One of the cooler features of Firefox 3 (which is currently in beta) is the awesomebar, which is the nickname for the URL bar and its new autocomplete features. Madhava, one of Mozilla’s talented interacticians, noticed something neat: this means that the URL bar can be used as a shortcut to perform commands in web apps like Google Docs.
Here’s how it works: instead of navigating to Google Docs and clicking the “new document” button, you can just type the words “new document” into your awesomebar. These search terms will match part of the query string of a Google Docs URL, and visiting that URL will pop you right into a new document.
This reason this works in Firefox 3 is because the awesomebar autocompletes anywhere in the URL or page title, not just at the beginning of the URL like older versions of Firefox. For more information about the awesomebar, check out Deb Richardson’s post, or see some of my older posts: Firefox 3 Awesomeness and Firefox 3 Beta 1: Usability impressions.
I just tried something similar when I went to write this post: instead of navigating to my blog’s admin page and then clicking “New post”, I just typed “new post” into the URL bar. The first hit was on the title of the Wordpress “Create New Post” page. Sweet!
I think this is pretty cool. It means that Firefox’s URL bar is now a command-line for web apps. Of course, this is just more evidence of the command-line comeback and the URL as a user interface.
Some of you might remember my post from January where I talked about the innovative interface of the OLPC laptop. I wrote that post after talking to Mike Fletcher about doing an OLPC-related project for a course I was taking with Greg Wilson. It turned out to be a really fun and cool project, and now that I’m finally finished the course, I thought I’d post about it here.
So, you’ve probably all heard of One Laptop per Child. They recently started shipping their first laptop, which is called the XO. One of the unique things about the XO is that it comes with a built-in graphics tablet. Unfortunately, the system software doesn’t come with tablet support built-in. My project for the semester was to work on improving the tablet support — specifically, the API for activity developers, and the user interface for drawing.
The user interface ended up being the most challenging part of the problem, because the XO tablet is not quite like a standard graphics tablet. It has no hover mode, and it has an aspect ratio that’s completely different from the XO’s screen. In this video, where I explain some of the ways I’ve come up with to deal with these problems.
I’m planning on continuing with this work this summer, so if you’ve got a comment or any other ideas, I’d love to hear them. Leave ‘em here, or send me an email.
I’ve become pretty finely attuned to the difference between their markup languages. The OLPC wiki runs on MediaWiki, the same as Wikipedia. The version of DrProject that we’re using seems to use a variant of the MediaWiki syntax. Jottit uses Markdown format. In this wiki-markup-language-cage-match, here’s my decision:
Markdown rules.
Markdown wins, hands down. In fact, ever since I learned about Markdown a few years ago, I’ve been wishing for a wiki that would support it. Luckily, more and more are. In fact, even the new version of DrProject supports Markdown.
I won’t even begin to go into the reasons why Markdown is so superior. If you haven’t tried it out yet, give it a go.
