who may in fact be in the audience (but who is not allowed to answer)?
WAIT FOR CORRECT ANSWER, GIVE OUT T-SHIRT.
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Mike is the phen-o-men-ologist at Mozilla, which is a fancy word for User Experience. Mike is important to this story because we worked really closely with him on the redesign, but also because he very prophetically sat us down at the beginning and said...
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All joking aside, he really wanted to hammer home the point that this was a pretty serious undertaking. It’s not every day that a designer gets to work on something that will be seen by 30,000,000 people EVERY DAY. In fact, in order to really break it down, he told us…
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If we did better than a 90% rate on the …
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I HATE YOU scale …
That would be teh awesome. For the math challenged in the crowd…
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30,000,000 people CLICK times 90% CLICK FOR LINE DRAW THEN AGAIN is 27,000,000 haters. Which, no matter how you look at it, is a lot of haters
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30,000,000 people CLICK times 90% CLICK FOR LINE DRAW THEN AGAIN is 27,000,000 haters. Which, no matter how you look at it, is a lot of haters
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30,000,000 people CLICK times 90% CLICK FOR LINE DRAW THEN AGAIN is 27,000,000 haters. Which, no matter how you look at it, is a lot of haters
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30,000,000 people CLICK times 90% CLICK FOR LINE DRAW THEN AGAIN is 27,000,000 haters. Which, no matter how you look at it, is a lot of haters
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So, how’d we do? Well, it’s easy in retrospect to look back on it and know that we really had nothing to worry about, but it was a pretty tense day when the first Firefox 2 betas shipped out with the theme in them, and an even tenser day when the actual release went out the door. In the end though, I’d say we did okay.
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Firefox 2 won both CNET and PC Magazine Editor’s Choice awards. And with all due respect to our Microsoft colleagues in the audience, it was widely seen as being a significantly better upgrade than IE7. Some of the reviews even said nice things about our theme! Overall, we did substantially better than the 90% and the new theme was generally seen as a great evolution of the Firefox 1 design.
So what did we learn?
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Lesson #1: Good design is hard. It's not about pretty pictures and pushing pixels, although that tends to be the end of the process. Good design requires a lot of effort before even the first pixel gets pushed.
There’s a famous story about Picasso, sketching in a sidewalk café in Paris. I have no idea if this story is actually true, but either way it has a great message.
A woman was strolling along a street in Paris when she spotted Picasso sketching at a sidewalk cafe. She walked up, interrupting the master at work, and asked if he might sketch her and charge accordingly.
Picasso obliged. In just a few minutes, there she was: an original Picasso.
"And what do I owe you?" she asked.
"Five thousand francs," he answered.
"But it only took you three minutes," she politely reminded him.
"No," Picasso said. "It took me all of my life."
Despite what some of our clients choose to believe, good visual design doesn’t happen overnight, whether it’s Picasso sketching or icons for a web browser. Having eyes and an opinion doesn’t make you a good designer any more than It takes a lot of skill to do, and even more so, it takes a lot of SPECIFIC skills to do. Unfortunately for the Open Source movement, it takes a specific set of skills that’s quite different than a developer or a systems architect. As a result, and very generally speaking…
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Open Source Software and good User Experience or Visual Design are often like…
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Two ships…
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Passing…
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in the night.
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We’ll come back to this point later on - and lest we upset anyone who has poured their heart and soul into their favourite OSS product, we’re not saying they’re mutually exclusive. Just rare.
Lesson Two: Know they competition. The whole time we were working on Firefox 2, Microsoft was preparing Internet Explorer 7. It was a crucial part of our process to look at their preview releases and to read the reactions across the web. We particularly focused on places where they had changed their user interface in significant ways, or where they had duplicated a feature already found in Firefox, like tabbed browsing.
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Your design work will always exist an ecosystem of other design. Thinking of your masterpiece in isolation as the platonic ideal of perfect design is a mistake as it will never be viewed that way in the wild. Once your work grows up and starts staying out late with friends and stealing the car without asking and stops talking to you and then moves out and never calls home, it will always exist in a world in which it is compared to everything else. Architects understand this problem very well as they are often charged with designing a building which will be built in amongst a collection of existing buildings.
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This photo shows one of the commuter train stations in a suburb of the Greater Toronto Area, called Oakville. As the city around it has grown considerably, the Oakville station has expanded and re-expanded many times. This particular image shows two roofs, one belonging to the private-owned GO Transit and the other belonging to the publicly-owned VIA Rail. This particular problem is also known as Design by Committee.
This photo shows one of the commuter train stations in a suburb of the Greater Toronto Area, called Oakville. As the city around it has grown considerably, the Oakville station has expanded and re-expanded many times. This particular image shows two roofs, one belonging to the private-owned GO Transit and the other belonging to the publicly-owned VIA Rail. This particular problem is also known as Design by Committee.
Lesson Three: It’s a small world. Firefox is used by people literally around the world and is translated into TODO languages. Each one of those languages has its own particular set of requirements in terms of space in the User Interface, particularly languages like German which tend to have very long words with no place to line wrap.
