At issue are early mockups for one of the Jetpack developer tools that included design elements from the MetaLab web site. While the design direction being implemented does not utilize these design elements, we inadvertently included the early mockups in our blog post and video announcing the next phase of development for the Jetpack SDK.

We’ve since removed all of the early mockups from our web sites, and updated the videos and screenshots with the correct content.

We sincerely apologize to MetaLab for incorporating design elements from their web site in our early mockups and for posting them publicly without proper attribution.

We’re actively investigating how this happened to ensure that it does not happen again.

The team involved with design, development, and testing work has been stellar, and includes: Sean Martell, Neil Lee, Ryan Doherty, Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj, and Raymond Etornam. This site is wholly their creation and they’ve all been a fantastic (and fun) to work with.

The site itself is constructed on a straightforward WordPress Multi-User installation, with two custom themes designed by Sean and developed by Neil and Ryan. All content and customization for each project site can be edited via the WordPress UI, making updating and maintaining the site significantly easier.

There are bound to be some rough edges and issues here and there. If you find any problems with the site, please file a bug. Any questions or feedback you have about the site can be left here, or you can send comments via email to deb-at-mozilla-dot-com.

I am going to do this by grouping the work we are doing into four distinct categories.

* Performance improvements

We are concentrating very hard on initial sync performance. Initial sync is important for both new users as well as when you set up Weave Sync on new devices. We are working on a few different ideas to help improve initial sync performance.
- WEP 102 is an attempt to allow “Weave to decide what subset of data to pull from the server and how to continue fetching the rest of the data later.”
- WEP 105 aims to create an importance metric so we can come up with a meaningful subset of data.

While these two are more near term, we are also exploring some ideas that are a little farther out. For example:
- WEP 101 describes a proxy service that can perform encryption/decryption routines on a user’s behalf which might be particularly useful on phones, netbooks and computers with less resources.

We are working on setting up benchmarks and getting more quantitative data (who doesn’t like pretty charts), but I think we are definitely getting better.

* Weave usability (first run and ongoing)

This is one of the key focus areas of the upcoming 0.6 release. We have completely revamped the sign up and set up pages, UI and flow. I am personally very excited about the changes. I think these changes will using Weave a lot more intuitive.

We are also trying to see if we can remove the requirement for a separate password (used to sign in to the Weave service) and passphrase (used to encrypt/decrypt your data). WEP 100 has our current thinking on how we might achieve this. If there are any security minded folks interested in helping out, we could certainly use your help with this.

So, if you have tried setting up Weave in the past and been turned away by the 9 or so screens/steps between downloading the Weave add-on and actually using it to sync your data, you should have a siginificantly better experience with the upcoming 0.6 release.

* Weave is more than Sync

Weave, as a Mozilla Labs project, is a collection of experiments around integrating services in/with the browser. The two most active experiments we have going on are related to synchronizing your web experience and integrating identity in the browser. While we want to drive both of these forward while still carrying on new experiments, our current focus is on stabilizing Sync.

This means, in the short term, Weave is going to be mostly about Sync. We are also thinking about launching a separate development train for all the neat experiments we’ve been planning. Once we do that, I think the true potential for the Weave platform will start to become clearer.

* Weave bugs, consistent behavior

For a project that’s in alpha and working towards beta, I think we are actually of pretty good quality. However, we do need to get more detail oriented. Here are some of the specific things we will be working on to improve usability:
- Revamp user documentation to clearly describe which features are supported and which aren’t. (Sync is stable, identity is experimental for example)
- Describe what is expected to work and how (Syncing bookmarks works both to and from the cloud, for example)
- Get the basics right (more unit tests, better performance benchmarks, buildbot integrations etc.)
- Pay attention to edge cases and common user frustrations (captcha issues during registration, random change password/passphrase issues etc.)

Conclusion:

To summarize, we have a solid plan for a great 0.6 release and beyond. We look forward to building an unbelievable user experience.

In the meantime, keep using Weave and help us make it better. Let us know what you think, even if you decide not to use it. And if you have questions/comments on any of this, let us know in the comments.

– Ragavan Srinivasan, on behalf of the Weave team

Something grabbed a hold of us and wanted to make the coding experience more social. Our initial prototype had the notion of collaborating on code artifacts a la SubEthaEdit.

We have worked with many remote teams during our coding careers and trying to do code reviews and pair programming has always been painful. Since Bespin’s all about coding in the cloud, how about using the cloud to make it a little easier?

Putting collaboration into production takes a lot of work. If you are hacking on code with a group of people, you are very chatty, so we had to rewrite the collaboration server to deal with this.

