We spent a good chunk of time with a team from Invisible Elephant who came in to give us some training on making technical presentations, and then dug into the code on Day 2. It was great to have the geniuses at Mozilla Labs like Atul and Myk show us the latest Jetpack code as well as get the latest project direction from Daniel, Aza, and Nick, from which we could see the amount of careful consideration and effort that’s gone into the Jetpack reboot.

The best part of the whole experience, though, has to be the fellowship with the other Jetpack Ambassadors. The Ambassadors came from all over the world, encompassing Europe, Asia, S. America, and of course N. America. Each are involved with some really exciting projects and have each made a name for themselves in their respective communities. I’ve put together a twitter list of all the Jetpack Ambassadors and the core team members and invite you to follow them.

We also had the greatest number of Ubiquity core developers to have ever been in the same place at the same time, which of course had to be documented.

(More photos can be seen in my gallery.)

I had a fantastic time in MV and it was a shame I could only be there for such a short time. I feel honored to be a part of this group and am looking forward to speaking on Jetpack soon at an event near you!

Related posts:

1. Contribute to Ubiquity! No Coding Required!
2. Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists
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Time working for Mozilla: 6.5 months

Mozilla-related blog posts written: 69

Academic papers written on Ubiquity: 1

Ubiquity presentations given: 5

Screencasts made: 8

Most popular video on Vimeo: Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ, the Japanese Ubiquity 0.5 introduction video: 2252 views

Languages Ubiquity commands and parser now support: 6

Commits to the Ubiquity repository: 492

Other web projects started during this period: 2+ (Ten Grand Is Buried There, HookPress)

TechCrunch references: 2 (1, 2)

Countries worked in: 2

Mythical Kiwis worked with: 1

References to bugs I introduced as “glitcho”s: 1

Extremely disturbing homages to me and Django: 1

Friends made; experience gained; lessons on Open-ness learned; personal growth: priceless enumerable

Thanks to all who made this experience amazing, beginning with Aza, Jono, Atul, Blair and the rest of the Labs team; intern extraordinaire Brandon; the always thoughtful and friendly Mozilla Japan team; and of course the fantastic Ubiquity community! Please visit me in Boston—I should be around for a while.

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Mozilla Labs の実験的プロジェクトのひとつ、 Ubiquity の最新版、バージョン 0.5 を昨日リリースしました。 (Mozilla Labs 正式発表 [英文])

Ubiquity はウェブをより有益に、より使いやすくするために自然言語で Firefox を操作するインターフェースを提供します。ウェブ上のオープン API と機能が増えて行く一方でどのようなインターフェースが必要であるのか。その答えを追求した結果、テキスト入力の正確さとスピードと自然言語の心地よさを合わせたインターフェースができあがりました。例えば「麹町を地図で表示」、「これを (誰々) へメール」などを自分の言葉で入力してブラウザを操作することができます。新しいコマンド (動詞) も簡単に JavaScript で書けるので、拡張性も非常に高いプラットフォームです。

ユーザにとって「自然な構文」 (“natural syntax” [英文]) という目標の下、数ヶ月の研究の結果、Ubiquity 0.5 では複数の言語の異なる構文に対応できるパーサを実装しました。Ubiquity 内蔵のコマンドもローカライズ可能になり、0.5 ではすべての内蔵コマンドの日本語、デンマーク語とポルトガル語版が搭載されています。

リリース直前に Ubiquity の日本語紹介ビデオを作成しましたので、どうぞご覧ください。日本語モードでの使用方法も説明されています。

Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ from mitcho on Vimeo.

日本語サポートが入った Ubiquity 0.5 を是非ご使用ください。このインターフェースをより多くのユーザが「自然に」使えるよう、これからも開発を続けていきたいと思います。

Related posts:

1. Contribute to Ubiquity! No Coding Required!
2. Talking Ubiquity in Japan: 拡張機能勉強会にて発表
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The name tomoshibi means “torch” in Japanese. As a new Firefox brings new technologies and possibilities to all corners of the web, so too will the tomoshibi light up the night in Japan!

The site was designed and coded by Daisuke Akatsuka of the Keio Kakehi Lab (xlab), the same fine folks who brought you interFORest.

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2. Report from Mozilla Party JP 10!
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If you are reading this through a feed reader or planet, click on the permalink to view the banner embedded below:

Place one of these personalized canvas-powered virtual tree banners on your site to spread the word on Firefox 3.5, the Shiretoko Park and Foundation, and the power of open communities. All the cool kids are doing it. ^^

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I’m not sure what this is saying about me, but my immediate reaction was to go check whether tengrandisburiedthere.com was available. To my surprise, Microsoft had yet to snatch it up! A few hours later, here’s the result:

Go ahead, visit the site and give it a try!