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The process of creating versions of a product for different markets is a combination of Internationalization, which is making sure that your application understands things like different currency and date formats or measurement systems like metric and imperial, and Localization, which is translation into different languages. These two things are increasingly becoming known as Globalization. We’ll save you some confusion should you ever hop on an IRC channel with the Mozilla dev team by telling you that they are also known as…
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I 18 n, L 10 n, and, G11n. Now sometimes I18n includes much more complicated things, like RTL.
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That’s pretty much what we said, the first time someone at Mozilla asked if the new theme worked in RTL mode. If you’re wondering what RTL is, and we certainly were, maybe this will help you to understand?
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No? How about this?
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RTL mode, or Right-to-Left, provides support for languages which are read in that direction, including Hebrew and Arabic. Windows can let the browser know that it should run in RTL mode based on the user’s current language selection. It’s not currently supported on the Mac or Linux platforms. Adding RTL to a browser theme is actually pretty difficult, because there are lots of unforeseen issues which pop up. For example...
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When you’re laying out a user interface in XUL, the markup language which Firefox’s user interface is built in, you use CSS for styling and positioning in the same way that you do when building a website. For those of you who have done any web design using CSS, this will look very familiar. The problem is in the words “left” and “right”, which lose all meaning when your interface can flip around. Instead, you have to use…
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“start” and “end”, which are relative to which direction the user interface is facing.
Lesson Four: the user interface of the web browser has to step back and allow the content within the browser to shine. Some of the feedback we got on the first beta release of the theme was that people were underwhelmed - that they were expecting something a lot splashier. We saw it completely the other way: we needed to make an evolution of the Firefox 1 theme, not a revolution. The browser’s user interface should be in the background and should only draw attention when it’s needed for things like security alerts. A favourite quote and one that applies to almost any design…
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It was really important to us that we achieved an almost zen-like balance between ease of use and non-obtrusiveness. We didn’t feel a need to provide a very intensive visual experience because Firefox has such great support for add-on themes.
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A little plug for the great work Mike Shaver has been doing on the Add-ons site: you’ll find over 300 themes up there, as well as about 2200 extensions, 40 language dictionaries for Firefox’s spell checker, and 25 search engine plug-ins which extend the search box at the top of the Firefox window.
TODO
TODO
Every project has at least one sticking point where the stop energy hits the brakes and there’s just no moving forward until it gets resolved.
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For the Firefox 2 theme, it was the Home icon. Let’s take a closer look. CLICK FOR ZOOM IN. The home icon went through a lot of revisions before we got to where it is now - here’s a quick history of it.
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For the Firefox 2 theme, it was the Home icon. Let’s take a closer look. CLICK FOR ZOOM IN. The home icon went through a lot of revisions before we got to where it is now - here’s a quick history of it.
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For the Firefox 2 theme, it was the Home icon. Let’s take a closer look. CLICK FOR ZOOM IN. The home icon went through a lot of revisions before we got to where it is now - here’s a quick history of it.
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We started with this cute little number, complete with siding, lawn, and curb. It was generally felt that it was too complex and detailed, so...
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We dropped away the finishing touches and simplified it down. Then we noticed that it was the only icon in the set with this particular perspective, so we took a different look.
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The perspective was better, but it still didn’t match the rest of the set. So we move to more of a head on look.
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The lawn came back here, but it was still felt that the perspective was causing issues and that the complexity of the icon stood out compared to the clean lines of the rest of the set.
At this point we moved into pixels - what you’re seeing here is actually an EPS icon done in square blocks in Illustrator, to make sure that we can shrink and grow it up or down to fit any size icon. We had the right perspective now, but the colour wasn’t working.
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So we tried a blue door - and this is how it shipped in the first betas that had the theme in them. A member of the Firefox community opened a bug in Bugzilla, Mozilla’s open bug tracking system, to request more colour in the home icon so it stood out better from the toolbar background. I’ll come back to that bug in a moment.
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And so here we are. This is the home icon as it shipped in Firefox 2. Let’s take an even closer look.
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Let’s go back to the Bugzilla bug. While we agreed with the person who filed the original bug and added more colour, another member of the community responded to the bug with a follow up thought. More than anything else we encountered during this project, that particular comment drove home exactly how passionate Firefox’s users are. The concern was that the door handle on the door of the Home CLICK was too low, because real door handles are actually mounted above the vertical center of the door. Now, I can’t argue with that point, but I can point out that a 1024 x 768 screen has 786,432 pixels in it. The door handle is exactly 1 pixel by 1 pixel. That is real passion.
Let’s go back to the Bugzilla bug. While we agreed with the person who filed the original bug and added more colour, another member of the community responded to the bug with a follow up thought. More than anything else we encountered during this project, that particular comment drove home exactly how passionate Firefox’s users are. The concern was that the door handle on the door of the Home CLICK was too low, because real door handles are actually mounted above the vertical center of the door. Now, I can’t argue with that point, but I can point out that a 1024 x 768 screen has 786,432 pixels in it. The door handle is exactly 1 pixel by 1 pixel. That is real passion.
Show of hands: who in the audience considers themselves a designer of something?