The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

April 25, 2004

More SmartUpdate Screenshots

Posted by ben at April 25, 2004 3:32 AM

Comments

Ben, would it make sense for this UI to also be extended to include updating for plugins (like flash and stuff)?

Also, the puzzle piece icon looks a lot like (a pretty version of) the blue icon you get when a page displays a plugin you don't have -- perhaps this could be confusing? Alternatively, the two concepts could be merged, since the user probably doesn't care that their implementation is different... Just a thought anyway....

Posted by: vst at April 25, 2004 4:05 AM

i got one suggestion:
"choose the items you want to install..."
sounds better than
"choose the ones you want to install..."
IMO

apart from that it's really VERY cute ;-)

Posted by: pat at April 25, 2004 4:34 AM

These thoughts are petty remarks on an overall fantastic design:

Would it be worth making this dialog a fraction wider, so that the single word wrapped to the line (both within the list box, and the text underneath ("others." and "them." respectively) can be avoided?

I know the white bar at the top gives parity with the new format adopted by Windows wizards, is it worth the tradeoff in the vertical space lost (meaning you only get one and a half items visible in the list)?

As I mentioned before, these are only an attempt to be helpful and I have faith that the final implementation will be top notch irrespective!

Posted by: antony at April 25, 2004 6:11 AM

what? Firefox 1.2 is out? Where? Where?

LOL. j/k
Good work Ben. I hope the window will be a bit bigger so you can see at least two items and only a few linewraps. Looks cute so far :)

Posted by: sensemann at April 25, 2004 7:45 AM

Is it safe to assume that all your extension manager updates will be easy to implement in the other *birds? Looking forward to seeing the final product :)

I'd love to be able to see this making flash, real, or windows media plugin installation as easy as possible (I won't hold my breath on the latter one).

Posted by: Albert at April 25, 2004 10:24 AM

Antony: You're assuming the developer would somehow know the width of the string... That's not possible since Mozilla comes in various languages (105 localization projects at the moment).

Posted by: Jussi Kukkonen at April 25, 2004 1:26 PM

Why Web Services? Maybe, It would be better
a simple xmlhttprequest that take an RDF file from a directory that the extension owner has specified. In this way we don't need a central web server for the web services, but each developer can put a simple RDF file in a directory.
Using the web services via SOAP means that a developer that want to implement their own internal update servers have to produce a SOAP web service.

Posted by: Faser at April 25, 2004 2:23 PM

Looks great! IMHO the content area (list of updates) should use more real estate of the dialog. And I assume that there are tooltips for long URLs ;)

Posted by: Walter K at April 25, 2004 3:04 PM

I dreamed of this feature in Firefox...

...thanks for making it a reality!

Posted by: AkaXakA at April 25, 2004 3:12 PM

And hopefully the UI won't be as slow as the current downloads view, because I'd rather install extensions manually.

Posted by: r at April 25, 2004 3:36 PM

Should the default button be Cancel?
See also bug 240637.

Posted by: Bogdan Stroe at April 25, 2004 4:08 PM

Yes it would make sense to have this do plugins probably, but it's unlikely we'll get time to do that for this release. Maybe later. Once I'm done, file a bug.

Posted by: Ben at April 25, 2004 4:56 PM

could this feature be done in the browser's content-area instead of a dialog box? then, real estate worries could be put the rest, and string lengths would have to be insanely long in order to warrant concern.

... right?

Posted by: bish at April 25, 2004 9:41 PM

From My Point Of View The Checkbox Would Be More Usable (But Not Look Nicer, Of Course) When Shifted To The Right, Out Of The Icon. Otherwise It's A Bit Harder To Find Checkboxes. Especially Green Ones On A Green Icons.

Posted by: Maniac at April 25, 2004 11:49 PM

Perhaps the available updates should be categorized into groups (like in an expanded tree view, or simply a set of grouped lists). That way the user will be able to tell between updates for Firefox, updates/new installs for popular 3rd party plugins like the flash plugin and the Sun JVM and updates for extensions (should their be differentiation between mozilla.org developed extensions and 3rd party ones?). I'm sure this is all planned for the future, it looks like a great little update mechanism so far and looks easy to use - I wouldn't rely on the user invoking it though, a friendly scheduled (silent?) check for updates (with notification when updates found) would probably keep most people better updated. An optional feature of course.

Posted by: Christopher Cook at April 26, 2004 2:51 AM

Is there any plan on adding SmartUpdate to Thunderbird and other Mozilla projects like Calendar?

Posted by: blank at April 27, 2004 10:17 PM

Expanding on the suggestion above, I propose the wording:

"Choose any items you want to install..."

Where the word "the" has been replaced by the word "any." When it says "choose _the_ items," it sounds like I have no choice but to pick something.

Posted by: mike at April 29, 2004 10:02 AM

Looks great - looking forward to it! The wording of the last phrase needs to be changed though - it's got the word "install" three times!

Posted by: mcic at April 29, 2004 11:36 AM

Looks Great !

Posted by: jim at April 29, 2004 11:49 AM

It looks wonderful, easily the best 'auto update' sort of diaglog I've seen. The automatic handling of extension updates is extremely slick.

Interesting point about 'grouping' - ignoring Flash and JVM which have been initially discounted - having some headings for the types of updates might be worthwhile - nice as the icons are it would make it fullproof when an update is a core update such as the Firefox executable or an extension.
Then again, I can't help help feeling that 'full on' grouping (such as collapsable headings and catagories of extension etc.) would be overkill and unecessary since, when you thin about it, the number of updates appearing at one time will be minimal - surely it will usually be one at a time, and so make grouping fairly pointless (with the possible exception of post FX core updates where a glut of extensions might run to update their RDFs).

I would support the idea of group headings though, even if just to separate the Firefox core from Extensions more obviously than icons.

Looks lush though. Nice job!

Posted by: Ben Ward at May 9, 2004 6:00 PM

It looks wonderful, easily the best 'auto update' sort of dialog I've seen. The automatic handling of extension updates is extremely slick.

Interesting point about 'grouping' - ignoring Flash and JVM which have been initially discounted - having some headings for the types of updates might be worthwhile - nice as the icons are it would make it full proof when an update is a core update such as the Firefox executable or an extension.
Then again, I can't help help feeling that 'full on' grouping (such as collapsible headings and categories of extension etc.) would be overkill and unnecessary since, when you thin about it, the number of updates appearing at one time will be minimal - surely it will usually be one at a time, and so make grouping fairly pointless (with the possible exception of post FX core updates where a glut of extensions might run to update their RDFs).

I would support the idea of group headings though, even if just to separate the Firefox core from Extensions more obviously than icons.

Looks lush though. Nice job!

Posted by: Ben Ward at May 9, 2004 6:01 PM

Niiice! :)

Posted by: Chris Wood at May 27, 2004 8:50 AM

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