Joe Walker has done the bulk of the work, and has posted about the implementation and how to use it

Using Collaboration

As part of collaboration we need to notion of connections between people and access control. A few new commands give you access to this information:

• follow/unfollow: allow you to decide whose shared projects you want to see in your project navigator. As we evolve Bespin this will become a way to get all sorts of information about the people you are working with
• group: allows you to put the people you are interested in into groups to make it easy to manage sharing
• share: allows you to export your projects read-only or editable to individuals, groups, or to everyone

To get started quickly, you can jump in to a public shared project that Joe has setup. Once logged in to Bespin follow the steps:

• Press CTRL+J / CMD+J to open the command line.
• Type follow joewalker to get someone to share files with. I’ve shared a project called pubproj globally.
• Type project list. You should see joewalker+pubproj in your list of projects.
• Type set collaborate on to turn on shared editing.
• Open a shared file by typing open /joewalker+pubproj/example.txt.

Your command line should look something like this:

We have a collaboration sidebar that you can access from the top right icon; the icon turns blue if you have collaboration on and yellow if you are actively collaborating on a file with someone.

If you want to see this in more detail, watch the screencast:

One more thing….

The big feature of Bespin 0.4 is collaboration for sure, however we have fixed a huge number of bugs and have cleaned up the user experience in many ways as we keep making Bespin solid.

Give it a try and let us know what you would like to see!

If there was a problem yo I’ll solve it,
Check out the hook while Shay revolves it.
Ice, ice baby…

* (apologies to Vanilla Ice)

Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.

You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.

We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

Concepts may take the form of Ideas, Mockups or Prototypes.

• Ideas
  It all begins with an idea. A sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community.
• Mockups
  Turn your idea (or someone else’s) into an image, sketch or video. Words are great, but you know what they say about pictures. Mockups offer up a visual and communicate ideas in terms that are just a bit more polished and real. They draw the next person in, tempting them to pick up the concept and run with it.
• Prototypes
  A prototype is interactive. Feel, touch and play with developing concepts. Prototypes get ideas across by showing off the moving parts. They aren’t always fully functional or pretty, but they’re more than a static image or two. They’re a dress rehearsal of sorts, with minimal programming. Make a prototype in HTML, Flash, or whatever puts things into action.

We only ask that all concepts and related source materials be freely redistributable and remixable under either a Creative Commons license (for Ideas and Mockups) or the Mozilla Public License (for Prototypes) so that we can all effectively collaborate on the exploration. Again, the intent is not for these concepts to evolve directly into new products but rather to provoke thought, facilitate discussion and provide inspiration.

Be bold. Be radical. The crazier, the better. Let’s explore the future together.

Inaugural Concepts

Aurora Concept (Part 1)
by Adaptive Path

Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios. Learn More

Bookmarking & History Concept
by Wei Zhou

An investigation into a better way of visualizing and interacting with bookmarks, your history, and the browser in general. Learn More

Mobile Concept
by Aza Raskin

An experimental UI proposal for Firefox Mobile. Learn More

How to Get Involved
Join us on the Mozilla Labs site at http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/concept-series/.

Soon we’ll have a more structured way to contribute concepts. For now, all you have to do is use your favorite method of sharing an concept with the world. If it’s an idea, blog about it. If it’s a mockup, put it on Flickr. If it’s a prototype, host it on your web site. Tag it with “mozconcept” and then let us know about it by posting to the Concept Series discussion forum.

Personas enables artists to treat the browser as their canvas. An important goal is to continue to provide artists with the tools they need to create original art, and share their work with a global audience. As part of this effort, we recently added “designer pages”, which gives each Personas artist an easily shareable page that showcases their creations.

The results have been inspiring. Many artists in the Personas community have been able to attract tens of thousands of active, engaged users of their art. Here are just some examples:

What’s Next?

Between now and the 20,000th design, we’ll be actively looking for additional ways to give Personas artists a strong, easy-to-use platform for their work. If you have ideas, please discuss and debate them with the community in our discussion group. Finally, if you have an inner-artist, join thousands of others in the Personas community by creating your own Persona art work and sharing it our gallery for millions of people around the globe to enjoy.

– Suneel Gupta and Toby Elliott, on behalf of the Personas development team

Design Challenge: Summer 09 – together with IxDA and Johnny Holland

After our successful inaugural Design Challenge in Spring ’09 – more than 50 students from all around the world participated and submitted nearly 20 prototypes – we are happy to announce the next Design Challenge today.

In collaboration with IxDA, a network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design and Johnny Holland, an open collective talking, sharing and finding answers about all aspects of interaction design, we once again invite designers, students and design-focused people from all around the world to develop new ideas & mockups for the future of the Web.

About the Design Challenge

The Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. Our aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Open Web as a whole.

For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.

However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.

