Desktop Notifications

Desktop notifications allow a web page to notify the user using system level services, such as Growl, in a clean, safe, and easy to use manner.

The code is very simple:

navigator.notification.notify("Another Desktop Notification",
                              "Check out my icon",
                              "http://dougt.org/me.jpg");

and the result is something you’d expect from a notification.  On the Mac, the notification may look like:

You can get more sophisticated by adding a callback when the user clicks on the Desktop Notification:

navigator.notification.notify("Another Desktop Notification",
                              "Check out my icon",
                              "http://dougt.org/me.jpg");
                              function() { /*do something*/ });

A user must grant each site permission before they can use Desktop Notifications.  We will use the familiar notification bar (the text isn’t final.  Also, these will end up looking quite different in future releases of Firefox.):

That is there all there is to it!

Get involved:

If you like or dislike this feature, please just leave a comment.

If you like to follow the implementation details, you can follow bug 573588.

You can try out the engineering builds.  There are bound to be a few bugz.  If you see anything funky, please let me know.

If you are using the above engineering builds, you can try out Desktop Notifications.

More details:

I reviewed two draft specifications.  The first is the WebNotification specification and the other is the Google Gears NotificationAPI.  I found both of these APIs more complex than what was required.  Clearly both of these other APIs have use cases that are not address by my proposal.  But for basic notification from the browser, not much is required.

Looking at what Growl and other system level notification services provide, you basically only need a title, a description, and an icon.  For fun, I added one callback if the user clicks on the notification while it is on screen.

Next Steps

You tell me.  Is this something you’d like to see in the browser?  Does the API work for your use cases?

Let me know what you think!

With the upcoming 0.23 release, MythTv has a new and super easy-to-use python binding.  The best way to illustrate this is an example.  Suppose you want to record every “special event” broadcast.  These are the programs that do not occur all of the time.  For example, “The Eighth Annual Young Comedians Show” is a special event.  LOST is not.  To do this, the code is simple:

from MythTV import MythDB, Record
db = MythDB()

shows = db.searchGuide(category="Special")

for x in shows:
  x.record()

This is huge!  Being able to allow developers to script the TV is great and I can’t wait to see what cool things people come up with.

Our situation in Fennec is that we have a hidden browser element that contains the flash object/embed element. When a paint needs to happen, we draw whatever the plugin wants to draw into a canvas or sent of canvas elements. These canvas elements are what the user sees on the screen — they are part of Fennec’s tile manager. Now these draws to the tile manager consistent of a 16bpp to 24bpp conversion (I am told that the flash is optimized for 16bpp), then a copy to a gfxXLibSurface, then a final blit to the screen. This final bit also contains a 24bpp->16bpp conversion because the screen is 16bpp. To make matters much worse, many plugins intersect multiple canvases in the tile manager which causes this drawing path to happen multiple times per video frame. The end result is that we were getting no more than 4-5 fps.

We took some incremental steps to improvement performance, but we were no where close to double digit fps.

At this point, we decided to just draw directly to the screen avoiding the tile manager completely. This allowed us to render without any conversions and only one copy — the plugin could write directly to X11 shared memory.

In making this decision, we would lose a bunch of information that Gecko provides such as where the plugin should be position relative to other elements, and how it should be clipped.  The solution we came up with was to let Fennec tell each of the object and embed elements where they should be drawn.  The frame painting code would honor the position and clip that the front end set.  In this way, we could have plugins do the right thing during pans and when content is below the Fennec sidebars/urlbar.

You can check out how Fennec positions elements here:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mobile-browser/source/chrome/content/browser.js#2937

The end result in this work is that we get over 25fps when Sorenson encoded videos.  Over the next weeks and months, I hope to see more video content honoring Fennec’s user agent and provide optimized content.  (YouTube and other sites do not recognized Fennec’s UA, yet).

This fast path is only implemented on Maemo, but it can be implemented on any platform assuming the plugin has support to draw directly into a memory buffer.

You also can check out the details in bug 528551.

The previous day at MetaPlaces, I heard a lot about mobile advertising and the targeting operators can provide. What was most scary for me was the amount of information operators have and their use of this information to place you into a very detailed market segmentation… all of this without your expressed permission…

One company was able to take a two week data drop from an undisclosed operator and tell you the sort of lifestyle, socioeconomic status, age range, and other demographics of the phone owner. The data drop merely consisted of longitudes and latitudes of where the phone was at given times. Following a single phone you are able to known where the person lives, what kind of coffee he drinks, what area the person works, what stores he shops at, what their work hours are like, are they hitting clubs at night or are going home, and do they spend time at the library. And the user is aware that this sort of tracking is happening!

This is wrong. Operators should always be up front about this. The location data is yours. Where you take your phone, like who you call, is personal information.

Recently, a group of privacy advocates are calling on Congress to address some of these concerns. Some of the more interesting requests are:

* Sensitive information should not be collected or used for behavioral tracking or targeting.

* Individuals should be protected even if the information collected about them in behavioral tracking cannot be linked to their names, addresses, or other traditional “personally identifiable information,” as long as they can be distinguished as a particular computer user based on their profile.

* Individuals should have the right to confirm whether a data controller has their personal or behavioral
data, request such data, and delete it.

For more information about this effort, please check out the CDD press release.

The code is pretty simple.  Just something like:

CLLocationManager* locationManager = [[CLLocationManager alloc] init];
locationManager.delegate                = self;
locationManager.desiredAccuracy = kCLLocationAccuracyBest;
[locationManager startUpdatingLocation];

The delagate is just two functions:

- (void)locationManager: (CLLocationManager *)manager
didUpdateToLocation: (CLLocation *)newLocation
fromLocation: (CLLocation *)oldLocation
{
}

- (void)locationManager: (CLLocationManager *)manager
didFailWithError: (NSError *)error
{
}

If you put this in your code, you magically get a prompt that looks like this.  “Untitled” is the name of my application.

Location Request for "Untitled" application

Clicking on the Help icon, you get the following:

Help screenshot

The network requests goes to mac-services.apple.com.  The good news is that it is over a secure network channel.  The bad news is that the content is also hidden from inspection.  (eg.  since this is close source, Apple could be passing anything.  The thing that worries me is that it might be passing the application name which would give unfair Apple insight into what applications are popular).

The accuracy is pretty good — it places me at the building I am working from.  Now where is the support for Geolocation in Safari? 

Best known as the founder of the Special Olympics, she reshaped how we think about people with mental disabilities. Mrs. Shriver ensured that people with mental disabilities have a place in our society, that they are guaranteed civil rights including access to an education.

Much of this you may have heard over the last few days. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any athletes speaking out. Here is one of my favorite videos.  Enjoy!

See it? That little button between the map control and the street view man, when pressed, will enable geolocation for maps.

Other sites also have started adopting geolocation. Flickr has created a maps page that has a “Find my location” button that uses geolocation to position you and then show you pictures from your area:

What other cool sites have you seen?

Technorati Tags: geolocation, gps, location, mozilla