The Farmville Bug

No joke, Firefox pushed an update on a single bug. Last release they introduced this great feature that times out Flash applications if they take longer than 10 seconds to start up, thinking that anything that takes longer than that is probably crashing. Reasonable!

But Farmville often takes longer than 10 seconds to start up. Oh shoot. Flash developers that do run-time debugging destroy the 10 second limit. Double shoot!

Use Real Data!

It’s a cut-and-dry example of why you should use real data to make calls on design decisions. It’s a variation of the Lorem Ipsum Sucks argument. The “10 second” decision seems arbitrary, and kudos to Mozilla for doing the right thing and releasing a fix right away. It’s probably not the correct fix, as adding a friendly user prompt would be preferable to a low, fixed timeout. But hey, baby steps.

The Problem – It’s not uncommon for someone who does real work with the corporate intranet to have several tabs open within their web browser with data sources, and a webmail tab. Add to that desktop applications like Microsoft Excel, and an instant messaging client, and we have broken workflow in Alt-Tab.

This effect will become more pronounced as more and more applications that we use daily sneak into the web browser – unless we launch everything from Adobe Air or Gears shortcuts on the desktop. That is not the case, since I’m much more likely to get to Google Calendar by clicking an Add this GCal link, than I am to launch it from my desktop.

User Solution – If the user wants to correct this workflow problem, they can open all of their working tabs as new windows.  The major issue with that is pre-loading the cognition of the task.  Odds are the user navigated to their document in an exploratory way, and didn’t precede that activity with the thought “I better open this in a new window just in case I find something I need to task-switch to.”

Last I checked (Firefox 3.0.8), there is no easy way to turn a tab into a new window in Firefox.  At least not without the Tab Mix Plus! add-on (via How-To Geek).   Though I understand “tab tearing” will be included in Firefox 3.1, and is already a standard feature in Google Chrome and Safari 4 (video link).

Potential Solution - The major web browsers that support tabs already support quickly rotating through the tabs using Ctrl-Tab.   Integrating the tab switching functionality (including preview screenshots, tab titles, and all of that) into Alt-Tab would be good.   The specific details of how that would look, feel, and interact would make a  great little M.Sc. topic. :-)

As a side note: The default built-in Alt-Tab application in Windows XP is fine (Vista Flip is even nicer), but there are a handful of better free replacements: one from the Microsoft PowerToys team, and an even richer one from Alex Avdonin.

Feedly: A great news aggregator

Like most people I find myself going to the same six or so places on the Internet for news every day:   Digg, Yahoo Sports, IHT, CSMonitor, Globe and Mail, and so on (BAM,  roasted Sarah Palin)   All of them have RSS feeds (the little orange icon ).  Rather than having to visit page individually to decide if I want to read the articles, I can aggregate their newsfeeds to a single place.  As far as what that “single place” is, there has been a LOT of competition:  My Yahoo!, Google Reader, Sage, etc.

Of all of these tools, my favourite by far is Feedly.  It’s an add-on for Firefox (sorry Internet Explorer users, you have other options I’m sure).   It allows you to (with a single click within Firefox) to add a feed to your own custom little magazine landing page.  Usually RSS readers make your landing page look like an email inbox.  The layout makes it very readable, and the simple category support is easy to use.  From their website:

Feedly weaves your favorite content into a magazine-like start page. Based on Google Reader, Twitter and Firefox. Insanely Well Integrated.

Feedly Screenshot

As a side note, I love when developers of software have really interesting developer blogs, especially with posts about use cases and new features.

Twitter Music

I’ve been twittering up a storm, kinda.  On Monday, some people participate in #Musicmonday, which means they twitter about a song they would like to share with the world.  This is great, but in order to listen to the song you’d have to track it down.  So as a courtesy, the good people at twt.fm have built a web app to tweet your #musicmonday song with a link to either the complete track or a preview (whichever is available on imeem).  There are alternatives to this setup, some much more established.

twt.fm (it's a little prettier now ..)

WP Caching (after 2005)

Now something for those of you who run your own blogs on your own servers. WordPress has been a wonderful blogging platform, especially since they added automatic downloading and installing of plugins!  One of the plugins I’ve battled with in the past has been WP-Cache.  No new version since 2005.

Nobody told me, but now there is WP-Super-Cache, and it fixes much of the disagreements I had with WP-Cache. From the authors blog:

WP Super Cache version 0.9.1 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website. Major changes under the hood in this release, and many bugfixes.

I’d like to share some of the notes from his talk, as I have a feeling I’ll be going back to them in a few years when I’m an open source superstar.

