Hey all,

I've decided to move Snowl discussion to a forum on the Mozilla Labs web site to take advantage of some features offered by its forum software and make it easier for the larger community of labs contributors to participate in Snowl.

From now on, please discuss Snowl on the Mozilla Labs Discussion Forum for Snowl.

-myk

Hey all,

I've pushed a new preview release of the upcoming 0.2. More details are available in the blog post.

-myk

Hi,
at first: great work! I really like snowl and use it regularilly.

With the update to 0.2pre2 I found the following:

- dates of the entries are missing
- it seems much slower than the last version

Greetings from Cologne/Germany

Randolph

Basic support for audioscrobbler banned/loved tracks. http://www.dusbabek.org/hg/hgwebdir.cgi/snowl/rev/67d1ff5e0094

It could use some cleanup, but the general idea is there. Fun ideas of where to take this would be to grab the album art as part of the message, or grab a list of similar songs via ws.adioscrobbler.com.

I haven't fully grokked the parts* section of the schema, so the messages are nearly empty.

Over the course of putting this together, I realized it would be nice to have a sourcesMetadata table that acts in a way similar to the personMetadata (it would be easy to just hijack personMetadata, but that didn't feel right).

This can be a good use case as both of them try to "show / use messages". Only integration i see most prominent is to have user profile viewable with messaging.
I am sure at some point snowl will have reply feature also.
Snowl currently does not recognize user independently. May me this could be an addition to it. Like same user has a blog and twitter account and facebook account to.

Use case can be something like this.
1. get user credentials
2. If valid get "messages"
3. Also check for rel=me on profile page if available. get service if supported.

This might require bit restructuring Snowl architecture. But makes a strong use case.

Here i mean messages as anything video, picture. text, anything.

The db schema seems to allow for multiple identities per person. However, the code seems to want to generate a person on the fly whenever an identity is created.

I am hacking in sources for audioscrobbler banned and loved tracks. So a single user (Person) implies two identities, one per source.

My plan is to modify identity.js to enable it to optionally recycle persons if "name" already exists in the People table. Is this the right approach, or am I off target?

When adding subscriptions with Hebrew titles, they appear as the regular weird-coded boxes.

Help / Fixes?

The bugs first:

- When importing feeds, if the URL of the page I paste isn't actually a feed URL, the dialog still says it has been successful
- Something on the feed at http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=all&format=feed&typ... is breaking the layout of the river of messages view in 'view all content' mode... specifically, the page ends up with vertical scrollbars that let me scroll by about 1/3rd of the screen height, which is really inconvenient.
- I'm not sure what the "only show current messages" button is supposed to do _exactly_, but as far as I can tell it does nothing. I would hope that it would enable me to see only messages I hadn't seen before, but it is definitely not doing this.

And the observations:

- I think the state of the view should be remembered between uses of the program.
- The default should probably be newest messages first, I think.
- A view that shows only the header info for messages and has a toggle to show the full message content (in addition to the link to the source of the message) would be useful.
- It would be helpful if the source of the message was identified in its header, as well as the author; e.g. instead of:
"Happiness, Meaning and Significance: Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes
Jo Walton - Yesterday 17:02"
we would see
"Happiness, Meaning and Significance: Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes
Jo Walton on tor.com - Yesterday 17:02"
or something like that)
- Interpreting HTML in message titles would be useful, I think. (See above)
- Ideally, I'd like to be able to override the refresh frequency of my feeds. Not a critical feature, but I'd hope a relatively easy one. A manual refresh option would be handy, too.

I try to add RSS feeds. Clicking on the + sign doesn't do anything.
What could I be doing wrong ?

OpenSuse11 - 32 bit
Firefox 3.0.1

There are a million-and-one projects dealing with each of the various messaging protocols individually, and each probably does better than Snowl does at displaying and manipulating its particular protocol. An RSS reader treats RSS feeds as a sui generis form of communication, unique, and therefore requiring a unique form of display and manipulation.

The value-add of Snowl seems to be that it does *not* treat RSS, email, tweets, etc as unique phenomena, but simply as short, structured pieces of text. As such, the way in which they are thrown together and accessed is the most important part of Snowl. Heavy duty conceptual lifting on UI ought to be the centerpiece of the project.

Point #3 on the Mozdev project page seems to me to be crucial to dissolving past approaches and reconstructing how we view and organize and think about information. Searching for content instead of hierarchically organizing it was a tremendous change in how we related to the web (from Yahoo! to Google) and how we related to our desktop/filesystems (from nested folders to BeOS/Spotlight/Google Desktop).

Before getting too attached to the 3-pane format common to email and RSS, I think more thinking about what people are really looking for should be done.

