Archive for August, 2011

File Under: Browsers, Mobile, Web Apps
Aug
24
2011

Mozilla’s WebAPI Wants to Replace Native Apps With HTML5

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Mozilla has launched an ambitious new project aimed at breaking down the proprietary app systems on today’s mobile devices. The project, dubbed WebAPI, is Mozilla’s effort to provide a consistent, cross-platform, web-based API for mobile app developers.

Using WebAPI, developers would write HTML5 applications rather than native apps for iOS, Android and other mobile platforms.

Mozilla isn’t just talking about WebAPI, it’s already hard at work. It plans to develop the APIs necessary to provide “a basic HTML5 phone experience” within six months. After that the APIs will be submitted to the W3C for standardization.

Among the APIs Mozilla wants to develop are a telephone and messaging API for calls and SMS, a contacts API, a camera API and half a dozen more.

If those APIs sound vaguely familiar it might be because the W3C’s Device APIs Working Group is covering similar ground.

So, why the new effort from Mozilla? Well, Mozilla’s WebAPI is a part of its larger Boot to Gecko Project, which aims to eventually develop an operating system that emphasizes standards-based web technologies. With that end goal in mind, WebAPI may end up somewhat different than what the W3C is trying to build.

It’s also possible that Mozilla simply doesn’t want to wait for the Device APIs Working Group. Mozilla wants WebAPI up and running in a mere six months, the W3C’s Device APIs Work Group is unlikely to move that fast. But “the idea is to collaborate with W3C and all players and together form a good solution, and not just dump it on them,” says Mozilla Technical Evangelist Robert Nyman in a comment on his post announcing WebAPI.

The dream of write-once, run-anywhere software is nothing new and, if history is any guide, Mozilla’s WebAPI efforts may well be doomed. The open source giant does have one thing going for it that most other efforts have not — the open web. Most write-once, run-anywhere attempts have come from companies like Adobe and were built around proprietary frameworks. WebAPI doesn’t suffer from vender lock-in the way some projects have. WebAPI’s main roadblock is convincing other mobile web browsers to support the APIs.

For WebAPI to appeal to developers, Mozilla will need Apple, Google and other mobile browser makers to implement the APIs so that WebAPI can compete with native applications. Before you dismiss that as an impossibility, bear in mind that Apple’s original vision for iOS app development was based around HTML applications, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a company more eager to embrace web apps than Google. Whether either company will devote any resources to implementing WebAPI remains to be seen. But if Mozilla can get WebAPI standardized by the W3C other browser makers would likely support it.

Mozilla’s plans for WebAPI are certainly ambitious, but the company is putting its money where its mouth is — Mozilla is currently hiring several full time engineers to work on WebAPI.

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File Under: UI/UX, Visual Design
Aug
23
2011

Creative UX Designs to Improve Web Forms

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Extra options in Gowalla's login form

We’ve looked at how the new HTML5 form tags improve the process of building web forms, but you don’t need to wait for better browser support to improve your forms today. Luke Wroblewski, web developer and co-founder of Bagcheck (which was recently acquired by Twitter), has a great post over at Smashing Magazine detailing various ways of improving the ubiquitous login form.

Pulling examples from Gowalla, which helpfully provides your user id photo, Quora, which immediately offers to create an account if your e-mail isn’t found, and his own Bagcheck, which is experimenting with a drop down list of usernames as you type, Wroblewski’s post is an excellent tour of some of the best UX login forms on the web.

There is one important qualification for these forms — the assumption is that your site has public, searchable profile pages, otherwise exposing user data (like username or photo) would be a privacy no-no. Of course it’s worth considering that, while exposing usernames in the login forms might not actually violate anyone’s privacy (any more than a public profile already does), that doesn’t mean your users won’t perceive it as a privacy violation.

For those worried about security the same caveat applies. If your site already has public profile pages then you’re not exposing any data that can’t be found with a simple Google search. Provided your backend security protocols are built correctly, making a more usable login form won’t make your site any less secure.

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File Under: UI/UX
Aug
22
2011

Audit Your Site’s Content with ‘Page Trawler’

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Need a 50,000-foot overview of your website? Page Trawler is a new web service that will crawl your site and give you a bird’s eye view of your content. While the service is currently limited to crawling the first fifty pages of your site and offering up a .cvs summary of those pages, the developers hope to turn Page Trawler into something much more useful.

If you’d like to try it out, head over to the Page Trawler site and plug in a URL. Note that you’ll need to give up an email address to download the report.

