Infocard

Yesterday I upgraded my firefox identity selector plugin to find an interesting new addition. Of course I'm not talking about the managed card support added last month, or that the missing plugin dialog no longer appears, or even the fact that this plugin runs on both my Windows and Fedora 5 x86_64 machines. No..... instead, what caught my attention was the callout to the form button that kicks off the selector (Go figure).

Anyone who has looked at my registration or login page might have noticed that I really suck at graphics and all that I have is a tiny button labeled enter. Not very informative on its purpose, eh? After installing the latest version of the plugin (0.8.5 at the time - a lot of activity happening so this might already be outdated), I was pleasantly surprised to find my page looked a little different.

If you look at the screenshot to the left, you should notice the "What's this?" callout in green. The plugin automatically added this to callout my infocard enabled form. Currently clicking on the image is still a work in progress. It pops up a box where additional information about infocards will be provided and allows the callout to be turned off. Right now it can only be disabled for the current session. Once firefox is restarted, it will appear again. In any case I think its a great feature. There is no current standard image for indicating the login, so if you are graphically challenged like me then it at least provides people with an indication of what your button is for.

The one feature I am really waiting for is the ability to backup and restore infocards using the plugin. Chuck Mortimer recently added the code and utility for working with a Windows Cardspace backup file. Hopefully this feature will be added to the plugin so that I will be able to share my cards between Windows Cardspace (the selector when using IE 7) and firefox (on all my platforms). Currently when using Windows I prefer to use Windows Cardspace just for the fact that it is feature rich, but don't have that option when using Fedora. With the rate features are being added to the firefox plugin though, it shouldn't be too long before it's going head-to-head with Cardspace (at least feature wise).