Note: Not being a marketing guy, I just threw some text together to introduce Firefox. If someone has some better copy for this display, please let me know.

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昨日は文部科学省の先端ITスペシャリスト育成プログラムの学生の為に講義をしました。ちょっと長めの時間だったので、二つのトークに分けてみました。第一部は「オープン」と言うアイデア、特にオープンなデザイン過程の利点について。第二部は未来のインターフェースと国際化とUbiquityの紹介でした。スライドをここにslideshareにあげておきました。

Design processes in the open-source era オープンソース時代のデザインプロセス

Ubiquity: Interfaces and Internationalization インターフェースと国際化

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Asa Dotzler: Firefox, Mozilla, Humans, and the Internet We Want

The first talk was by Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development, who was last in Japan seven years ago for the launch of Mozilla 1.0. Asa’s talk took us back to the history of the Internet and its great impact on all people. He reminded us that the values which built the successful internet of now are those of participation, transparency, interoperability—all of which are currently threatened by the forces of commerce. We must work together to balance the forces of commerce to prevent exclusivity.

Asa argues that the web browser—as the window through which we access the internet—has an important role to play in ensuring the open web. 23% of the world uses Firefox as its browser, spreading Mozilla’s non-commercial values with it. He retold the Netscape 7.0 popup-blocking fiasco as an example of commercial forces working against the public good.

While Firefox doesn’t have the great revenue stream of its competitors, what it does have is an impressive community, as demonstrated by the Mozilla gumi in Japan. There are over 1000 contributors to Firefox code—almost 10 times the number of actual employees—not to mention the thousands of daily testers who support this development. As we look forward to Firefox 3.5, it will support over 70 different languages, thanks to the great work of localization communities and organizers.

Asa argues that the key to Firefox’s success—and the success of the open web—is the involvement of users in its development. Firefox is a better product due to this community process, and he encourages users to get involved however they can to continue this success.

Bob Chao (趙柏強): Activities of the Taiwanese Mozilla Community

Bob Chao is the Community Liaison for the Taiwanese Mozilla Community, MozTW. As his day job, he works for Creative Commons Taiwan at Academica Sinica and is also affiliated with Dharma Drum University’s School of Philanthropy.

Bob started off by remarking that the Taiwan is in many ways much like Japan: both use Kanji or Hànzi (漢字) for writing, both love baseball, and both have great senses of humor. Bob then gave a quick overview of the Taiwanese internet space. While there are no official numbers, Bob reports that Firefox has between 10-15% market share in Taiwan, and most are still using IE6. The most popular social networking service in Taiwan is not even on the HTTP web, but rather is PTT.CC, a telnet service. For this reason, there are two Taiwanese Firefox extensions to add telnet support. Taiwan is also a leader in mobile technology and Bob is looking forward to Fennec, the upcoming Mozilla mobile browser.

MozTW started in 2004 on the site moztw.org with hosting by the Open Source Software Foundation of Academica Sinica. MozTW now hosts a number of forums, wiki, and a planet as well as the popular Mozilla Links news blog. Some of their off-line activities include:

• Firefox Parties for major version releases,
• A “Firefox month” campaign for Firefox 2, including a tour of talks at different college campuses,
• Their own local Firefox mascot, Foxmosa (狐耳摩莎),
• Regular seminars and tutorials on localization, web standards, add-ons, etc.,
• Community education courses for basic web applications, and 自由新生代 (Freedom for Generation Z) seminars on open source software for high school students,
• A weekly gathering in Taipei called MozTW Lab,
• A monthly BarCamp-like gathering in different locations called MozTW Gathering.

On-line, they also run a Top Extensions contest one month after each major release. This past April they also ran a campaign called Experience IE8 (體驗 IE8) to highlight new features of IE8 which already existed on Firefox. This MozTW site became the first hit for Google searches for “體驗 IE8”. They are also currently working on Project GFX, a social network around Firefox usage, with a public beta planned for this summer, with the aim of further growing their local community.

In late 2009, the MozTW community will be involved with Mozilla Service Week and another 自由新生代 (Freedom for Generation Z) seminar series for high schoolers. Bob states that the MozTW community aims to help spread open standards and open content on the web, not just the Firefox browser through these efforts.

mar: Natural Language Interfaces and Ubiquity

mar is a very active contributor to a number of localization efforts and Japanese SuMo who has been working on various modifications to Ubiquity’s Japanese support. mar introduced Ubiquity with a quick demo and showed how easy it is to write new verbs in JavaScript and jQuery.

A linguistic interface has the advantages of increased efficiency, precision, and great extensibility. Like many software projects, however, its roots were in English. mar then gave a general overview of the functions of Ubiquity’s parser and his work on making Ubiquity better support Japanese. I finished up at the end by highlighting some of the features of the upcoming parser for Ubiquity, Parser 2.

