Reposted from Mike’s Musings

So you may wonder why we called it Personas Interactive.

If you were go to the Brand Thunder Gallery, you would see what we specialize in – creating customized browser experiences for different sports teams, websites, musicians and more.

These browser experiences have evolved over the years in their design, their technology and even their name. But regardless of the technology change, these browser experiences always required the installation of a Firefox add-on and the restart of the browser for every one that you wanted to install.

One of the reasons we created Personas Interactive was to address this issue. With the advent of Personas in Firefox 3.6, we saw the opportunity to take our browser experience to the next level. So one of the core features of Personas Interactive is Interactive Themes.

Interactives Themes take the Enhanced Personas we talked about last time and add interactivity like clickable logos, sidebars, toolbars, feedreaders and more. So instead of just providing people with a picture of your website or brand, you can provide a way for them to connect with you in the browser.

Before we continue, I have to make a disclaimer. Up to this point, we’ve talked about things that anyone can do (set up their own Personas gallery, create Enhanced Personas) but at this point in time, an Interactive Theme can only be created by Brand Thunder. We’re working on expanding the technology so it is available to anyone. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have an Interactive Theme, though. Brand Thunder would love to work with your band, sports team, website or company to create an Interactive Theme. Just send an email to info@brandthunder.com.

So let’s look at a diagram that shows the differences between Personas, Enhanced Personas and Interactive Themes.

So what does this mean in practice?

If you were to go to the Personas Interactive page with Personas Interactive installed, you would see some of our Interactive Themes in action.

Are you a fan of the Goblins Web Comic? There’s an Interactive theme that keeps your favorite web comic close at hand. If you need your daily fix of The Daily Beast, you can install an Interactive Theme that gives you links and news from The Daily Beast as well as the top story of the day updated in your browser. Is your team the Indianapolis Colts? You can connect with them right in your browser. Or maybe you like movies? The Movie Premiere Interactive Theme is updated with a new movie poster every 15 minutes. Can’t get enough of CollegeHumor? Install the Interactive Theme and your favorite links will be one click away.

And we’ve got over a hundred more Interactive Themes coming in the next few months. Besides porting our existing themes over to Personas Interactive, we’re working with great brands like the CBS Sports College Network to bring your favorite college sports teams to the browser.

So what should you do? Install Personas Interactive. Setup your own Personas gallery. Create an Enhanced Persona. And stay tuned, because we’ve got some great stuff coming your way.

Reposted from Mike’s Musings

In explaining exactly what a Persona was in my last post, I mentioned that a Persona contains two images – a header and a footer. I also indicated that these images are very large – 3000 pixels wide. You may wonder why that is. Personas is designed to do one thing; take an image and put it in the upper right corner of the browser. It doesn’t resize or scale the image. If you resize your browser very wide, you just see more of the image on the left hand side. That 3000 pixels number is a completely arbitrary number that is designed to be the maximum you will resize your browser.

This architecture creates problems.

• The file sizes of the images can be very large.
• If you have a repetitive image, you have to cut and paste it to make it 3000 pixels wide.
• If you want to use an existing image, you’ll have to do something to convert it to 3000 pixels wide.
• You can’t guarantee that anything appears in the upper left corner.
• You can’t have more than one background image.

All of these problems have already been solved by CSS, but none of the CSS to do anything to background images is available in Personas. That’s where the Enhanced Personas feature of Personas Interactive comes in.

Enhanced Personas adds additional attributes to the Personas JSON that gives you all the things that CSS backgrounds have to offer. This includes multiple background images! Here are the attributes we’ve added:

backgroundImage

Specifies the URL of an image or multiple images that will be used for the background. Multiple images are separated by a comma. The images are drawn from right to left, so the left most image appears on top. We aren’t using the actual CSS syntax here, so don’t put url(‘…’) around the images.

backgroundPosition

Specifies the position of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.

backgroundSize

Dpecifies the size of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.

backgroundColor

Whereas accentcolor in the original Personas specification is used for both the titlebar and the background of the browser, we allow you to specify just the background color. It is never used for the titlebar. If you specify both a backgroundColor and an accentcolor, accentcolor is used for the titlebar, and backgroundColor is used for the background of the browser.

textShadow

One of the other areas that causes problems with Personas is the area of text shadows. We’ve provided an additional attribute to let you control the text shadow. Personas determines the color of the text shadow to use for your Persona by computing the luminance of the textcolor specified in your Persona.

let luminance = 0.2126 * r + 0.7152 * g + 0.0722 * b;

If the luminance is less than or equal to 110, it makes your text shadow light, otherwise it makes your text shadow dark. We’ve made textShadow an attribute that you can specify, and you can give it three values: dark, bright or none. You can experiment with these three values to see which one makes your text look good on your Persona.

