• Full Page Zoom

    June 9th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 20 comments »

    In my opinion, one of the coolest features of Firefox 3 is full page zoom.  From the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.

    I’ve used it so many times when images or text are small and I want a scaled up view of the details.  Also, I have to admit that sometimes my eyes get a little tired and it’s nice to scale text to a bigger size so I can read without focusing too closely.

    How do you use Full Page Zoom?

    So, before we get too far into it, here’s how to use full page zoom…

    I use a Mac and love keyboard shortcuts, so I press Command and the “+” sign to zoom in.  Command and the “-” sign pulls me back out.  You can also go to the View –> Zoom menu and zoom in and out from there.  When hitting the command “+”, I can zoom in over and over again until the image or text I am viewing scales up to the desired size.  Once I am finished, I hit command “-” to take me back to the state I want.

    (On a PC, you can use similar keystrokes with Ctrl + and Ctrl -.  Or, go to that view menu again…)

    And, if you prefer it the old way, where you can zoom in on just the text, select the “Zoom Text Only” option under the View –> Zoom –> Zoom Text Only.  With that setting activated, you’re back to zooming just text.

    One final note, when you zoom in and out, the state of that page persists.  If you navigate away from the site but come back to it later, the zoom state will remain.  This can be very handy for many reasons, not the least of which is accessibility.  Readers who prefer a much larger text for reading will not have to re-zoom every time they visit their favorite sites.

    What’s in that tide pool?

    Let me give an example of how I have used this recently.  My friend Jordan puts all of his wonderful photography on his site he calls Nomadic Planet.  Recently, Jordan has started experimenting with high dynamic range photography (or HDR for short).  HDR allows photographers to take several photographs with different light settings to create a more dynamic range of exposures.  Nifty software allows the photographer to then combine all those shots into one, resulting in a final photograph with a depth of field that shows great detail in the foreground all the way to the background.

    Jordan describes this as a beautiful sunset at the end of the road in north Kau’i at Ke’e Beach State Park in Hanalei, Hawaii.  It’s a 3-exposure HDR taken on April 27, 2008.

    Ke'e Beach Sunset 1 Hanalei HI USA - April 27, 2008 A beautiful sunset at the end of the road in north Kau'i at Ke'e Beach State Park. A 3-exposure HDR.

    But, I really like tide pools.  And, because Jordan’s HDR technique provides so much detail in the entire landscape, I want to zoom in on the bottom left corner to see if I can find any little shells or starfish or whatever.

    Voila, FULL PAGE ZOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

    Here’s the shot from my browser (I uploaded the screenshots to Flickr to allow me blog this…)

    Anyone see a starfish?  I don’t.  But, thanks to full page zoom, I was able to get very close to the area I wanted to investigate.

    Want more technical background on it?

    Robert O’Callahan did two interesting posts about this feature a while back.  The first post you might want to read came in February of 2007 and discusses a patch landed by Eli Friedman that “is a major cleanup of the way we work with length units in Gecko.”  The second post worth reading again discusses the behavior the zoom implementation.

    Without a shred of knowledge about this computer science behind this feature, I found these two posts really interesting.  Thanks to Roc for passing them my way as background.

  • Community Giving and Empowerment stuff…

    September 20th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    What have I (we) been doing lately?

    We tried to streamline the discovery/review process a bit.  With the new evangelism team, I will be working very closely with colleagues like Asa, Mike Shaver, mfinkle, jresig, sheppy, and dria.  (What an honor!)  And, as a part of this new team, I am able to triage requests and present ideas more quickly…resulting in a faster turn around time.  With a review process that’s been in place for over a year, it is a nice addition to be able to move a bit more swiftly through requests.

    In the past few weeks, we have reviewed a number of new ideas:

    We will be providing funding for an accessibility meetup in October.  Here are some deliverables from that meeting:

    • Live region and Javascript application behavior in Orca screen reader
    • Rich text editing in Orca
    • A strategy and architecture going forward for Jambu on screen keyboard
    • A system for automated testing
    • A minimally accessible Chatzilla 

    We will also be helping the “Rhino”project by setting up a VM on our community box in Amsterdam.  The VM will host a fee license given to Rhino by Atlassian for their continuous integration product, Bamboo.

    Now, we are looking at individual contributor requests.

    …Still looking for ideas to support, but we are really trying to find tools to provide to the community that will benefit larger groups of contributors.  Setting up a VM on a community box is an idea that makes sense because it allows many people to access it.

  • My Mozilla 24 Wrap

    September 18th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    Returned from Tokyo yesterday after a whirlwind tour… Alex Polvi and I pulled some “almost-all-nighters” working on fun projects and participating in Mozilla 24.

    To see all the moving parts of Mozilla 24 happening at once, and to witness the amazing teams in Japan, Thailand, Paris, and Stanford all working tirelessly to pull off this event was both awesome and exhausting and so much more. Repeatedly, I would get IMs, emails, IRCs (is that a term?) mentioning what a creative and interesting event it was while 24 was taking place. Messages came to me from India, Germany, U.S., France, Japan — all remarking on the coolness of what was going on. I believe we have to give a big “congratulatory-blog-on-the-back” to Chibi, Kaori, Gen, Kohei, Masayuki, Eiko, Shimono, and all the tons of others who made this idea a reality.

