Acts of Volition

The Mozilla team is looking for some help with some design work. The work would involve a variety of design tasks for the web and for print. For example, banner ads, small HTML page designs, print ad layout/design, etc.  •  What we’d like to do is assemble a loose team of people to whom we can …

Software is often used in ways not envisioned by its creators. Sometimes this is the goal of the original creation; to create a platform upon which others can create in ways the platform builds can’t even imagine. Some developers build tools and enable others to build. Such is the case with the …

I was at the Desktop Developers’ Conference in Ottawa this week. The DDC was for developers working on Linux on the desktop and it started off a week in Ottawa that also includes the Linux Kernel Summit and the Ottawa Linux Symposium (neither of which I stuck around for - both being way over my …

Open source software is flourishing in terms of code. The interface design aspects have improved dramatically in the last few years. There has also been improvements in the aesthetics and visual design aspects of many prominent open-source projects. Firefox and Thunderbird are getting to be better …

The crusade to make the world a more beautiful place inches forward. The Mozilla Visual Identity Team is happy to see the preview of a new default theme for Firefox, which will be included in the next release (0.9 - in the next couple of weeks).  •  The new theme was designed by Kevin Gerich and …

Back in February, Matt Haughey kindly referred to me as “a tastemaker for Canadian indie rock”. I blushed, and ever since, I’ve noticed that there has been some pretty heavy Can-Con in my shows. Session ten of Acts of Volition Radio ended up, unintentionally, as another all-Canadian extravaganza …

Wow. Earlier this week, I posted a draft spec for, Gnome Outliner, a project I hoped to see developed. The response has been remarkable. Only four days later, there is a beggings of implementations in Java, Python, and C. It looks like, as I had hoped, I’m not the only one who would like to have a …

Since I’m now using Gnome as my primary desktop environment on Linux, I find myself wishing I had a simple outlining application along the lines of OmniOutliner. However, there doesn’t appear to be such a thing for Gnome (despite some old/abandoned projects).  •  Unfortunately, my limited skill … read more »

When the Mozilla Foundation announced the name change for their web browser from Firebird to Firefox, there was a predictable response of skepticism. It was the second name change and people were understandably skeptical that the name would continue to change.  •  Even though the Mozilla … read more »