Visual Flavor Studio

I have volunteered to work with a group of open source coders and artist to develop a web site to promote the skills of open source web developers and designers. I have not been accepted as a team member but I have been exchanging emails with the project sponsors Christopher (teacoz) and James (squarebottle).

All interested artists and coders should email either Square Bottle or Teacoz. In particular, we could use some web programmers. We look forward to hearing from you!

The goal of the project is,Visual Flavor Studio, is the creation of a community to display the talent of artist behind open source. The interface designers and creative type who add that personal touch to software. It is also an opportunity for the coders to pay respect to the creative.

Put another way:

Let us artists do what we do best to help you programmers get back to doing what programmers do best.

(Via Visual Flavor Studio.)

Mozilla Labs Weaves the web

Introducing Weave by Chris Beard

As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.

Mozilla Weave

Looks like the Mozilla foundation is getting into the services business. Mozilla's Weave project appears to duplicate the functionality of the Google's Browser Sync. In the current Weave 0.1 users will be able to synchronize their bookmarks accross computers using Firefox 3.0 ( current in beta ).  The goal of the project is more than just browser synchronization:

We’ve set out some basic organizing principles to help frame the approach that we’re going to explore. We will:

  • provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online servicesensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
  • provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
  • respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
  • leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
  • build a extensible architecture like Firefox

 

I think this is an interesting move from Mozilla and I am even more interested in how Google and Yahoo will respond. Personally I would be happy to move back to Firefox ( it was too bloated with extensions ) from Safari my browser provided the following:

  • OpenID integration: I like the Verisign SeatBelt plugin but I want this done natively in the browser.
  • A way to save my entire browsing session and launch it from another computer at any time.  Really that would be so fracking cool!