Canvas Programming in the Cloud Computing Era (har har)

gyuque is a community member who caused a storm earlier this year with his demo of 3D rendering in 2D canvas. [slides]

gyuque gave an explanation of how different aspects of the 3D in 2D canvas demo were done, like how he accomplished texture mapping using affine transforms, and how the ray-tracing approximation was done on-line. He concluded that forcing 3D in the 2D is unreasonable and absurd—but that 3D canvas API’s are actively being developed at Opera, Mozilla, and Google. He demoed versions of his js touch demo ported to Opera Canvas 3D, Google O3D, and Gecko Canvas 3D (demo here). He compared and contrasted the various API’s and concluded that those who are interested in learning Canvas 3D technology now should try and familiarize themselves with all three systems.

Lightning talks

Mr. Horin (jus) MC’d a series of eight lightning talks with a gong to kick people off the stage after exactly five minutes. Without further ado…

1. Yuriko Ikeda spread the word on the J2 outdoor Mongolian barbeque parties,² with the first J2 held in 1989. The dates are announced on Usenet, but information is also on j2.org. It’s an open source Mongolian barbeque, so people bring their own food and take their trash back. The next Kanto (eastern Japan) J2 will be held on 2009-09-06. [slides]
   
2. piro of clearcode, the famed developer of about 25 add-ons, advocated for building unit tests into add-ons. Unit tests may be hard to write and difficult to maintain, though, so piro wrote UnitTest.XUL (abbreviated UxU) which offers a framework to make the unit testing task less painful. He then mentioned some successful uses of UxU.
   
3. dynamis of Mozilla Japan presented 10 ways to enjoy open source software: [slides]
   
   1. use it,
   2. talk about it,
   3. support other users,
   4. document and translate,
   5. test it, report it,
   6. suggest new features,
   7. design, illustrate, and mock up,
   8. write add-ons,
   9. develop: “bugs are waiting for you,”
   10. embed it into your projects.
4. potappo gave an update on the Mozilla Developer Center Japanese translation. He introduced MDC, described the ramifications of the move from MediaWiki to DekiWiki, and made a call for contributors. [slides]
   
5. Taro Matsuzawa (btm), head of Mozilla-gumi, gave a quick overview of his Mozilla hacking experience (including definitive proof that it helped him lose weight). He’s now more involved with community development, including running the regular Firefox Extension Development meetings in Tokyo. He would now like to help support people interested in hacking the core of Mozilla itself and hopes to dragoon more people into doing so.
   
6. Masahisa Kamataki from the Japan Open Office User Group showed off the add-on (extensions) functionality in Open Office. He first covered some news, including UNESCO’s promotion of Open Office and the promise of further interoperability with Microsoft Office in the future. He then introduced three Open Office add-ons: the Sun Report Builder, Sun PDF Import beta, and Sun Wiki Publisher. Add-ons can be written in Java and C++, but some do not require any coding.
   
7. Kazuyuki Ashimura of W3C discussed the multimodal web which goes beyond HTML + CSS. He described the architecture of MMI and gave a vision for such ubiquitous devices. He noted that the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group is currently going through a rechartering process.
   
8. An anonymous presenter presented some ideas for a new issue escalation system for Mozilla. He believes a bugbase could also act as a knowledge base to support users and act as a hub for developers. Some ideas are up on this website. He’d love to get people involved with this mozwiki project, as well as further development of bugzilla-ja. [slides]
   

Talk session with Hirotaka Yoshioka and Satoko Takita

The last session of the night was the talk session with Hirotaka Yoshioka of Miracle Linux and the Yokohama Linux Users Group and Takita Satoko (chibi), the Chair of Mozilla Japan, in the style of many Japanese radio talk shows. They stepped through the history of the web and recounted some tales from their experience in the early web. They discussed their struggles for and with internationalization of web technology and their initial reactions to open-source software. They noted that open-source projects used to be used only by those who contributed, but now many open-source projects are used by many who are not active contributors themselves. They discussed the status of various open-source projects in Japan and how they’ve attempted to get people involved.

Yoshioka and Takita finished up by giving their conceptions of the future of the web, as the internet becomes more and more ubiquitous and continues to change the way we live our lives. The internet will continue to develop and transform, and its continued creative development is best spurred through open and free development.

After the party there’s the afterparty

And with that, Mozilla Party JP 10 came to a close and the participants moved to the afterparty. I personally wasn’t able to make it, but makoto has some photos of the great food and various shenanigans up on his flickr.

Thanks to Mozilla gumi and the various sponsors for putting on such an outstanding event! It was great to feel the overwhelming energy of the Mozilla community here in Tokyo.

