Archive for the ‘Life Hack’ Category

Collaboration Made Simple with Bracket Notation

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

While writing, I like to keep things simple. While I don’t go to the extremes of Khoi Vinh’s punishing Blockwriter, I generally use an editor that can’t even make text bold. When I write, it’s just the raw text and me, mano a mano. By using a bare-bones editor, the text can’t fight dirty by throwing frivolous fonts and formats in my eyes. At most, I use Markdown to add style to my text.

Must of my collaborators are the same way. We are often editing each-others’ work, but many hands in the copy-editing cookie jar means edits fly like popcorn kernels on the griddle. How do we keep collaboration simple, especially now that Etherpad is about to reach the end of its life? We need a robust method of keeping track of comments and edits. Standard revision control is too heavy weight, and most diff programs operate on a too-course line-level granularity. We needed another solution. Text interface design to the rescue!

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Ubiquity In the Firefox: Round 2

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

We’ve been iterating hard on ideas to bring the power of Ubiquity to Firefox main. The two places it makes sense to surface Ubiquity-like power are (a) in situ with content when we are trying to manipulate, and (b) in the location bar, where we already type to perform navigation tasks. This post focuses on the second use case.

The three design goals, in shorten form, from round 1 were:

(1) Don’t force new work flows.
(2) It must be localizable.
(3) It should feel like Firefox.

We’ve added a new design goal, as a subset of not forcing new work flows: discoverability. The interfaces we design should be self-learnable. In this case, that doesn’t mean ever piece of functionality is immediately obvious, but that over time the system can teach you — step by step — how to use more and more of itself.

Note that all of these mockups are sketches. They don’t imply anything about the final visual style. From an interaction standpoint, they focus on tight feedback loops, as well as putting contextual autocomplete as close to the text being entered as possible.

Mockup 1

The Ubiquity-esque actions appear in the Awesome Bar results, and are subject to the same ranking algorithms as everything else.

The inset image on the right is an alternative way of accessing verbs: instead of having them appear in the awesome bar results, they appear as autocorrect-style text above what you’ve typed. The benefit is that you can always hit tab to quickly get to the action you want (as opposed to using the arrow keys for navigating the awesome bar results). It can also be unified with methods of structured modifiers (see later mockups). The detriment is that it is yet another mechanism and is visually noisy.

Other thoughts: The background of the url bar can change colors to add a visual key that an action is taking place. We can also unify the keyword mechanism, so that if you type “g ” it automatically gets expanded to a “Google” action.

Mockup 2

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Ubiquity Update: 0.1.2

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Ubiquity Update

We’re pleased to say that the distributed team at Mozilla Labs working on Ubiquity has recently released an update to Ubiquity. If you already have Ubiquity, it will auto-update itself. Otherwise, you can download it here.

What’s In It?

We’ve got an amazing amount of feedback about Ubiquity since it’s launch. One of the main points has been wanting features and bug fixes for the commands included in Ubiquity, as well as more commands. The web moves quickly and Ubiquity has the ability to stream commands: it’s silly that we aren’t using that ability to let development of those built-in commands rage on, without being impeded by the slower Ubiquity release cycle. The largest update in “Raging Stream” is the ability for all of the built-in commands to be streamed in from the HTTPS-secured ubiquity.mozilla.com. Along with that is an experimental way of having all preview  and command code combined into one large file.

Also, for those of you who are writing commands, we’ve greatly improved the Ubiquity command editor. For a full list of changes and notes, check out the release notes on the wiki.

Welcome!

Between Ubiquity 0.1.1 and 0.1.2, we are proud to have been joined by many new faces. In particular, two new members now have commit access to Ubiquity. Please welcome Fernando Takai, and Davanum Srinivas! By the quality of code, and quality of their participation in the community they have shown themselves to be stewards and champions for the rest of our contributors.

If you have patches or questions, please don’t hesitate to ping us on the #ubiquity channel on IRC at irc.mozilla.org. The handles of the folk who can review code are now fern, dims, jono, atul, abi, unfocused, and aza.

Bloxes

Friday, March 7th, 2008

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of Bloxes.

Bloxes are essentially 3D cardboard Legos that ship flat, and fold up in modular building blocks that are strong enough to stand on. While they aren’t tech per se, we use them for building tables, walls, cubicles, and desks at the Humanized office. Google and Mint.com have already ordered some, and Mozilla has expressed interest in using them in their offices too. This may well be the new thing in terms of agile office-space deployment. Don’t like where a wall is? Just move it! Don’t like the way it looks? Just rebuild it! They are cheaper than cubicles, and much more fun.

They are also eco-buzzword-friendly (meaning that they are made from recycled cardboard and are recyclable).

So head over to Bloxes and order yourself some re-factorable furniture and walls. Then come back here and tell us all about it.

We are now a Python and cardboard shop.

One Thing at a Time and the Multitasking Myth

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

I can only think about one thing at a time.

Any girl reading this just going to roll her eyes and think, “Of course. You’re a guy!”. But it’s not just true for me, it’s true for everyone. It’s true for you.

And not in that way.

At first, this claim can sound fantastic. We can talk on a cell phone while driving to work, and we can compose complex sentences while typing. But, if you stop to reflect on it, you can only do those things at the same time because at least one of them is automatic. In the first case driving is automatic, and in the second case typing is automatic. You’ve done them so often that you’ve habituated to them: doing them doesn’t require any thinking. Can you still talk on your cell phone while driving through a rainstorm on unfamiliar roads? Would you still be able to concentrate on writing if you had just switched to a Dvorak keyboard? I didn’t think so.
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MoonEdit to the Rescue

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

Last summer, before Humanized got started, Andrew, Atul, and I did some consulting work. Andrew and I were in balmy California, while Atul was back in humid Chicago. We were all working on the same project, and we had a big problem: we needed to talk. A lot. About everything: documents that needed commenting and editing, new ideas one of us had brainstormed, what we were going to do the next day, and the weather. Unfortunately, our tools (phones, AIM, email, and a wiki) were inadequate.

Enter MoonEdit.
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