Summing it all up

So what does all this give us? The ability to create a Persona that takes full advantage of CSS. If you hover over the preview images below with Personas Interactive installed, you’ll see examples of Enhanced Personas in action. Each of these Enhanced Personas has an image on the left, an image on the right and a repeating image for the background. If you install them, you can resize the browser and see that the images stay in both corners of the browser. I’ve deliberately placed breaks in the background image so you can see the repeat. You’ll also notice that I’ve used a different text shadow option for each of the Personas. See if you can figure out which value I used.  (NOTE: Visit the original post to see the samples in action: http://kaply.com/weblog/2010/07/09/enhanced-personas/)

Here are some other things to keep in mind with Enhanced Personas.

backgroundImage is a required attribute. This means that even if you use the other attributes, if backgroundImage isn’t specified, they won’t be honored. The only exception to this is textShadow.

You can create an Enhanced Persona that works with Firefox out of the box. Just specify both a headerURL and a backgroundImage. Personas Interactive users will get the Enhanced Persona.

For our next installment, we’re going to talk about the hallmark of Personas Interactive, Interactive Themes and Interactive Personas.

This is part three in my series about Personas Interactive from Brand Thunder. If you missed the first two, they are Introduction to Personas Interactive and What is a Persona?

Reposted from Mike’s Musings

After I introduced Personas Interactive, I indicated that my next topic was going to be Enhanced Personas. As I was writing that post, though, I realized that I was putting the cart before the horse. Before I explain how we’ve enhanced Personas, I need to give more detail as to how you can put Personas on your website. Then we can talk about the enhancements we’ve made and how you can use them in your Personas. Remember that to really see these things in action, you need Personas Interactive. You can download it from here.

So what exactly is a Persona? You probably think of a Persona as just an image that goes in the background of your web browser. But Personas are not just the images. They are also a JSON file that gives a little bit of information. Here’s what a bare bones Persona looks like:

{"id":"mypersona@kaply.com",
 "name": "My Persona",
 "headerURL": "http://kaply.com/images/mypersona.png"
}

To use this Persona in a web page, Firefox introduced an attribute called data-browsertheme. To designate that an element on a web page defines a persona, you add that attribute to any element (usually an image):

<img alt="My Persona"
     data-browsertheme='{"id":"mypersona@kaply.com",
                         "name": "My Persona",
                         "headerURL": "http://kaply.com/mypersona.png",
                        }'
     src="mypersona.png"
     id="mypersona-preview">

Having the data as an attribute on the image isn’t enough, though. We need to have some JavaScript that hooks everything together. Personas works by using custom DOM events to indicate when an image is previewed, installed and reset. Here’s what preview looks like:

var event = document.createEvent("Events");,
event.initEvent("PreviewBrowserTheme", true, false);
document.getElementById('mypersona-preview').dispatchEvent(event);

Writing this code every time would be tedious, so I’ve created helper functions that do this for you. You can download them here. Attaching all the appropriate Persona events to a node is matter of calling attachPersona and passing it the node that you want to use for your Persona preview.

Now you may be thinking that it would be difficult to maintain JSON embedded in a web page, and you would be correct. What we need is an automated process to generate a Personas gallery. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that Personas are described in a JSON file. What we want to do is store JSON files directly on our server and generate web pages that use the data contained in those JSON files. The reason for this is three fold. First, because it makes it easier to maintain, second because Personas can be updated by pointing to the JSON file directly, and third because we will use those JSON files for site specific Personas which we talked about in the previous post.

I’m a PHP developer, so the example I am going to provide is how to generate a Personas gallery using PHP. For my basic example, I’m using a top level directory with an index.php that will be my gallery and subdirectories that represent each Persona. Those directories are named for the Persona and contains a persona.json file, a PNG file used for preview that is named the same as the directory, and any other supporting images, like the background or icon. To generate a gallery item, you call the function generateGalleryItem passing it the name of the directory. Here’s some PHP code that does this:

<?php
function generateGalleryItem($name) {
  $handle = fopen("$name/persona.json", "rb");
  $contents = stream_get_contents($handle);
  fclose($handle);
  $persona = json_decode($contents);
?>
 <img alt='<?php echo $persona->name; ?>'
      data-browsertheme='<?php echo $contents; ?>'
      src='<?php echo $name; ?>/<?php echo $name; ?>.png'
      id='<?php echo $name; ?>-preview'>
<script type="text/javascript">
  attachPersona(document.getElementById("<?php echo $name; ?>-preview"));
</script>

With these code examples, you should be able to get a Personas gallery working on your website.

