Calendar Date Picker UI Comparison

Outlook uses an editable menu list for choosing event times.  The direct text entry aspect is good, but the drop down is a very expensive user operation.


Mozilla's Calendar takes a fresh approach, making selection of the time easier on average.  The inability to type the time is a weakness, but it's eminently fixable. Clicking MORE exposes the 0-60 values for minutes. 


A web application that shall remain nameless uses a drop down with every hour:minute combo for a day in a drop down.  Not only is this a slow selection operation, the individual select clocks in at over 100k.  Ouch.
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Posted at NaN:NaN

Mozilla Junk Mail Filtering

Spent an hour today surveying the Mozilla Mail bug landscape.  Here's a fun bit from Dan Rosen:

Bug 11036 will never see the light of day. It's assigned to nobody@mozilla.org and seems to be the dumping grounds for the true AI freaks among the mozealots.

The bug in question, "Filter by example (create a filter based on a message you're viewing)", has actually been fixed for the fixed category of junkmail with bayesian filtering.  Interestingly, a member of the development team for a commercial spam product asked me what bayesian filtering is.  I suggested that it capitalized on the co-location of certain terms.

A rather humourous dialogue ensued, which I'll recount using the word noodle to protect my google-space. "So the presence of larger and noodle suggests it's spam much more than just the two words alone."  A third party responded "But yeah, I want to get those smaller noodle emails".

Baye's algorithm is a statistical approach.  For further reading, check out a detailed expose on using bayes algorithm for junkmail filtering. More in the surfmind and at mozilla.org. I'm quite pleased with the junkmail filters in Mozilla.

08/09/03: Asa points out more 168905 which leads to more prior art on applying systems like Mozilla's bayesian filtering to learn mail classification, see bug 181866 - Use bayesian filters for other features than spam
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Posted at NaN:NaN, Published in: Mozilla

Mozilla.org needs IA

Yep, you rarely hear me talk about information architecture (IA), but some concentrated effort on navigation is needed on mozilla.org.  The ease of use for downloaders has been nicely addressed by the new design, but now it's time to dig a little deeper.  My .02 at bug 213898, "web site redesign".

Interestingly, the tech-evangelism project uses a variant of the normal template, ditching the static sidebar for a top bar main and breadcrumb nav.  This is an excellent example of the type of system that the mozilla.org infrastructure needs to support.
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Posted at NaN:NaN, Published in: Mozilla UI