Heads up. The last part to the series I’ve written, entitled “Why Mozilla Deserves Our Attention”, is up on InsideRIA now.

In case you missed the first two, here they are.

Just a heads up, I’m writing a series of articles dealing with Mozilla and RIAs over on InsideRIA entitled “Why Mozilla Deserves Our Attention”.
Go check it out!

[Update]…and they’re gone, Matt in the comments was right. Didn’t quite have their game together.

Caught this news this morning. A service called Qtrax that allows unlimited, permanently free music downloads that apparently has the support of all the major record labels.

What I see as interesting is the client technology they are using and requiring for use. ReadWriteWeb mentions that it’s built on Songbird.

On the Qtrax site as well, they highlight in multiple spots it’s “A Mozilla Web Browser”, and a “Mozilla Based Browser”.

This is cool as it’s another use of Mozilla technology. Too bad it has so much press and is associating together Songbird, Mozilla, DRM, and Windows-only support not even including iPods. This is in direct opposition of some of the strongest aspects of Mozilla technology.

I’m continuing with my XUL Dark Matter series, which I started with TabPress, a visual editor for simple tabbed content. (Which is at 0.3 now and has theme support)

Now I’ll be looking at Phloneme. Phloneme is a desktop authoring tool as well. It is currently configured to work hand-in-hand with Vocab Collab. Unlike the other XUL projects that I’ve done, Phloneme and Vocab Collab are personal projects that I’ve done in my scant personal free time. I wanted to discipline myself in sticking with something and finishing it through, and this combo was the guinea pig!

(Now, evangelizing a project is a whole different beast and I’m not really pushing that real hard right now with Phloneme and Vocab Collab, but if you know someone interested in the subject domain, pass it along!)

So the whole point of Phloneme (Combination of flow and phoneme), is to write rhymes. It allows you to create, edit, save and publish rhymes directly to Vocab Collab.

The interesting part of the whole thing comes from the ability for the author to easily create structured content, and then push that structure online in the form of a special microformat I’ve created just for rhymes. The structure they add are user-defined rhymes.

The authoring tool allows the user to designate rhyming words in a highly visual way. This is all edited and kept track of through microformat style overloaded class attributes. The document format is XHTML. The editing is taken care of via the awesome Mozilla Midas Spec.

So when the user publishes online, you get all the structured rhymes inserted into the database. The visual display of the rhyme also matches that in the authoring tool, since they can use pretty much the same CSS and everything.

One of the cool advantages of the structured content can be seen in the search feature in Phloneme. You can search for rhyming words for a particular word, and it will return live results from Vocab Collab.

If the user simply wants to copy and paste some rhymes from a search result into his own document, an automatic attribution and link will be created, so once published it will link to the work it derived from. That brings up another feature that I’ve added, which is the ability to select a Creative Commons license when publishing.

This was just one of those personal project ideas that I thought would be cool. Don’t really know what to do with it now. I sure did learn a lot about XULRunner, XUL, and the Midas spec while working on it though.

If you would like to play around with Phloneme, go ahead and have fun. You don’t need a Vocab Collab account unless you plan on publishing. Bust a rhyme!

Getting started tutorial on Phloneme. (With some screenshots)

Phloneme

I’m not done with the XUL Dark Matter series, still have a couple to go yet!

Google’s new Android mobile platform chose Java for it’s application development language. But what’s lacking in developing a Java GUI app? Oh, but of course, something that Mozilla and Adobe have implemented already as part of their platforms, an XML based user interface language!

I made up the name of course, since I couldn’t find a name for it: AXUL.
The format looks a little like SWIXML without the Swing.

This reinforces the whole strategy of using a markup language to layout interfaces and custom widgets, taking advantage of a nice box layout mechanism. But one thing I don’t see is the ability to create new AXUL components by simply composing other AXUL components. (without a hosting Java class)

But why didn’t they choose HTML 5? Ha.

Just read the NYTimes write-up on Prism.

Interesting comments by Mark Finkle:

if the Web can’t do it, Prism can’t do it

and

We’re not asking Web apps to change at all.

So thats the big thing really. It’s an incremental nicety to classic web browsing. This is really not in competition to Adobe AIR at all.

It’s more in line with something like Mac OS X’s new Safari Web Clips. Yank an app out of the browser and run it by itself.

As a real-world example, imagine Google Analytics without browser chrome, and then look at the Google Analytics AIR app. Designing an experience more with the user in mind, than browser limitations. And this is using Open Internet protocols and APIs. Maybe that’s not as good as the Open Web though, not sure?

Wow, a lot of writing and discussion over Prism lately! And to think, all from a new name, logo, and a Labs post. (And I guess some weight from being an officially sanctioned experiment too.)

Of course, I’ll follow suit. Partly because I am interested in the technology, and partly because I am interested in how this relates to Adobe AIR, and Mozilla’s own technologies, like XUL. How is it integrated? How can some important features and functionality be integrated with HTML/JavaScript only?

I thought I would start by comparing the installation story with Adobe AIR. A lot has been made of how easy it is (or will be?) to make a web app into a desktop app. (A simple menu command from Firefox, and voila!) But that’s not the whole story. How does Prism get installed in the first place?

With Adobe AIR (which runs web apps as well on the desktop, built with HTML/CSS and JavaScript), there is a really cool installation story. You can create a special badge that a user can install your app (with permission of course) from a web page. The cool part though, is if they don’t have the Adobe AIR runtime, it will be installed auto-magically (with permission of course) along with your app! No need to direct them to a different website, instruct them to download something, then come back and get your app.

So how will Prism get installed? Sure, after it’s installed it’s somewhat smooth sailing. But getting software installed is a hurdle which should not be ignored. Adobe has excellent experience with this. Heck, installs of Firefox are dwarfed by Flash Player. So what’s Prism’s installation story?

I was waiting for this to happen. Didn’t think it would happen this soon though.
The very first Prism app built with Flex.

Speaks to the pervasiveness of the Flash Player, since in the first batch of Prism apps out of the gate, one is built with Flex. It also speaks to the flexibility and strength of the Prism idea, especially since it’s already wooing prime Adobe AIR candidates: Flex developers.

A Flex app as a Prism app?! This doesn’t fall in lock step with the shining goal of the “open web” as defined by some folks.

But, man wouldn’t that be cool if Mozilla had their own user interface markup language? Oh, wait they do, XUL. Does something like this, and that Mozilla doesn’t even mention XUL with Prism mean that it’s pretty much lost the fight to Flex/MXML?

Daniel has posted his unpleasant surprise about eBay using Adobe AIR for their internet desktop application instead of XULRunner.

Here are two lists attempting to document the application landscapes with each technology:
Mozpad’s Mozilla App List
AIRApps Adobe AIR App List

I have been working on an authoring tool code-named TabPress. This is being built on XULRunner and is meant to be a relatively simple tool to create small learning objects delivered in a tab container.

I am experimenting with a different way of editing structured/complex content utilizing the editor and overloaded images. So far it’s working decently, but I need to conduct some more usability tests to flesh things out further.

Some quick points about the app:

• Uses XSLT for publishing
• Publishes content using YUI components
• Opt-in Creative Commons licensing
• Streamlined SWF insertion
• Streamlined MP3 player insertion

It’s in an alpha state without any user documentation at the moment. Feel free to play around with it though and see whats discoverable. Just wanted to get this early version out there and make sure it doesn’t end up as dark matter.

Updated!
Now at 0.3, there has been some bug fixes, enhancements with visual editing capabilities and support for themes when publishing.

TabPress 0.3 - Mac UB (20.4 MB)

TabPress 0.3 - Win (7.6 MB)