41–50 of 73 posts
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Ubiquity continued development recently https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-...
I don't think so. Only major thing I see is the homepage URL changed to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity
Version 0.6.2
Released July 19, 2012 1.0 MB
Works with Firefox 13.0 and laterAmazing that after all these years, the mouse, perhaps the most iconic symbol of the PC, is being ditched for just about every application.
A mouse is OK for expressing verbs, not so much nouns or adjectives.
"Not knowing the parameters" can come in two main forms. The first is when the user simply may not have used the feature enough to be able to instantly recall all of the parameters needed and how they should be set. For example, a print dialog displays three or four commonly tweaked parameters to a user, and gives easy access to as many as several dozen more advanced parameters. This is far more useful than a CLI would be, except perhaps to a very small minority of users.
The other form is when you may know what the parameters are, but need feedback to choose them correctly. For example, resizing a window is well-suited to a mouse. Obviously you know that the four parameters are the height and width of the window, but few people can glance at their screen and say "Oh, I need this window to be 348 pixels wide now".
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Ah! Thanks. So if I say "responsive" in relation to a computer, are people now going to think I'm talking about webpage layout? To me, "responsive" means the amount of time between when I issue a command and when the computer has completed what I asked it to do.
I fail to understand why this phrase is offending you so badly. Let’s look at a more interesting example. The current design of mozilla.org is a responsive design. I want to see how the headings will show up on a smaller screen. If I’ve been working on the page, I would likely know some of the IDs and structure used in the page, so I could enter a command like: "Responsive design" is a fairly established noun in the…
paraphrasing the dictionary definition
the meaning is similar in both contexts you mention.
indeed if we asked someone who did not know what an "os kernel" was, they might think of the meaning they do know: e.g., the innermost part of a seed of a cereal or nut
and they might guess based on what they know.
have you ever heard the phrase "the computer program has become non-responsive"
e.g. a graphical web browser such as Firefox
Mozilla developers are not committing "crimes against nature". But nonetheless they do create some annoyances that millions of people have to endure. That's not the developers' problem, it's the users' problem. Some might search for solutions to the annoyances. Such solutions could be quite valuable to users. They might read things that are meant for "web developers" because that is where the annoyances come from. They are created by web developers.
It would be nice if the command line supported a shell-like language that would allow you to easily parameterize and script these Firefox commands. So instead of running one command at a time, you could create files that ran commands sequentially, iteratively, etc. There could even be syntax that sets variables to the values of arbitrary JavaScript expressions (which would give you access to any DOM attribute, for ex…
perhaps use javascript for that?
It's kinda sad that the world seems to have forgotten Tcl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl
In the case of tcl, you invert C functions (or another language with C-style calling conventions) to be callable by default as commands. You then have the [expr ...] escape hatch to toggle back to the non-default programing mode, that gives you expressions, arithmetic, and other general purpose programming language features.
I'd really love to see a Tcl++ type thing. It would be super cool if applications could easily drop a console, like this one from Mozilla, into their app. Bonus points if it comes complete with a help system, UI, completion, etc.!
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I save ESC2J to a file and my "cls" is simply another file consisting of cat file1 in my PATH. Only because sometimes printf or some other way to print ESC's might not be available. The idea of starting up X11 so I can start the super-sized code complexity experiment that calls itself "Firefox", all just to get to a command line struck me. The fact they are calling the approach at Mozilla as "responsive design" I fou…
They identified the Mozilla home page as an example of responsive design, not Firefox. The feature being demonstrated with that example was the ability to "resize" the browser window to see how a page built with "responsive design" in mind would be rendered with, say, a mobile device with a smaller screen. Pretty useful, if you ask me.
For example if I have Firefox running in Xvfb it would be nice to be able to issue remote commands (an early version of Mozilla did have something like this if I recall correctly: -remote), such as the commands they are implementing for this "graphical command line". It would be convenient to easily dump screenshots to image files without having to run something like Crowbar.
Anyway at least they are starting to acknowledge that not everyone uses a mouse or prefers using a trackpad over hitting keys. I mean keys as tactile buttons, not images of onscreen keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad.
I wonder if this shares code with the promising-but-defunct Ubiquity project? https://vimeo.com/1561578 Edit: if you don't feel like watching a video, here's what it's about: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/ubiquity-in-depth/
Wow. This may make switch back to Firefox from Chrome as my develoment browser. Bravo, Mozilla!
The other nice thing about FF for devs is that Chrome is a little too robust sometimes. I've had some egregious errors in my markup and Chrome still manages to do what I intended. But then it's broken on every other browser.
As far as I've experienced, anything that runs perfectly in FF runs perfectly in Chrome. But the reverse is not true.
I'm loving this. It didn't seem like the most useful feature when I first heard about it, but it seems pretty well implemented. (Using the current nightly). The pagemod and inspect commands seem super useful. I hate having to click around an inspector to find the thing I want -- "inspect #foo > h3" just seems so much easier.
You made me investigate HN dom structure and it's quite scary !
If you have to interface with HTML or CSS directly and frequently while writing your application, then you want to make sure your HTML and CSS are super clean and maintainable. But, as PG has said before, HTML can be treated like object code! There was once a time when everyone had to write super clean and maintainable assembly code, but now you rely on a compiler.
Ever look at compiler generated assembly code? It's quite scary!
Amazing that after all these years, the mouse, perhaps the most iconic symbol of the PC, is being ditched for just about every application.
It maybe iconic, however, it's a horrible device for pointing from the point of health and ergonomics. And even with all the improvements, I've never seen a mouse handled more accurately than a proper trackball (see Logitech M570). Of course, that depends on the user.
In addition, good keyboard controls can make or break many programs. If you take a look at a program in the adobe suite, you'll normally notice two things. First, that using the program with the mouse generally involves awkward mouse manoeuvrings. However, keyboard shortcuts can eliminate 90% of this.
Third, do you personally recommend using a trackball? I've been experiencing some mild wrist pain lately and am looking for something better than a mouse.