Brij Charan’s Blog

Originally posted at: http://brandthunder.com/2008/brand-thunder-bolts-addoncon/

Mozilla Add-on-Con

Well this week Mozilla and Microsoft put on their Add-on-Con (add-on conference). The conference showcases the latest and greatest for the browser extension and addon market. The agenda covered talks from both a business and tech side…or as I like to refer to it, Suit’s and G33ks. Patrick, Mike Kaply, and I all attended this event.

Mozilla Open House:

We were lucky to attend the Mozilla Open House. I felt pretty excited myself, as it was ‘my’ first time ever visiting California…and the infamous ‘Silicon Valley’. I went with my friend and colleague Mike Kaply (http://www.kaply.com/weblog/).

The food-spread and drinks Mozilla put our was quite impressive. They had Mediterranean cuisine, snacks, and plenty of beverages. I was able to finally put a face to some of the names I’ve either met online, or heard of through the community. These included: Mary Colvig, Rey Bongo, & Mark Finkle.

And of course, a special thanks to Mary and Julie Deroche for helping me arrange the 2nd North West Moz Dev Group.

We were able to discuss our own interests in the mozilla community, as well as hear and understand the possible future of AMO.

I was also able to meet with some old friends from Dance Jam & Flock.

The Conference:

So the actual conference was pretty cool. It was hosted at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. We were able to establish some good network connections (business connections, stop thinking like a g33k ), and meet some more folks.

We also met Joshua Allen and Matthew David Crowley. They were both at the conference representing/evangelizing Internet Explorer. It was enlightening to see how understanding and receptive towards these guys were towards IE development and it’s inherit complexity.

However, we both understood that IE still represents a very large market share, and it needs to be supported more by extension developers.

We also heard some more talks regarding AMO and other mozilla technologies. Mark Finkle was able to talk more about various Mozilla technologies as well.

At the end of the day…

Overall, we all thought this event was quite a good investment. We met some cool people, made some good business connections, and learned more about the Mozilla/Microsoft World.

Mozilla Foundation Logo

Mozcamp: aka NorthWestMozDev Meets again!

Yep it’s our 2nd meetup for our own North West Moz Dev Group.
We’ll be meeting up in Victoria this time, so it was my turn to arrange the location etc.

One thing really cool about this 2nd meeting, is that it’s going to be completely sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation!  (THANK YOU!)

We generally gather a bunch of different people involved in the Mozilla community in one way or another, and we break out in small scrums and discuss various topics related to Mozilla.  Most of the topics will be development related, but some will be more non-tech, and related to open source in general.  These sessions are geared towards the North West Mozilla community.

To learn more about this meeting, see:

http://groups.google.com/group/northwestmozdev/web/meeting-2008-11-29

Our attendees represent:

• Brand Thunder (well of course!)
• ActiveState
• Mozilla Foundation
• Mozilla Messaging
• Mozilla Corporation
• Flock
• Songbird
• Adevia Software
• Others (don’t have links to their companies)

I’ll be sure to bring the camera and snap some shots.  I’ll post to flickr.

Well we’ve gone and done it.

We’ve made a festive winter holiday theme.  Not its not necessarily Christmas, because not everyone is into Christmas. 

So go ahead and download our theme bundle form here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9690

Well, it’s finally here!

The OFFICIAL Vanouver Canucks theme bundle for Firefox!

Yes as many of you know, I don’t like the Canucks…but this is the first one we’re rolling out that has this much effort from the team themselves. 
Not only that, but the Canucks themselves designed it!

Now this isn’t just a theme, but a theme Bundle.

What’s a theme Bundle?

What we (Brand Thunder - http://www.brandthunder.com/) made is a ‘Rich theme’. 

Why is it rich? well think about this…
Any regular theme you get for Firefox is just a look changer. 
What we do however, is take it a step further.
We try to connect the user with the team. 

With the Canucks we offer:

• Branded Browser
• Custom hotlinks to Official Canucks destinations
• Games
• Roster
• Stats
• Media
• Message Boards
• Press Round-up
• Fanzone
• Get Gear
• Live Feeds
• A Custom Video sidebar with Canucks Media
• A Custom News Sidebar which shows all the latest News Clips direct from Canucks
• A ‘lite’ theme when you need to turn down the look of the branding.
• And nice shiny tabs… ok I made these…but they designed the rest

Let me see it!

Where to get it?
Click the image above, or go here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9477

The Problem:

Like many people on this planet, I suffer from the disability, or disease…of forgetting names. 
Not just names of people, but songs, actors, movies.

I luckily have friends who are able to bail me out in certain situations.

For instance, one of my friend’s will message/phone/e-mail me saying they ran in to ’so-and-so’ from High school.
I’ll say something along the lines of…”Haha..oh ya, that’s interesting….”.
My friends knowing me well enough, will then proceed to explain who “So-and-so” is, because I have no idea who the person is.
Its the issue of relating that name to that face. (then I’ll have to use facebook, or a year book to figure out who that person is).