    I took part by organizing the accessibility track, as mentioned in my last post. Pretty much, it happened with relatively few snags. From my location at Keio University in Tokyo, we were using Skype to dial into a conference call that I had set up for all the panelists to dial into so we could have a live phone conversation. Skype dropped our call once in the middle of Tim Keenan’s presentation. Aside from that, everything else seemed to go pretty well. If you are in my timezone in California and did not get up at 4:50 AM to watch our discussion, here are all the presentations (or as much as I can provide):

        1. Video presentation by Dr. Nagarjuna G and Krishnakant Mane from the Homi Bhabha Centre in Mumbai
        2. Video presentation about Access Firefox by Ken Saunders
        3. Aaron Leventhal’s presentation: Aaron L’s Moz 24 presentation
        4. Tim Keenan’s three links about Mozilla’s QA for accessibility:

    What were some outcomes of this session?

    First of all, it was definitely nice to get a few of the players in the Mozilla accessibility world together for a session. I think having each person chat about their specialties was very valuable. A lot of praise and congratulations were exchanged, and I believe this is pretty valuable.

    Secondly, I think we found some developers or contributors in Japan who might be willing to work on some Japanese-based accessibility issues.

    Third, the team of panelists has already started planning for future events, including an accessibility hack fest in October and a game plan for participation at the annual CSUN conference.

    If you viewed the accessibility track online (thank you!!! I know it was 4:50 AM in California…), then please comment on what you thought. It was exciting to be a part of and congrats and thank you to all of the panelists. They were terrific.

  • Mozilla 24 Takes On Accessibility

    September 10th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    Have you checked it out? In a prior post, I blogged about Mozilla 24 and all the things you can do to participate. For my part of the conference, I’ve helped plan an hour-and-a-half session about accessibility efforts at Mozilla. Here is the short description:

    1. A discussion on new accessibility features in Firefox 3
    2. Demos from interesting projects like Access Firefox
    3. How a blind developer performs QA and testing for Mozilla
    4. A blind contributor shows off Firefox 3’s best features with a screen reader and his own nightly build of Firefox.

    In the spirit of 24, the team of presenters is truly international. I will be in Tokyo, helping to organize the conference and emcee-ing the session. One group will present from Mumbai, India. Then, we’ll have 2 contributors from Boston. Our final participant will be dialing in from San Diego at 4:30 AM!!!

    I’d love to hear if you’re up-all-night with Mozilla during 24. I will be!

    Please check out our accessibility session, it will be very cool.

  • Mozilla 24, FOSS.IN Project Day, & Other Stuff

    August 28th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    In the past two weeks, I haven’t blogged a thing. It’s been a time for a slight realignment of teams, and I now am a part of the newly-formed Mozilla Evangelism team. I’ll bringing all that I have been doing with Community Giving to a great team where we all will work on empowering others, telling the Mozilla story, and building new communities of contributors. Perhaps it’s needless to say, but I am super excited to work with the new team.

    What have I been up to in the past two weeks?

    1) Mozilla 24

    I scheduled a track for Mozilla 24 featuring Mozilla Accessibility contributors. We have quite a line-up ready to go, with a number of our blind or visually impaired contributors putting together presentations about how they are contributing to Mozilla.

    Have you seen the stuff for Mozilla 24? It will be a great worldwide event so please participate on September 15 and 16. Because I have taken a lead in planning a session and have been supporting our lead organizers in Japan in pulling off the conference, I will be going to Japan from September 11 to 17. More travel. More meeting community. If you’re in Tokyo in early September, tell me and we’ll meet up.

    Some other cool stuff about Mozilla 24:

    Everyone on our Japanese team from our marketing team here has really put in a lot of hard work to make this happen.

    2) FOSS.IN Project Day submission

    After my trip, I got inspired by all the activity in India, so I decided to work with some developers there, Chofmann, and others at Mozilla to submit a project day for FOSS.IN. I hope it gets approved because there is really a groundswell of activity happening around Mozilla stuff. If you care to learn more about project submission for FOSS.IN, then read here.

    I’ve been impressed with most of the process thus far. Everyone is communicating over a Yahoo! Group. We are all commenting on submissions and passing along ideas. It’s been pretty cool.

    3) Community Giving & Empowerment stuff

    We’re going to start moving faster here. Shaver, Asa and I will review a few request next week. In about 11 months, we’ve *officially* reviewed 45 requests….very close to 1 per week.

    (I make it a point to highlight officially because a lot of requests have come through that I have simply passed along to the correct contacts, whether internal at Mozilla Corp or to the guys at Mozilla Foundation.)

    We have a good process now and are going to keep moving forward with it, but how to be a bit more agile, experimental, aggressive…just a few of the things needed to scale.

    What else…what else….

    Interns are leaving Mozilla for the summer. A quick shout out to Andrew Stein, Rishi Mallik and Sarah Arora. All have been a real delight to work with and some really great stuff has come from their creative energy. We’ll probably see a few of their projects surface more publicly after they leave, but credit goes to them.

    Last stuff to report: India has been going very well. Chofmann and I are spearheading an en-IN build of Firefox, optimized for Indian users. And, the student teams at IIM-Ahmedabad and Indian School of Business are all starting their projects next week. We’ll be sure to report on that going forward.

    That’s all. I’m out.

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