Status update, weeks 41 – 42, 2009

Weekly summary of Firefox and Plone work.

From the dept. of status update slacking, the two previous weeks:

Plone

• The new theme for Plone 4 was merged, along with all the other improvement branches that were proposed for this release. Impressive work by everyone involved in Plone 4! It’s looking to be a great release.
• Completed my keynote presentation. More than a week before I’m actually presenting. I know, crazy.
• Worked with Eric Steele and Israel Saeta Pérez to improve the roadmap on plone.org, which is now fully converted to Trac. Still needs better descriptions, but the hard part is done. Thanks, guys!
• Worked with Jon Stahl to identify some opportunities around improving plone.org and our evaluator experience. Looking forward to taking a crack at this with Joel Burton after the conference is over.

Goals for the coming week

• Finish my Plone Conference talk on advanced CSS layouts at Plone Conference 2009.
• Get Deco in shape to demo it at the conference keynote.
• Finish article on how to improve the social aspects of the conference for people that are new to the community.

Firefox

• Prioritized the UX work we want to land in Firefox 3.7. There’s now a list at the top of the UX index.
• Did some investigations on how Chrome handles its installer experience on Windows as part of making the experience better, similar to the proposed Mac installer improvements. Findings:
  • Chrome Frame requires admin privileges to install, Chrome itself does not. Counter-intuitively.
  • Tested the new Firefox installers on a couple of locked-down corporate computers, and it turns out you can install it in much the same way as Chrome does their install.
  • We should probably still try to make the install experience better on Windows, but doing the same as Chrome is probably not a good idea — their installer failed on several test computers.
• Worked with Alex Faaborg to get the first draft of site-centric preferences improvements out, he has posted them internally for now, but look out for them soon. Props to Alex for doing the legwork on the mock-ups.
• Was going to produce a screencast to demonstrate the effect of the prioritized tab loading in Firefox 3.6 with Paul O’Shannessy, but there were some loose ends to tie up first, so we agreed to do it early next week instead.
• Worked with Jinghua to get things ready for Taskfox user testing. We now have a consent form, and a rough outline of the upcoming user studies.
• Got closure on the remaining Taskfox issues — props to Blair for fixing the last remaining bugs that were in the way of user testing. There’s a new build you can (and should!) test.
• Did some investigation around the status of inline PDF display for 3.7. It’s 2009, we should really have this by now. There were patent issues in the past, but need to figure out the current situation.
• Had a great conversation with John Lilly about Firefox strategy, where UX should focus — as well as demoing some of the things we want to do in Firefox 3.7 & 4.0. Will talk about this in the UX team meeting this week.
• Finally got back to the Resource Package work again. Hoping to wrap up a version with the local storage manifest variant with Vlad this week.

Goals for the coming week

• Finish the third draft of the Resource Package spec, hopefully with input from Vlad, jst, bz.
• Continue refining the preferences redesign with Faaborg.
• Write up scripts for the user studies of Taskfox, hopefully with Jinghua’s valuable input.
• Work with the rest of the UX team on splitting our list of UX focus areas for Firefox 3.7 into more detailed requirements, and file bugs so it can be tracked.
• (Aspirational, 4.0) Work on the tab sidebar mock-ups.
• Wrap up the things that can be completed before I head to the Plone Conference in Budapest.

Other

• Falling down stairs on your back/shoulders/elbows should be avoided — or at least be drunk if you do so, it’s more embarrassing when you’re not. Ask me how I know. Ow.
• Educate world on glorious feeling of using en-dashes and hair spaces in headlines. Dashing!
• Hopefully getting together with Mike & Nicholas this week to save Mac window management from itself. Stay tuned.
• Around 400 people registered for this year’s Plone Conference. It’ll be awesome, can’t wait.