The Page Trawler project, which lists itself as alpha software, began life as part of a contest to build something in a week, but the developers have big plans to turn the site into something more. Among the ideas are integrated analytics, heatmaps, detecting orphan content and, our personal favorite, unlimited bourbon. We’ll be sure to let you know when that last one becomes available, but in the mean time if you’ve got ideas for Page Trawler, head over to the UserVoice page and let the developers know.

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File Under: Browsers
Aug
19
2011

Firefox: The Emperor Wears No Versions

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Mozilla has created a stir in the Firefox community by suggesting that the version number ought to be eliminated. The version number currently shown in Firefox’s "About" dialog has been filed as a bug. Instead of a version number Mozilla simply wants the box to read something like "Firefox checked for updates 20 minutes ago, you are running the latest version." Mozilla believes that eliminating the version number will reduce user confusion.

As is witnessed by an increasingly hostile thread in the mozilla.dev.usability group, pretty much everyone outside Mozilla seems to think eliminating the version number is a bad idea. After all, even Google Chrome, the browser from which Firefox has borrowed much of its new look and its new rapid release cycle, still offers a version number.

So why does Mozilla want to ditch the version number? In the words of Asa Dotzler, director of Firefox, "we’re moving to a more web-like convention where it’s simply not important what version you’re using as long as it’s the latest version. We have a goal to make version numbers irrelevant to our consumer audience."

We have a news flash for Mozilla: version numbers have always been irrelevant to your consumer audience. They have, however, always been very relevant to your developer audience. And version numbers are, whether it’s Windows, OS X or Linux, found in the About dialog. As Barry Able writes at one point in the now very lengthy thread, "I’d like to paraphrase the country song and ask, ‘What part of ‘about’ don’t you understand?’ This box is named ‘About’ because it provides information ‘about’ the application."

Developer Dave Garrett responded to Dotzler writing, "I don’t claim that showing the version number is the most important thing in the world, just that the about dialog is where it belongs and trying to change that feels to some of us like a fight…that doesn’t need to be."

Indeed removing the version number from the About dialog isn’t the point, but that small change is part of a larger goal — burying the version number so that Firefox users never know which version they’re using — and that goal is angering many Firefox users. The versionless software model works well for web apps — like Gmail or Facebook — but Firefox is not Gmail. No matter how much Firefox wants to ape web apps, it’s not a web app. In the eyes of most users installed software is judged by a different set of standards.

Even many who aren’t bothered by the move to the rapid release schedule Mozilla has adopted from Chrome, stop short of embracing a completely versionless Firefox. "While I understand that the UX team wants to make version numbers less important," writes Tyler Downer, "removing them from the About window is not the answer."

So what is the answer? Maybe the Chrome web browser.

Increasingly that seems to be where web developers are going, leaving Firefox for Chrome or Chromium (the open source version of Chrome). According to StatCounter, Firefox’s worldwide usage stats have been slightly, but steadily, declining since September 2010.

Here at Webmonkey Firefox has been falling much faster of late, losing roughly 3 percent every month for the last three months (with Chrome picking up the majority of those users). Three months ago happens to roughly correspond to Mozilla’s first rapid release cycle offering, Firefox 5.

With Firefox losing ground to Chrome across the board, snubbing anyone, let alone the web developers who were no small part of Firefox’s initial success, seems like a misguided strategy. But misguided or no, it seems to be the strategy Mozilla is embracing.

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File Under: HTML5
Aug
17
2011

A Quick Guide to Using HTML5 Forms

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Web forms are everywhere—contact forms, comment forms, sign up forms—these days you’d be hard pressed to find a website without a form. Sadly, HTML wasn’t originally developed with forms in mind and working with forms on the web is more difficult than it should be. Even something as basic as adding a date-picker to a search form requires JavaScript. But HTML5 forms will change that.

In HTML5 forms get a shot in the arm with dozens of new tricks, including, yes, a built-in date-picker. As with much of HTML5, the new form elements are designed to make developers’ lives easier by off-loading tasks like rendering a date-picker to the web browser.

If you haven’t had a look at the new HTML5 form elements, Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has a very thorough post examining all the new input types, attributes and elements for HTML5 forms. Even better, Nyman has plenty of examples, demos and sample code to show how each element works. As you can see from the screenshot above (taken in Opera) the default datepicker is pretty ugly, but fear not Nyman covers how to style the new elements as well.

Of course, as with all things HTML5-related, the new form tags are not supported in every browser. In fact, when it comes to HTML5 forms, Opera is the only browser that’s anywhere near full support. The developers over at Wufoo have a page devoted to tracking HTML5 form support in browsers, which is well worth checking out before you decide to dive in with both feet.

Like much of HTML5, support for the new form elements is uneven and it might be a bit early to rely solely on HTML5 form tools in production sites, but it’s never too soon to learn the basics.

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