Status update, week 38, 2009

Weekly summary of Firefox and Plone work.

Firefox

• Led a session on reorganizing the preferences window, posted the notes to the wiki.
• Looked into excessive CPU usage on multiple idle Gmail sessions, found to be a real issue in repaint + garbage collection, filed as bug 515215.
• Expanded the UX index with help from Boriss, added description and references for all the areas we’re looking at.
• Worked with Boriss and Faaborg to record material for a short screencast on the new UI in 3.7 and 4.0. Faaborg to do further edits and get back to us.
• Presented on “Improving the Download Manager” at Design Lunch with the goal of getting more input what people like and want to keep from the current approach. Great discussion with lots of new ideas, which were added to the wiki.
• Spoke to Chris Beard about next steps for Taskfox — we need to decide whether Labs should own it from here on and use the remaining bugs as a way to bootstrap, or whether Blair should just fix the minor issues so we can start some user testing. Expecting resolution sometime this week now that people are back from travels/vacations.
• Did more tests of Prioritized tab loading using zpao’s extension — help us test it! (More background info)
• Put up a blog post about improving the Mac install experience, got coverage at Daring Fireball, TUAW, OSNews, as well as the French MacGeneration.
• Helped clarify and direct the conversations around the proposed 3.7 and 4.0 design directions on the list (link)
• Published the video from the all-hands session on 3.7 & 4.0 design directions.

Goals for the coming week

• Put up a blog post describing how we’ll tab matching in the URL bar for 3.7
• Publish an updated article on the decisions for Mac installer improvements.
• Make sure the Projects list is up to date with everything I’m currently working on.
• Finish the third draft of the Resource Package spec, hopefully with input from Vlad, jst, bz.
• Get closure on next steps for Taskfox.
• Work with Stephen Horlander on refining the new Mac theme for 3.7 & 4.0.
• (Research) Get data from the tab experiments from Jetpack, analyze what they mean.
• (Research) Gather loose thoughts around session restore improvements.
• (Aspirational) Start working on a first UI mock-up for how the prefs reorg could look like. Coordinate with the add-on manager redesign.
• (Aspirational) Work on the tab sidebar mock-ups.

Plone

• Improved the new theme for the upcoming Plone 4 — one of the major changes outside of the actual CSS work was to revert to using XHTML for now, and do a proper HTML5 implementation for Plone 5 to minimize the impact to existing themes.
• Did some initial planning with Jon Stahl & Joel Burton for a sprint to improve the evaluator experience of Plone — aka. approachability (installing, getting started, etc).
• Dug up some old notes on how to build the next-generation LinguaPlone for multilingual content. Huge thanks to Jonathan Lewis for sending me his copy, since these had since disappeared from the OpenPlans/CoActivate site.

Goals for the coming week

• Prepare keynote & layout talk for Plone Conference 2009.
• Publish an article on how to improve the social aspects of the conference for people that are new to the community.
• More improvements to the Plone 4 theme based on Martin Aspeli’s feedback
• Get back into Deco development with Rob Gietema.