Personas Interactive

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.


Comments

5 responses to “Personas Interactive”

  1. […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Patrick Murphy, Michael Kaply. Michael Kaply said: New blog post: Personas Interactive http://kaply.com/weblog/2010/07/07/personas-interactive/ […]

  2. Mike – This is really tremendous stuff. I’ve installed Goblins and it looks fantastic. The “see through” images (not sure what you call that) are also very neat. Great job!

  3. […] Mike's Musings My musings about mozilla, microformats, me and my motivations. Skip to content HomeAboutOperatorOperator User ScriptsCreating a Microformat Action User Script (Advanced)Creating a Microformat Action User Script (Basic)Creating a Microformat Action User Script that uses POST ← Personas Interactive […]

  4. […] I introduced Personas Interactive, I indicated that my next topic was going to be Enhanced Personas. As I was writing that post, […]

  5. seigfred e. arevalo Avatar
    seigfred e. arevalo

    i was just”surfing”using my favorite browser which is mozilla. when suddenly i decided to visit my addon if there is something new.at first i download Nasa and add Stylish.then i was really amazed when i discover the PERSONAS INTERACTIVE/BRAND THUNDER.
    its just fine and almost perfect.
    i am just looking for a personas that fits my desire for a more better goodlooking computer windows/screen.
    when i installed the personas interactive my nasa sub skin was not affected.”i meam personas appear with my original Nasa theme (subskin)
    thanks to the developer
    for his bright ideas,,,
    and more power.
    seigfred,

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