Back in December 2001, kiwi UI designer "mpt" (Matthew Thomas) wrote a list of "the top ten usability problems in Mozilla" - i.e. the Mozilla Application Suite. It was endorsed by Dave Hyatt as summing up what's wrong "pretty nicely". He kept it updated until June 2002. The release of Firefox 3 seemed like a good moment to revisit his list to see which, if any, of the problems have been addressed in the past six years. mpt now lives in London and does UI work for Ubuntu, but was kind enough to provide up-to-date comments on the original and on my comments.
I may be the last to notice this, but: Twitter - the web command line?
However, I can't try these things out because I've forgotten my twitter password. I ask for a password reset email but one never arrives. I've been trying for the past six weeks, so it's not just Twitter flakiness. My help ticket has gone unanswered.
I know I definitely have an account and I know I'm using the right email address.
Anyone any ideas? What do I do?
At the London community Firefox launch party in June, I met a lady whose job is promoting O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expos.
The Europe Expo 2008 is from the 21st to 23rd October in Berlin, and she's been kind enough to offer a 35% discount to Mozilla community members. It's still not cheap - even with the Early Bird price and the discount, a conference-only ticket is €490 or £390 - but if you want to go, the code is webeu08gr3.
A problem: at events like the Firefox Summit, there is so much going on that it's not possible to get to even a fifth of it. And if you have a particular focus (e.g. Thunderbird, or QA) it's hard therefore to get a view of what else is going on across the project. Secondly, it's hard to know what a session is going to be like from a written description.
An observation: there has been a rise in "speed presenting" - lightning talks are now well established, and we have Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds each), and Conference Speed Dating.
An idea: At events like the Firefox Summit, why not have a "speedplugging" session first thing each morning, with no conflicting sessions, where every presenter for that day gets (plugging-session-length / number-of-sessions-that-day) minutes to both plug and summarise their presentation? The day with the most sessions at the Summit was Thursday, with 41 - which would be 1.5 minutes each in a 1 hour speedplugging session. Tuesday only had 20 sessions, so you could either speedplug for 1.5 minutes in 30 minutes, or give everyone twice as long that day.
There must be no messing with laptops and screen resolutions and Mac video adapter dongles, so either you have no slides - just stand up and talk - or you get to submit e.g. a maximum of three slides to a moderator who combines them all into one presentation (vital for speed) and runs it from their laptop, responding to cries of "Next!".
It would make it more likely that people would go to the most appropriate sessions, and give everyone at least a taste of what's going on across the project even if they are spending all their time in e.g. the Thunderbird room because that's their main focus.
What do people think? Would this be useful?
Having returned from holiday, I am instigating a period of discussion about what further changes might usefully be made to bugzilla.mozilla.org's product and component hierarchy. I expect this set of changes to be far less extensive than the first set.
A wiki page tracks all the currently-suggested ideas. If your idea isn't on there, please comment in mozilla.dev.planning to start discussion of it. Please let me know of any bugs filed on things to change which have not made it on there either.
Concrete proposals are everything - don't expect your idea to make it on to the wiki page unless you make one.
A contrast in approaches:
The IE team says "If you wish to be a part of making IE better by contributing great bug reports then please email us at IESO@microsoft.com and tell us a little about yourself including why you’d be a great beta tester."
The Mozilla team says "Our community is made up of a few different types of people... which ones do you want to be a part of? ... Anyone can help us test!"
(Emphasis mine.)
I'm now on holiday until the 20th of August, so please don't expect a response to any mail before that. :-)
And if you are thinking of burgling my house, don't bother - a) I have six housemates, and b) the burglar who visited while I was on the West Coast already looked through my drawers and didn't find much of interest.