• Winer's "river" concept is one way of breaking down the 'nested and hierarchical' way of thinking about our content.
• Spotlight and 'saved search' folders are another.
• Google's spartan homepage and Gmail's labels-not-folders are yet another.
• Mozilla's own AwesomeBar should be an inspiration.
• Digg's Recommendation Engine could be one: a kind of reverse implementation of bayesian spam filtering--based on things you've read/opened/flagged/saved/blogged, new unread content could be highlighted.
• Linking conversations by topic/keyword, regardless of protocol (emails and IMs are already this way within Gmail)

A lot can be done to break down the 'nested and hierarchical' concepts once we start treating *everything* as just another structured snippet of text.

Ideas? Inspirations?

I'm unable to finish loading my Google Reader-exported OPML file into Snowl because a particular feed isn't responding. It'd be wonderful if there were some sort of timeout or HTTP header check that skipped a feed if it took too long to load or returned an HTTP status code indicating a problem.

As it stands, I can't use my OPML file without a little hand-editing.

Cheers,
Michael

The idea of this thread is to list the types of messaging that could conceivably end up in a protocol-agnostic messaging app:

*RSS/Atom (Twitter, Podcasts)
*Email (POP, IMAP?)
*Instant messaging (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ)
*IRC and other chat (AOL/AIM?)
*Web forum posts (like Slashdot's messaging system)
*Social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc)

In the wildly speculative future:
*Telephone (Skype, traditional carriers, SMS, Voicemail access)

The low-hanging fruit here are going to be the ones with already established protocols and plenty of open-source implementations. Next are the private companies that have published APIs for their messaging systems. And finally, the hard targets will be those that remain in their own little world (site-only messaging systems like Slashdot's, or things like telecommunications/voicemail).

Are there any types of messaging that I'm missing?

Gmail indicates the level of 'personal-ness' a message has by giving the end user the option of having messages sent only to them with ">>" and messages sent to a list of people with ">".

This might be a good place to start thinking about how the UI and the properties of the messages interact.

Especially if this project aims to integrate all forms of messaging, from highly personal specific messages, to highly impersonal passive mass messaging, and all things in-between, being able to assess the extent to which a message is personal will be very important in helping users sift through mountains of data.

The signal vs. noise problem is one that should be central to an aggregation project like this.

But i cant figure out how to get Snowl to work. How do you open it?

Finally! An initiative to 'port' Tb functionality (folderpane and threadpane organization, and messaging protocols) into Fx.

Some thoughts:
1) Standalone app: whether it some day is an xulrunner app or standalone in some other way, I would immediately use it by creating another Fx profile, thus using it exactly like a standalone app. A non issue.

2) Must have imap/pop/nntp in addition to irc/xmpp to be a contender. Any way to reuse some of the useful Tb protocol code (and jettison the cruft)?

3) Folder Pane: the demo 'author' based organization is nice, and I assume it's meant to show how cross folder/account messages can be organized. But I think the classic 'folder tree' view should be maintained, with things like dnd folder organization or saved searches or other done via a 'named views' mechanism. I posted about this in the recent folder pane threads in dev.apps.tb newsgroup.

4) Layout: great to see your tabbed message pane (very disappointed it likely won't get anywhere in Tb3). And good that you reuse Sidebar for Folder Pane, architecturally speaking. I'd be glad to contribute some code to recreate the 5 layouts from Tb.

Great start. Imo, the question isn't really 'do messages work in a browser'. The browser is merely a subset in a 3 (or more) pane (or other view) organization of messages - displaying just content.

ps. don't use twitter but created an account to see; doesn't seem to work when subscribing, lots of:
Error: Subscriber is not defined
Source file: chrome://snowl/content/subscribe.js
Line: 59
and need to resub to get messages though there is never anything in the folder pane list.

My installation went great, I added a twitter account and exported my feeds from Google Reader. No problems there.

One thought: there are a ton of RSS readers out there. Most of the services that people subscribe to are available as RSS feeds. One of the big issues is that there is no central location for RSS data over multiple computers. If I read Slashdot in Microsoft Outlook and then I go to Thunderbird and read it again it doesn't know which stories I have already read.

Google reader is a great solution for this because I can access it from any computer. If you added a "Google Reader Account" section you could use it to manage which stories have been read across multiple applications and multiple computers.

Another solution would be to integrate with one of the Firefox Sync plugins so that stories could be marked as read across multiple instances of snowl.

Just my two cents.

Here is the console output:

Error: [Exception... "Component is not available" nsresult: "0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)" location: "JS frame :: file:///usr/lib/firefox-3.0.1/components/nsSessionStore.js :: sss_saveState :: line 1896" data: no]
Source File: file:///usr/lib/firefox-3.0.1/components/nsSessionStore.js
Line: 1896

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND) [nsIXPCComponents_Utils.import]" nsresult: "0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://snowl/content/list.js :: :: line 37" data: no]

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND) [nsIXPCComponents_Utils.import]" nsresult: "0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)" location: "JS frame :: file:///home/jason/.mozilla/firefox/default.uhn/extensions/snowl@mozilla... :: :: line 46" data: no]

----

Hope this helps.