Now if that name was a number, i’d have no problem….but its a name…I’ll forget you quickly my friend
So what the hell am I getting on about?  Be patient my friend…read on.

So like people, I have the same issue with songs, I’m always like..”hey have you heard that song by..umm…that …dude…ette….that sings…its like…umm…hip hop”.
Now while humans are far more sophisticated in processing than computers…unfortunately my search criteria usually yields a response of …”Dude, wtf” (or some other colourful metaphor).

(seriously, what the hell is he getting at here?)

Ok ok, so back to topic.

The solution:

What saved my life is Shazam.  I’m in the car, listenting to the radio, and boom..its ‘that’ song.  Oh oh, what is it.
Well I don’t have XM satellite radio, I don’t have some fancy radio that tells me the song.  So I either have to have a friend next to me that knows this stuff, or ….SHAZAM!

What is Shazam?

Shazam is an iPhone application which will let you know the name of the song you are listening to.
How does it work?

• Well first it will record a sample of a given audio recording on your phone.
• It will then upload that recording to a web service residing on a Shazam Sever.  
• The server will process that information by …
• <insert magic here/>…
• …and in about 10-15 seconds, your iPhone will oh so wonderfully viberate, and notify you of the song you just listened to.
• It also boasts some cool iPhone features, and will let you see links and youtube related content for that given song.

I of course find this the coolest application ever. 
(and I’m sure the irritated drivers behind me will also ‘love’ this app as well…)

Now as I mentioned above, certain friends/relatives I have fill in the voids of my life where shizam cannot.
For instance, I try to quote a line from Simpsons or Family guy…I end up totally butchering it..but my friend or my cousin will usually correct me with the original ‘quote’.

Now they just need Shazam to do video tagging. 
(the process they use to find a given sample of sound is ‘tagging’)

Well that is it for now, thanks for reading.

Tags: Shazam, iPhone, appstore, music, tag, Brij, Charan

Ok, its been a while since I’ve blogged.
But this news really grinds my gears.

What is happening?:

So apple is suing the school because their logo resembles their logo….which is what?
Yes thats right…an APPLE.

Here are the two logos, judge for yourself.

So using an apple in your logo is infringing on apple?  I think not.
This is complete bs.  The logos are nothing alike. 

Check the original article here:
http://www.schoolvictoria.com/ApplesandOranges

If I saw the VSBT logo, I could tell right away that is not a mac logo.

And if anything, lets think about when people said… “Give your teacher an apple”, as a gift.
I think that saying predates the apple company itself.

Now we don’t know for sure if that’s the analogy that VSBT is going for…but I’m pretty sure there are many educational logos that use an apple.

So why not check out who else uses an apple in the education field?

But is VSBT the only Company using an apple?  HELL NO!:

Check out:
http://www.ceanational.org/logousag.htm
What do they use?  An apple…why?…well duh, its a signature element that is identifiable in the western culture towards education.

Or check out:
http://www.mcps.k12.mt.us/portal/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx
Again, another apple in their logo?  And what are they?…an Education based organization.

Hmm.
I sense a trend here.  Now I’m not gonna bother doing any more 30 second google searches.
Now lets see apple, what are they?  Oh wait, they have nothing to due with education.

Final Verdict:

Apple should give up.
They should take that stupid “I’m a Mac” idiot, who tries to identify to the average computer un-saavy user, and maybe rephrase the line to…

Infact, I decided to make my own farce image…(ya cuz no one else has done this before!..ha!)

Now of course, I’m also a Mac user, but I totally lose respect for the company when they pull sh*t like this.
They need to apologize, and rise above this. 

Thats it for now.  Thanks

Tags: Apple, Victoria, School, Lawsuit, Copyright, VSBT, Logo, Macintosh, flock

MozCamp

(aka: A lot of Mozilla developers in one room)

Well this weekend I’ll be heading to Vancouver for the Open Web Vancouver conference.  However, just before that, I will be attending MozCamp.
I will be wearing my Brand Thunder hat at the event.  Other guests include Activestate, Mozilla, Songbird, and Flock.

Activestate will be hosting the event with Mozilla.  Should be interesting to see who else around BC is developing in Mozilla.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with Shane and the folks at Activestate.  A very cool team and nice office space.

Please see the official Release from Shane Caraveo below for info on MozCamp:
(official post: ActiveState - Shane Caraveo: MozCamp at OpenWeb Vancouver )

MozCamp Vancouver, Sunday April 13, 12pm to 5pm

Location:
ActiveState
1700-409 Granville Street
Vancouver

I am glad to announce Mozcamp, an informal gathering of developers who
work on XUL applications and extensions. We’ll start the day with a brief intro from each attendee, covering what they work on and what they are interested in discussing. We can then self organize for the rest of the afternoon. Any topic is accepted, from development issues to strategy and beyond.

