Seo Master present to you: Aza Raskin delivered the eighth Web Exponents tech talk at Google last week. Aza is head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. He's an entrepreneur and Renaissance man, as evidenced by the breadth of topics in his presentation.
What I like about Aza is that he's a user advocate - sharing our frustrations over the complexities and hurdles of interacting with computers. It's not that applications lack functionality. Aza points out that "90% of the feature requests for features in [Microsoft] Word are in fact for features that are already in Word." The problem is that humans can't interact with, speak with, computer applications using a familiar language.
Ubiquity is one of the projects from Mozilla Labs that bridges this digital divide. Ubiquity is a Firefox add-on that allows users to complete tasks using a more intuitive language. One example Aza shows is highlighting part of a web page and typing "translate this to Russian". Ubiquity acts on the user's request by replacing the text in the web page with the Russian translation. Another example is typing an address in a Yahoo! Mail message, typing "map this", and having Ubiquity embed the desired Google map inside the email.
Aza calls this you-centric computing - allowing us to interact by talking about what we want to do, rather than forcing us to think about how to do it. Ubiquity achieves this, moving us from a web of nouns to a web of verbs. The point, according to Aza, is "perhaps by adding language, by making things hackable, we go from interfaces which work to our failabilities and our frailities, and instead are a little bit more human and hence a little bit more humane."
Jetpack extends Ubiquity's theme of making the Web hackable. Aza describes it as "an incredibly fast prototyping environment for changing the Web to make the Web yours. Sort of like taking the idea of Greasemonkey and mashing it up with extensions and giving it all steroids." Ubiquity and Jetpack allow each of us to make the Web our very own by modifying it to work the way we want.
Empowering users to customize the Web and more easily complete tasks moves us from a feeling of helplessness to a feeling of being in control. This is an important point and reminds me of Matt Mullenweg's talk at Velocity about slow web sites (my personal bent). There Matt says, "...when an interface is faster, you feel good. And ultimately what that comes down to is you feel in control." Empowering users is a common goal, and yet today's web applications still contain many hurdles (complexity, poor interaction language, slowness) that need to be addressed to make users feel in control and ultimately happy. Thanks to Aza and the folks at Mozilla Labs, we're moving closer to the you-centric Web each of us wants.
By Steve Souders, Performance Evangelist2013, By: Seo Master
Seo Master present to you: This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. Today's post is a guest post written by Dion Almaer of Mozilla's Bespin project
It feels good to be posting on the Google Code blog again. Since moving down the road from Google to Mozilla I have been busy working with my partner in crime, Ben Galbraith, in a new Developer Tools Lab.
The first product of our new team's endeavors was an experiment code named the Bespin project. Ben and I have been talking about the great things that you can do on the Web platform for quite some years. We feel like there is a big sea change happening right now as the various browsers kick into a new gear with fantastic features. The core runtimes on the Web (the browsers) are getting serious horse power. With technologies such as Web Workers, Canvas, advanced caching (application cache), local storage, native video / audio, and screaming fast JavaScript VMs, we feel that a new world of possibilities is going to hit the Web.
It wasn't too long ago that we saw this before, when Ajax hit the Internet and we went from simple applications to richer ones such as Google Maps and Gmail.
We wanted to test out this theory, so we set about creating a new age application that uses the great new technologies stated earlier. Since we are a developer tools lab, would it not make sense for this experiment to be a developer tool? And, what is the grand daddy of all developer tools? The coding environment that developers use to build applications. How "meta" :)
Being Mozilla, we released a very early version of Bespin that is 100% open source, so the community could form. It has been a fantastic ride even in the short opening months. The editor is fully Web based, and "by the Web, on the Web." Being a former Emacs Lisp hacker, I have known how powerful it is to have an environment that you can change for your own work flow, using a language that you know and love. Why shouldn't today's world of Web developers be able to have a great tool that they can change using Web technology? Yet another reason for Bespin.
We have just released version 0.2 of Bespin, and it has features such as version control built in, rich syntax highlighting, real-time code analysis, a command line that that you can create your own commands for, and a fancy dashboard. We are proud of where we are in short order, but there is much to be done. In the lab we have collaboration support in place and will be deploying soon. We are incredibly excited about some exciting use cases. Wouldn't it be interesting if:
You could "follow" a developer and see how he codes? I would love to follow Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, as he hacks on TraceMonkey!
You could do a live code review with someone, and both edit the code in place, a la SubEthaEdit or Google Docs?
Have a chat session that associates itself with the code files, so you can go back and see the conversations around a bit of code?
You were told that someone else is editing in the same file so you can quickly commit the code so they have to do the merge :P
You could search and subscribe to others commands, which will then be automatically updated for you
This is the first of many tools that will come out of our lab. It is important to note that these tools are for the Open Web as a whole. Just because we are at Mozilla doesn't mean that we only care about Firefox, far from it. Bespin itself runs on multiple bleeding edge browsers!
I am very excited to have been asked back to Google I/O (May 27-28) to speak not only about Bespin, but about the Open Web platform itself. I can't wait to share more of our community's work pushing the Open Web forward, and would love feedback on our projects and what you really need from us as developers. Hope to see you in May!
By Dion Almaer, Developer Tools Lab at Mozilla2013, By: Seo Master