Earlier I talked about the fact that I was giving an example of a bare bones Persona. Now would probably be a good time to talk about what else you can specify in a Persona JSON file. Personas support the following attributes which are all strings:

Site Specific Personas

I mentioned site specific Personas, so I might as well give you that information as well. To enable a site specific Persona, add the following code to the header of your website:

<link rel="persona" type="application/json" href="https://mydomain.com/mypersona/persona.json" />

The href points to the JSON file that describes your Persona. If you want to use a Persona from getpersonas.com, navigate to the Persona and then look at the URL. You’ll see a number at the end of the URL. The format for Persona update URLs is https://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/update_check/%ID%. Just replace %ID% with the number at the end of the URL.

One other thing before I close this out. I find the site JSONLint.com invaluable for debugging my JSON. Not only can you paste JSON there, but if you put a URL to your JSON file, it will read it and check it. I can’t recommend it enough.

I hope this has helped you get started adding Personas to your site. Next post – Enhanced Personas. I promise.

Brand Thunder released a new theme for the Goblins web comic today. While it’s a great theme and I’m excited to have it out there, I’m more excited about how we’re delivering it. Goblins is the first theme we are delivering on our new Personas Interactive platform.

Personas Interactive is a new add-on that allows us to deliver all of our interactive themes with one click in the same way that Personas works. In the next week or so, it will be available as a standalone download. Right now you can get it by downloading the Goblins theme.

But Personas Interactive isn’t just about interactive themes. It provides major enhancements to Personas within Firefox and adds support for Enhanced Personas (more on that later). I’d like to take a few posts to talk about what we’ve done with Personas Interactive. First we’re going to talk about what we’ve done to Personas; then we’re going to talk about Enhanced Personas and Interactive Themes/Interactive Personas. We’ll finish the series up by going into details about how web developers can use our new features.

Let’s start with what we’ve done to Personas within Firefox.

We’ve removed the limits

Firefox currently has a limit of eight Personas. We’ve completely removed that limit. You can have as many Personas installed as you would like.

We’ve removed the limitations

Firefox prevented Personas from working with any theme but the default theme. We’ve removed that limitation. They don’t always work right, but at least you can try.

We’ve removed the lock-in

Firefox uses the same permission model for Personas that it does for the installation of extensions. What this means is that if you give a site permission to install Personas, you’re also giving it permission to install extensions. For this reason, Firefox does not make it easy for you to enable other sites to provide previews and host Personas. We’ve created a new permission model for Personas so you can give a site permission to preview Personas knowing that all they can do is preview and install Personas. Now any site can host a Personas gallery! We’ll be providing more detail in the next week on how to do this or if you want to get started now, send me an email. And if you want to see this in action, check out design noir.

We’ve updated the look (on Windows)

Personas on Windows just don’t look right. With the gray tab and the extra dark tab strip, they just don’t pop like they do on the Mac. We’ve updated the Personas look on Windows to be more consistent.

We’ve given you the choice

We’ve added additional configuration options so that you can make your Personas look the way you want them. If you wish you could see just a little more of your Persona, add some space. If you don’t want the titlebar to change color on Mac, turn it off. If text shadows make your Persona look bad, turn them off.

We’ve added some really cool stuff

We’ve enabled site specific Personas. Any website can put one line in their HTML so that people see a Persona when they viewing that site. Of course they have to ask your permission! If you want to check this out, you can load my blog with Personas Interactive installed.

In my next post, I’ll be covering Enhanced Personas. The best analogy I can give is that Personas are like a bumper sticker on your browser. For the artist, Enhanced Personas give you a palette so you can size, position and repeat any number of images on the background to create a design that’s exactly what you want and that resizes with the browser. I think you’ll like it.

One more note – Brand Thunder brings you VERY cool themes and extensions for FREE, but each takes a team of designers and developers. Brand Thunder themes include Bing as the default search engine since our primary revenue source is our search partners, Bing and Ask, so please give them a try.

And before you ask, we’re hard at work on Firefox 4 support. We hope to have something in the next few weeks.