Listening to People

When you have an open source project, your developers aren’t your work friends and users aren’t people you can call.  Thus there have to be very well defined and implemented listening channels.  Examples of which are (from lowest fidelity to highest):  crash reports, form-based feedback, bug-trackers, wiki’s, forums, IRC. All are important.

Ideas on voting:  in open source projects, voting (“+1!”) works as a great pacifier. It can be used to measure impact, severity, and interest, but should not steer what is of primary importance (or really used to make any important decisions on things).

Designing by/for People

Despite the fears and chaos, design-by-community has rarely steered Mozilla wrong.  Though it may be chaotic, the community has very strong and hierarchical leadership. Through effective leadership, good design ideas rise to the top.  More on that later.

Design-by-community is very different from, say, what Apple does.  Apple has one persona: Steve Jobs.  That’s great as long as Steve doesn’t miss any ideas (which he will), and if he doesn’t love things that aren’t all that super-great (Cover Flow).  Apple doesn’t have a succession plan for Steve.

Gave great example of the development of the UI features involving closing tabs in Firefox. Ultimately he admitted that Google Chrome got it right, Mozilla got 80% of the way there, as per normal :-)

Organising the Chaos

Expect chaos in open source.  Managing chaos begins with managing the design, rather than the code itself.   In any design decisions, opposite camps form very quickly – especially spurred on by half-finished designs being released as Alpha products.

To manage this chaos, you have to infuse some order.  First point of order is having a public and well defined road-map or a cheat-sheet of where the product is going.  Then build the product in layers, and introduce every major change as an Add-On first.  Educate contributors about “why” things are happening.

Discussions should be supported by research and data (possible cross-over with academia here, especially for people looking for small M.Sc. projects).

Disagreements ultimately end in negotiation, but never forget BATNA .. what’s the worst that will happen (typically “Screw you guys, I’m going to Opera”).  No you won’t.  And if you really disagree with the design change, write an add-on to correct it (yey!).

Leadership and Playtime

You need to identify and elevate in importance people who are “good” contributors – reward them with ownership of small modules in their expertise domain. Form small teams with well defined scopes of responsibility.  The leadership of these teams can be concentrated around these good contributors.

The modules of code are led and owned in a heirarchical manner. Ultimately, someone is the sole owner of the whole thing.  In the case of Mozilla, it’s Mike Connor (youtube) from Toronto, who is kinda hilarious.

Give your contributors complete and absolute freedom to explore the system.  They will reward you with neat things like add-ons to inject random stanzas of poetry into web pages, and localised versions of your product.

Localisation as more than Translation

This came out of the discussion portion, but he spent a great deal of time discussion on the localisation challenges involved with marketing Firefox in China.  He wrote extensively about it on his blog.

The bottom line is that localisation has to be more than translation: it involves studying the interaction of the people with the product, and changing the design of the browser.  Not the technical core of the browser – you should be able to adjust all necessary behaviours and design via add-ons. Discussed how Maxthon benefitted by being included on a very popular pirate build of Windows.

Lesson here is that customisation via add-on’s is ultimately key to solving many design problems.

It’s a little utility that enables a couple of things:

1. Let’s you to propose tags for images that don’t belong to you on Flickr. Contributing tags if you want to help describe the image is often not possible, unless: you’re the owner, you’re a contact of the owner, or the person has allowed very permissive tagging rights.
2. Keeps your search queries around the tagging area. Queries are valuable, because you as a user took the time to contribute that text at some point. Now you can leverage that same text when you want to tag an image.
3. Tag your images with the proposed tags, or delete the proposed tags.

If this sounds novel and useful, it is :) Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to prove in my thesis.

Installation

In order to do any of this, you need to:

1. Be using Firefox 1.5+, Flock, and any other browser that can run Greasemonkey 0.6+. This is an untested claim :-)
2. Install Greasemonkey in Firefox, if you don’t have it installed already.
3. Install my magical script: Flickr Search Tagging UserScripts.org

What happens to my contributed tags?

They get stored on a server (atthelib.com), attached to a timestamp, your Flickr account name, and the identifier of the photo you are tagging.

In terms of privacy and control of the tags: there is very little. This whole process is using the “Wikipedia approach”: everyone can contribute. The owner of the image can delete a contributed tag. A deleted, contributed tag cannot be re-added. There are some anti-spam measures, including limits to how many tags can be proposed at one time, in one day, from one location, and so on.

Anywho, this is an alpha release, so any and all feedback is most welcome (feel free to use the comment form below)! This is part of a Master’s thesis, so for now all rights and copyrights are strictly reserved.

Screenshot