It’s been a good week or so for discussing the merits and capabilities of the browser theme.

From the development side, the Mozilla community is exploring adding new standard functionality in the browser that Brand Thunder showcased in its Personas Interactive extension.  Mozilla is considering giving users the ability to expand the space available to the browser theme.  Especially for large screen monitors, this capability can offer a more compelling visual.  You can vote for the feature of a Persona height adjustment at the Mozilla Add-ons blog.

While this feature is a little nice to have, I think if Personas really wants to make a step forward there are other enhancements found in Personas Interactive that would be a more meaningful step for designers and the end user.  Supporting full CSS3 backgrounds and allowing sites to host their own gallery of Personas are a couple of them.  Then again, why wait?  You can try the functionality out today.  The documentation of how to do it is all found at http://brandthunder.com/personas.

If you’re more interested in the business applications of the browser and browser themes in particular, check out a couple recent articles covering Brand Thunder and its work in the interactive browser theme space.  Marketing by Deepak offered an in-depth look at business applications and the affinity marketing power of an interactive browser theme.   The Metropreneur took its own look at the value of interactive browser themes while also delving into the task of building Brand Thunder the company.

It’s great to see this continued interest around the company and the category we continue to build.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Brand Thunder Rolls Out Personas Interactive Extension For Firefox (techcrunch.com)
• Personas Interactive is an Improved Version of Firefox’s Theme Switcher [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)

The top trending Twitter term, as I write this, is “meteor shower tonight.”  It’s a wonderful event to enjoy on a summer’s evening, and the timing this year is perfect for those of us on in the Eastern time zone.  A great memory from several years back was having a pre-dawn jog in an very open park during the Leonid meteor shower and being awed as meteors fell all around me.  It was truly stunning.

Thinking of space lends itself to that sense of awe.  When you get the bonus of the rare and infrequent events like a meteor shower or eclipse, it brings that mystique to you in a very close and personal way.  In a sense, we’ve tried to capture a bit of this with our latest NASA interactive browser theme.

Each week, we personally select a new background for the browser theme from NASA’s Image of Day and update the browser theme.  It’s an automatic change for you, giving you a fresh and exciting new browser experience every week.  Our goal is to deliver something beautiful and continually fresh without being too fleeting.

This coming week, while it’s not guaranteed, I would expect a stellar image of the Perseid meteor shower.  Unlike the real event, this one can’t be spoiled by clouds and you don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to enjoy it.  Try it out.

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?