Countries: 9 (including Puerto Rico)

Miles traveled: 116,843 (of which, 101,897 were on United)

Days on the road: 133

2010 will bring even more travel, starting with Hawaii in January.

After our kickoff meeting with Happy Cog, the design firm we selected, we’ve talked a couple more times and they’ve now started the design process. One of the things we all agreed on was that getting the first pass at a design out before SXSW would be perfect. Doing so gives us a long week of feedback from both members of the Mozilla community as well as members of the design community.

We’re now intending on presenting the new designs in about a week at the weekly design lunch (which you can watch this week and next on Air Mozilla). David will have more information as we get closer to next Thursday.

The first question we need help with is: What other sites out there do you feel does a great job from an experience point of view? Why?

There are lots of websites with great design out there. Hundreds and thousands. But which sites do you think have a great user experience? What sites should we draw on for inspiration with the redesign?

The second question: What words (category labels) do you feel would be meaningful to your audience?

The Mozilla community is huge. There are so many facets and so many different things we do. What words describe Mozilla in general? This can be a long list, but I think three to five words would be ideal. What’s the most meaningful set of words that describe Mozilla?

Besides those two questions, there’s a bunch of other questions that have already been answered and we’re looking for feedback on. Feel free to browse through the questionnaire and provide feedback on any of the questions and answers. Preferably, add your comments to the “Feedback” section of the questionnaire, but feel free to add them to this blog post, send them to me (or David) in email, or ping me (or David) on IRC.

The more I used iPhoto, the more I thought about how Firefox could borrow from a lot of the better geotagging concepts it has introduced to even the most basic of users. There aren’t many players in the geo* market to draw from yet, but the expansion is happening fast and entering the mainstream pretty quick.

Here are a few things I like about the geotagging implementation in iPhoto that I think we can learn from for Geode in Firefox.

Pretty Maps

It’s a simple thing, if you think about it, but Apple has decided not to use the traditional map view from Google Maps and instead use the terrain view by default. The terrain view, of course, still shows roads, cities, and everything else you might want, it just displays them with prettier maps.

Autofill of Common Places

When editing the location of an image that wasn’t geotagged (if you don’t have a fancy new GPS camera like I do), iPhoto autofills the list with common locations as you type. This is in the very same manner as the search box on google.com and the search bar in Firefox. The benefit here is that if you don’t care about the exact address, getting a general city is a few keystrokes away, no need to find it on the map. I’m not sure, but I bet this autofills with common places first, based on where you’ve been. If it doesn’t, it should.

For Geode, we could just as easily have a database of common cities and other places (landmarks and the like) to grab from and display user-entered ones near the top, storing anything the user enters client-side, of course. Doing so would enable someone who, say, frequents a particular coffee shop, to always have that location near the top, likely even in one stroke.

Built-in Search for Finding Specific Locations

If you don’t want to simply enter a city (or if it’s not found), you can click the “New place…” option in the drop down above. That brings up another sheet that allows you to search a map and find specific locations. You can enter cities, towns, house addresses, or even just browse the map and drop the pin wherever you want.

Geode can learn a lot from this. Whether we build in Google Maps or another map provider (or lots of them!), giving users the ability to search and find their specific location is a great feature. Any location that’s added will now appear under “My Places” for easy access.

Specifying a Range

The final feature I really like in iPhoto’s geotagging implementation is the ability to specify the range of accuracy. Translating this to Geode isn’t a far stretch at all. There are many who don’t want their exact address broadcast to websites and finding a decent UI for translating that is hard. iPhoto seems to have hit the right spot.

Overall, I’m impressed with the new iPhoto and I hope we can borrow from and improve on a lot of the ideas that Apple introduced in it when working on integrating Geode with Firefox.

Seattle, WA*
San Francisco, CA*
Lost Angeles, CA*
Memphis, TN
Austin, TX
Las Vegas, NV*
Bangkok, Thailand*
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Phuket, Thailand

(Locations with a * are ones that I stayed at more than once and on non-consecutive days.)

Total miles traveled (not including commuting and such): 56,940 (50,827 flown on United)

Not as many as I thought previously, but it looks like 2009 will include twice as much travel. I’m also considering switching my mileage to Air Canada instead of United for several reasons, though this year I *will* qualify for Premier Executive status which is nice. That might make it hard to switch… I guess we’ll see.

I plan to post about my month long frolic in Thailand soon enough – a month’s worth of photos take a while to sort through – but this seemed so incredibly strange that I had to blog it.

A couple days ago, AOL released AIM for Mac Beta 1 (henceforth called “AIM”), a completely rewritten version of AIM for Mac after letting the the original AIM for Mac languish for years.

I download AIM and was greeted with a package installer. Now, for an app like AIM, this is completely unnecessary. AOL: Just give me a disk image to open and copy the app out of. I’ve seen the negative press before from .pkg files; specifically, some vendors use them to install random files throughout your system even when they don’t have to. As a precaution, I investigate them now. Much to my surprise I saw the word “Talkback” in one of the files.

For those who don’t know, Talkback is the name of the crash reporting system Mozilla uses for applications based on the Gecko 1.8 branch (and before) including Camino 1.6.x, Firefox 2.0.0.x, and Thunderbird 2.0.0.x. It’s an old, fragile system – both the client and the server – acquired from the Netscape days. Talkback also happens to be a group of four systems I manage at Mozilla. When I said it’s fragile, I mean it. The server often falls over and we scramble to fix it. The client looks fairly ugly and doesn’t provide the features we need (such as compatibility on Intel Macs).

AOL couldn’t be using Talkback. Not that Talkback.

Of course, seeing Talkback anywhere forced me to install AIM and survey the damage.

AIM uses quite a bit of open source software. The quick list includes:

• MOKit
• Pantomime
• PSMTabBarControl
• NSPR
• NSS

The last two are likely familiar to Mozillians.

Overall, it’s a pretty happy list, though MOKit and Pantomime seem to be older, less maintained projects (side note: anyone know of a replacement for Pantomime?). But I’ll be darned if AIM doesn’t include Talkback, right alongside the open source software.

Talkback in AIM is different than Talkback in Mozilla apps. For one, AIM uses version 2.0b4, Mozilla uses version 2.0b1. For two, the size of the Talkback application in AIM is 888 KB to Mozilla’s 480 KB. That, of course, is likely a consequence of AIM’s Talkback being a Universal application. Someone has gone through the trouble of updating Talkback specifically for AIM. Why in the world they would do this, I have no idea. Especially when a better alternative exists.

AOL did an “okay” thing by updating AIM in spite of iChat being the de-facto AIM client on Mac. They just completely ruined it in the end by incorporating a crash reporting system that is clearly ready to break down any day now.

skate – shot on red