How it works

To participate in the Design Challenge you need to create a mockup of your proposed solution. A mockup can be anything from a napkin drawing, to a wireframe, to a polished graphic.

You also need to create a video explaining your idea(s), presenting the mockup and showing how your idea works.

To register your entry: Upload your mockup and your video to a website such as Flickr, Vimeo or YouTube and tag it with “mozconcept”. Send us an email to conceptseries@mozilla.com with links to both your mockup and your video. (To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all content and contributions will be licensed under appropriate open source licenses.)

During the Design Challenge you can discuss your ideas with fellow designers on the Mozilla Concept Series forum. To inspire and help you during the challenge, Johnny Holland will post articles with background information on their website throughout the challenge.

All submissions will be presented on the Design Challenge website and honors for “Best in Class” in the categories Innovation, Execution, Interaction, Producible plus a People’s Choice Award will be bestowed.

You find all the details on the Design Challenge website.

Important Dates

• May 14th, 2009 – Launch of Design Challenge: Summer 09
• June 21st, 2009 – Submission deadline for mockups & videos
• July 8th, 2009 – Announcement of “Best in Class” and “People’s Choice” selection

Getting Involved

If you’re interested in participating, please do join us in the Concept Series discussion forums. Also follow us on Twitter: @mozconcept, @ixda and @johnnyholland.

You’ll find more information on how to participate on our Design Challenge website.

If your school/university is interested in participating, please contact us directly at conceptseries@mozilla.com.

– Pascal Finette, on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team

We’ll solicit topics from attendees at the beginning of the lunch, divvy up the available time between them, learn about each problem in turn, and brainstorm solutions.

Anyone dealing with design challenges who is looking for help resolving them is welcome to join us! You provide the problems, and we’ll provide the food and feedback. (You’re also welcome if you just want to provide feedback on other people’s design issues!)

To join us, come to 1981 Landings Drive, Building K, Mountain View, CA 94043 at noon tomorrow, Thursday, May 13. Let us know if you’re coming (and how many of you there are) by commenting on this blog post so we get a sense for how much food to order.

See you soon!

– Myk Melez, on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team

New Mozilla Labs discussion groups:

• Mozilla Labs – If there’s a Labs project, idea, or topic you would like to talk about and there doesn’t seem to be another place for it, post it here!
• Bespin – The Bespin project is developing an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing. (project site)
• Concept Series – Concept Series and Design Challenges. (project site)
• Personas – A new add-on that gives Firefox a dynamic, lightweight theme system. (project site)
• Prism – Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop. (project site)
• Snowl – Snowl is a prototype extension that integrates messaging into the browser. (project site)
• Test Pilot – Test Pilot is an idea for a new user testing program for Mozilla Labs that aims to build a 1% representative sample of the Firefox user base for soliciting wide participation and structured feedback for Labs experiments. (project site)
• Ubiquity – An experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. (project site)
• Weave – Weave is a Mozilla Labs project to explore ways in which the browser can broker richer experiences on the Web, by integrating more closely with online services. (project site)

Another project we’re currently working on (along with the WebDev and QA teams) is a revamp of the existing Labs website, with a whole new look and feel and a more flexible backend infrastructure. We’re tracking progress and keeping docs and whatnot on the Mozilla Wiki here: Mozilla Labs Site 2.0. This is a multi-stage project, and we’ve just started the development phase of stage one.

If you have any questions or comments about the new discussion forums or the Mozilla Labs site project, please leave a comment here, email me at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com, or post a note in the Mozilla Labs discussion group.

– Deb Richardson, on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team

Just over three months ago we launched our first Mozilla Labs Design Challenge. We invited design-focused students from around the world to participate and develop solutions to the question “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”

After the first round, where students submitted mockups of their proposed solutions, more than 40 students actively participated in a three-week long tutoring and mentoring phase (the tutoring sessions are available on video). At the end of this tutoring phase the students refined their ideas and submitted 18 prototypes.

Out of those 18 prototypes a panel of design experts selected the following four “Best in Class” entries:

Best in Class: Innovation

For the solution that has the newest / most original interaction models.

• Collaborative Research on a Virtual Desk by Ecaterina Valica

Best in Class: Execution

For the solution that has the most expressive prototype, a combination of polish as well as functional availability.

• The Media Center-Like Browser by Amine Zafri

Best in Class: Interaction

For the solution that feels provides the best human-computer interaction model.

• Scrolling 2.0 by Valentin Laube

Best in Class: Producible

For the solution that would be the easiest to ship to users immediately.

• An Information-Centric Web Browser by Choawen Tan

Congratulations!

Head over to our Design Challenge landing page for more information on the selected prototypes, a complete list of all submitted prototypes, information on the panel and videos from the tutoring sessions.