Related posts:

1. Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists
2. Talking Ubiquity in Japan: 拡張機能勉強会にて発表
3. This week on Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation

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Every day, more users are trying out Ubiquity, the Mozilla Labs experiment that lets users accomplish common Internet tasks faster through a natural language interface. As we live more and more of our lives on the web, there is a huge appeal to—and need for—a faster way to access and mashup our information.

But what exactly do we mean by a “natural language interface”? Is it just another programming language with lots of English keywords? Should the final goal be a computer that understands everything we tell it?

As we think about the future directions and possibilities of Ubiquity, we need to go back to our roots and understand the project’s motivations. With that in mind, here are some initial thoughts on the advantages of a natural language interface. The ultimate goal here is to refine the notion of natural language interface and to come up with a set of principles that we can follow in pushing Ubiquity further, into other languages and beyond.

Why language?

In his 2008 article in interactions, Aza describes a clear need for modern UI to move beyond monolithic do-everything apps into efficient, granular commands that can be connected to accomplish tasks. Hierarchical menus with an application’s every possible function are great for discoverability, but slow and inefficient as they grow. Aza advocates for the use of a familiar subset of natural language to this end. In his own words,

Words can capture abstractions that pictures cannot because language has an immense amount of descriptive and differentiating power. Abstract thoughts are exactly represented by the words that give them names. It is this power that comes to the rescue in specifying functionality.

In other words, language gives us the descriptive power to succinctly and creatively express our will, far faster than a series of menus, and with more freedom than a series of shortcuts or gestures. In addition, by tapping into the lexicon of our every day language, we make a direct attack on the learnability problem.¹

The natural syntax test

The ability to string different commands together is not a novel one—indeed, this is what more traditional command lines and programming languages offer. However, these technologies present a huge barrier to the layperson, even for languages with many keywords from English or English-like syntax.

Programming languages can be such teases in this way. Often the first bits of code in a language look remarkably similar to natural language (Python):

print "Hello World"

…but the young coder is quickly disappointed:

print map(lambda x: x*2, [1,2,3])

AppleScript is a language which tries to take this idea further and, indeed, sometimes AppleScript code constitutes readable English.

print pages 1 thru 5 of document 2

Dig a little deeper, though, and AppleScript also fails the “natural syntax” test. In fact, it can be argued that a language that looks like a natural language but differs in some important details can be even more difficult to use than one that is completely novel. Bill Cook, one of the original developers of AppleScript, makes this point in his history of AppleScript: “in hindsight, it is not clear whether it is easier for novice users to work with a scripting language that resembles natural language, with all its special cases and idiosyncrasies.”

If the interface’s syntax is too restrictive or, worse, conflicts with a user’s natural intuitions about their natural language, it immediately fails to be “natural”, no matter how similar the keywords or grammar is.²

Towards a natural (and forgiving) syntax

Aza similarly laments the relegation of text-based interfaces to the higher echelons of geekdom in his 2008 paper: “if commands were memorable, and their syntax forgiving, perhaps we wouldn’t be so scared to reconsider these interface paradigms.”

The key word “forgiving” above (emphasis mine) is two-ways ambiguous, both of which we want a natural language interface to be:

1. Forgiving as in “not difficult to learn and remember”: the syntax must be easy and natural for the user, encouraging experimentation and intuitive application;
2. Forgiving as in “not correcting or prescriptive”: the system should try its darndest to accept the user’s input, even if it’s not the most “well-formed.”

From an implementation point of view, (2) above can also be an advantage. There are many grammatical restrictions in natural language which, as long as the command is unambiguous, Ubiquity need not enforce on the user. Take, for example, the two statements:

1
2

print two copy
print two copies

I feel that Ubiquity should execute both of these statements with equal ease. The numeral “two” makes the user’s intent very clear, even though the plural of “copy” should indeed be “copies.” It need not be the job of the interface to decide whether a sentence is “correct English.” By assuming that the user is trying to communicate a valid and possible task, rather than throwing up an error, the system will be more flexible and more forgiving in the inevitable case of human error. The ultimate goal should be to help the user accomplish their task.

Conclusion

By developing a language interface which truly feels natural to the user, we can successfully bring the power of text-based interfaces to the masses. I feel the key to this “natural-ness” is a less restrictive and in fact forgiving syntax. While this goal akin to natural language programming may be daunting from an implementation angle, and it may indeed prove impossible, as long as the goal is to execute simple imperative commands, the scope of the target syntactic structures is limited.

Ubiquity as it stands is many different things for many people. The natural language guidelines above may feel too restrictive to many current developers for whom Ubiquity is simply a convenient new way to extend Firefox.³ This discussion also seems orthogonal to the mouse-based Ubiquity experiments. As users and developers, how do you feel about the potential benefits and downsides of these natural syntax guidelines? In the coming days I’ll look at some concrete examples of what this “forgiving” syntax would demand of Ubiquity.

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2. Testing Google’s Language Detection
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