Vancouver and Victoria have a number of organizations that currently
develop mozilla-based applications, such as Mozilla Messaging
(Thunderbird), Flock, Songbird, Brand Thunder and ActiveState (Komodo
IDE). Representatives from these organizations will be attending, and
as well this event is also open to anyone who works on mozilla-based
applications, extensions, or related technologies. ActiveState is
providing the space, Mozilla is providing the pizza. Space is limited,
so please RSVP to Shane Caraveo (shanec at ActiveState-dotcom)
as soon as possible.

Tags: mozcamp, mozilla, activestate, songbird, brand, thunder, flock, brij, charan

So I just install ff3-beta-5 on my machine.
And…umm…well I’m not super impressed with the new skin.

I mean, for such a major release, you’d think they’d work more at the look of their UI.
But am I really surprised? Mozilla has been plagued with bad UI designs for the past few releases.

I’m not talking about HCI, i’m talking about how pretty she is.
And she aint pretty.

So here’s some design areas I think need work.

Colors:

What’s with the primary colors for our icons? It was done before, and its getting very dated…
If you compare the same UI on the mac, it looks great, but if you’re a windows user, it’s like you have to pay a penalty.
Sure they’re gonna say “well we tried to keep it looking like the native OS.”
Well…no not really…windows apps have had many sweet looking UI’s long before the osx even appeared.

There’s nothing saying that all the windows icons have to be ugly multi-colored ‘toons’ reminiscent of the Google logo…

The mac icons are great, they’re single toned, and straight to the point, why change this for the windows version?
Atleast keep the iconset the same, but change the icon button backgrounds to a different look.

Back/Forward buttons:

I understand whats going on here. Making the back button larger than the forward…
<cough mumble=”internet explorer”/>
…because it’s generally used more than the forward button. But the way its styled doesn’t really match the rest of the Design.
Not to mention they’re HUGE.
What would be nice is to decrease the oversize of those cojoined buttons, and maintain the same ratio as before.

Ya you may say, “switch to small mode.”
I did, but it is still larger vertically than the other icons.

Popups:

Context based popups:

• Fav-icon on the urlbar
• Bookmark ’star’ <cough mumble=”rip off”/>
• etc

These popups look pretty ugly.
You click the urlbar favicon, and you get this ugly grey icon that has what appears to be a traffic cop with a book (i’m guessing it’s supposed to be border patrol with a passport, or identity verification.)
But c’mon, did we go back 7 years when the icon design. This looks like it came from the days where photoshop unleashed those many variants of the emboss effect and every amateur website started to use them.

Yuck!

Final thoughts:

Its probably not mozilla’s fault. Having worked with 2 different mozilla browsers already, I think that there may just not be the organization necessary on the UI-Design front to keep everything to par.

But atleast we have addon themes to make this mix-mash of design go away
I’m sure I’ll complain about some more stuff later.

In the mean time, if your on windows, sorry for your next round of bad graphics

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: Brij, Charan, Browser, Firefox, Design, Review, Beta 5

So I was trying to do some moz building the other day, and it seems that everything just stopped working.
I couldn’t build anything.
I started to google the error, no real luck.

So then I put on the old computer technicians hat, and tried to determine what ‘changed’ the state of my machine in the last few days.
Then blamo, it hit me…I just installed the new iPhone sdk, which includes Xcode 3.1 (beta), instead of xcode 3.0.

I figured that probably was it.  I did some more googling and learned that mozilla also encountered this, and that there was a patch out to fix the build problem.  However the build problem was completely different than mine, but I tried their patch anyways.
Well their patch failed, so I was back to almost square one.

I then decided to google how to ‘uninstall’ xcode 3.1 (beta), found the command (one line too!)…and then I re-installed xcode 3.0.

Well everything built again.

So those out there that may whish to build some sort of mozilla app, make sure you research to see if there are any fixes to this issue…OR…run xcode 3.0 and 3.1 on the same machine.

’nuff from me.

ttyl.

Tags: Mozilla, xcode, 3.1, mac, os, 10.5

Yes, thats right.

Google has helped allow Linux users to run Photoshop CS2/3.

I’m guessing the other adobe apps may work as well.

How?  Through Wine.

What will this do for the linux community?
Well it allows linux users who have been plagued by a general lack of Graphics applications to finally get back into the graphics design game.

Of course, i’m not 100% sure about other areas you may need support for.
Like for instance, wacom support (there is some basic functionality, but I don’t know how this transitions through wine.

Also proper printing color management, seeing how adobes color management only works with windows/mac, I’m not sure if it’ll be supported through wine either.

But atleast you get to use photoshop in Linux, and thats always a good thing, considering Gimps limited toolset.
(yes, I know I’m going to get comments from Pro gimp users, but I’ve had this debate many times, and I can tell you that gimp still lacks many key features that photoshop and other graphics packages have.)

Check it out, read the article here:
Google behind Photoshop’s new Linux compatibility | APC Magazine

Another step in the right direction by google.
Notice the big players Like Google and MS make their strategic moves now?  I do…

Tags: Google, Adobe, Photoshop, CS2, CS3, Linux, Wine