Jason

Firefox n'a pas pu installer le fichier situé à

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/file/35119/snowl-0.1-...

raison : Hachage invalide sur le fichier (corruption possible du téléchargement)
-261

Hi!

I'm a new user of Snowl, and I use to translate extensions in the BabelZilla website. I still help so many people in a french forum about Firefox ( geckozone.org ), buuut, but but but... I need to explain how this extension works, because they don't understand the english language.

So, could you put it on the Web Translation System?
For five to ten language, I think a translation will be made very quickly.

You only have to go to this page, in order to upload the XPI file...
http://www.babelzilla.org/index.php?option=com_include&Itemid=100

..., and so, to say that to us:
http://www.babelzilla.org/forum/index.php?showforum=2

Are you ready to put it?

Thanks a lot for your answer!

Hi Myk, congrats for Snowl. It's a very nice 0.1, I won't comment on the UI since I'm sure you have tons of changes in mind. I just wanted to let you know I found one bug when you import an OPML containing a ref to a "non-existing" feed. If the target URL of the feed is not reachable, the import wizard keeps working forever, choking on that feed, and never moving to the next feeds in the OPML instance.

Just one question : why an extension to Firefox and not a standalone XULrunner-app ? I don't want to close my feedreader when I close my browser. I open and close a browser dozens of times per day while I *never* close my feedreader unless I have to reboot my machine....

I just installed Snowl about 20 minutes ago and I wanted to post my initial reactions while they were fresh in my mind.

The "email" view

On the Snowl page this view is described as a way to actively read important messages. I think I'd like this idea but what will be the way you determine what messages are important to me. I'd love to have a way to filter out what messages are the most important to me.

Perhaps you could glean some context off the page I'm currently browsing?
Maybe some context from the last N number of pages in my history, or possibly time based?

This interface feels a little clunky right now since I feel like I had an email client tossed inside Firefox. If there is a way to clean it up and make it less intrusive that would be great.

The River of Messages

I think I'd like this if the river was reigned in a little bit to more readable chunks. I'd love to use a view like this to casually browse messages and see whats going on in the past hour or two. You could also make it into an infinite scroll where you are dynamically loading more from the river as I scroll, this way you only load what I need up front, and then you can load more as I read along.

More thoughts on Snowl

I think this is a worthy idea to explore and the more discussion generated the better. Obviously this is a prototype right now but I think this could be turned into something very useful.

Keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts are probably the most important thing for me, I'd love to call up the two views using easy to remember shortcuts. This would let me call up my message and see whats going on easily.

Contextual Messages
It might be interesting to load messages related to the site or site content I'm currently viewing. This would let me communicate with others who are viewing similar items.

Messaging
I love the idea of two way messaging with this system but I'm not sure how exactly that would be implemented. Currently Snowl just aggregates feeds / tweets but I'm not sure how two way messaging could be added. This is a very interesting idea though and I'd love to see development in this area.

So currently Snowl definitely is rough, but I like the ideas and I am interested to see where this may go. I think that context to what I'm doing and automatically showing relevant messages is an important and interesting direction as well as a way to add communication between Snowl users. Keep up the good work!

I know Instant messeging is planned in the future but this might be a good idea
You could probably use the backend of pidgin, libpurple
its been used with xul before, with instant bird
Im not a programmer, but Im guessing you could use code from instantbird which I think is under mpl (even If Im right, which I probably am, considering I read some of the license from the source using 7zip, Its a good idea to check before taking advice from total strangers) and then use the xul/libpurple binding code to bind it in snowl, it might be possible depending on how they did it, or if they did it at all

Snowl sounds great! It's what I've been wanting from a web browser for quite a while... so long that I've even blogged about the idea of creating it ( http://21echoes.blogspot.com/2008/07/kitchen-sync-synx-other-witty-title... ).

I'm not trying to fault Mozilla or claim rights to it--chances are they've been working on it longer than I have seeing as they already have a beta code out, and they have far more manpower and funding than I ever could, so this is not some antagonistic message... I just thought it was kinda funny.

Maybe they could read that blog post and see what other things would be nice to add to it!

Good luck with the project boys, I'm sure it'll be amazing.

-David Kettler

Welcome to the Snowl discussion forum! This is the place to post thoughts, ideas, questions, suggestions, etc. about Snowl and messaging in the browser.

For more information about Snowl, see its labs project page.

To report a bug or request an enhancement, use the bug tracker. Also see the list of reported bugs and enhancements.