Mozwho Notes

Most Frequent, New, Active

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 00:28:03 GMT

The bookmark manager Spurl gets it right with tabs for "my most used", "hot now", and "just in".

Mozwho does the last well but the first two features are in development. Try out chrome://mozwho/content/active.html

HTML vs XUL

Sat, 29 May 2004 21:16:19 GMT

Rendering bookmarks to HTML has a key advantage: link visitation status coding, e.g. the purple or blue text coloring.

Why does this matter?

Not recently visited

high visit count -> likely revisit
low visit count
no visit count -> todo item

Recently visited

high visit count -> likely revisit
low visit count -> potentially an isolated context

So how might we get this information into the XUL bookmark menu and data table? A two dimensional plot might work plotting visit count vs time since last visit (on a logarithmic or power scale). By drawing a line between the axis positions and filling the resulting region, low level visual feature extraction could likely assist visual search. The intensity of the fill would vary along with the probability of revisit while the horizontal versus vertical contrast would distinguish active from archival marks. An 8 x 8 value continuum can be presented in a 16x16 pixel space.

There's another factor of interest, age. While the age of a mark is less indicative of revistation likelihood, given last visit, it does offer a useful memory cue. Bookmarks in which last visit is equal to first visit offer a special case and should be visually distinct. Color could be used for age though a redundant non-color cue would be ideal.

I'm imagining a sparklines style visualization.

Trailblazer

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 20:57:18 GMT

Slashdot covers a OS X browser thing that takes advantage of the OS level thumbnailing to offer a history map. Very nice.

Not happy with the name though, curating and sharing trails is as important and move novel than non-tree trimbed history w/thumbnails and is due it's initial limelight.

Mozillazine forum thread.

Mozwho 0.4

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 15:42:27 GMT

The new release is a significant upgrade from the 3.x series:

everything is now a real link

facilitates keyboard nav using type ahead find (hit "/" and type)

search results now have a separate URI

this enables a search box plugin and bookmarking searches
search still only operates on the bookmark name

better CSS

in an effort to enable alternate skins, use of ids and styles has been improved
a sample alternate has been checked in (mozwho_desert.css)

Get it on the installation page.

Firefox Mozwho Search Plugin

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 16:32:46 GMT

You've got to love open source! I've been planning to write a firefox search plugin for mozwho for a few weeks now, but ricky @ samespirit took care of it.

Get it now and make your bookmarks more useful.