Camino Blog: Camino 2.0.4 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at August 26, 2010 06:00 PM

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2010 Late July-Early August Roundup

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at August 15, 2010 05:09 AM

Although it’s been only a little over a month since the last update, it feels like I’ve been heads-down in code and bugs for much longer than that.

In the past month, Stuart Morgan has continued working on the performance issues with the new autocomplete. He also removed some old code in our Keychain implementation and added safety checks to prevent some crazy behavior in situations where there is no document present. Stuart also adapted our work-around for Flash 10 crashing after Exposé to handle the same problem in Flash 10.1; this fix is forthcoming in Camino 2.0.4. In addition, he added null-checks to problematic Gecko macros in our Places integration code, handled a good chunk of the superreview requests, and committed the 10 crash reporter localizations that our localization teams contributed to the Google Breakpad project.

Sean Murphy (of Safe Browsing, tab dragging, and keyboard loop fame) reappeared with a partial patch to get gestures working again in the content area. Stuart sent the patch back for some additional changes, so we’re waiting on Sean to have some time to address the review comments.

I feel like I’ve been attacking things all over the place since the last update. I spent several weeks working on getting Gecko security fixes tested and landed for Camino 2.0.4. I reviewed a couple of Stuart’s patches to our update script, and then Stuart and I deployed a “scary update warning” to users on Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 who were still using Camino 1.6.x. I also continued working on a fix to stop overzealous unescaping of certain Unicode characters in our location bar, finally ending up, with Stuart’s help, with a version that made both 10.4 and 10.5-and-up happy. I landed a few minor code cleanup fixes and also helped Stuart debug a Keychain issue I had observed and the Flash 10.1 crash. Recently, I began working on replacing the jargon-filled (and non-localizable) certificate error pages with more user-friendly and informative ones, using the framework Sean had created when he implemented our Safe Browsing support (Philippe Wittenbergh is working on the CSS for the new page). Finally, I landed the remaining Camino fixes for 2.0.4 and got the release notes ready for localization.

So, here we stand at mid-August. We’re looking to release Camino 2.0.4 very soon, and, hopefully, Camino 2.1 Alpha 1 not too long after that. Until then, enjoy the remainder of the summer!

 

Jon Hicks: The Orchid - New Mexico EP

Posted by Jon Hicks at August 10, 2010 09:18 PM

If you like lush instrumental bands like Explosions in the Sky, you should get yourself over to The Orchid’s Bandcamp page, where you can preview their debut EP ‘New Mexico’. I’ve just picked up my copy!

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Jon Hicks: Little Big Planet 2

Posted by Jon Hicks at August 06, 2010 05:24 PM

Little Big Planet is the video game that has it all – inventive gameplay, a truly great soundtrack, costumes, Stephen Fry narration and of course the ability to make your own games. LBP2 looks set to build on that even more, but the trouble is I haven’t finished #1 yet! (Back up your game progress folks, lest you end up like me having start all over again after a Red Screen of Death)

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Tagged: gaming, littlebigplanet, ps3

 

Jon Hicks: Starflyer 59 - Changing of the Guard

Posted by Jon Hicks at August 04, 2010 03:05 AM

There’s a new Starflyer 59 album on the way, which means 3 things: I get excited, I talk about it a lot, and people ask me who they are and what they should listen to for a Starflyer introduction.

Their sound has changed a lot over the years, from the debut album Silver, and it’s My Bloody Valentine-ish droning guitars to straighter rock, via New Order and Electronica. It’s hard to pick out an introduction playlist, but I’ve had a go, and you can listen to it on Spotify.

If you do have a listen, ‘Everyone but Me’ is my favourite track of all time, and Silver is in my top 5 favourite albums of all time.

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Tagged: music, starflyer59

 

Jon Hicks: White UFO

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 23, 2010 04:11 PM

This beautiful Apple Airport Basestation was my 30th birthday present from my wife, quite possibly one of the best presents I’ve ever had. The gift of wireless. In those days it was 1mb broadband, but it was still exciting being able to work from anywhere in the house.

These days it’s been overtaken by N wireless devices, but it’s such a design classic that it has to be on display. It’s new home is the windowsill next to my desk at Webble Mill.

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Nate Weaver (Wevah): Changes

Posted by Nate Weaver (Wevah) at July 22, 2010 09:13 PM

 

Jon Hicks: Illustrator export artboards as png32

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 22, 2010 05:52 PM

A recent plea on twitter for an Illustrator script has been answered! I needed to export all my artboards as 32bit PNGs (24bit + 8 bit Alpha Channel), with the artboard name as the filename, but Illustrator doesn’t come with a built in method to do this. The closest it offers is the standard export, where it can save all artboards, but it always appends the document name to the start of the filename.

Big hurrays then for Dan Smith for creating exactly the script I needed! It’s already made a big difference to my workflow. If you’d like a copy too, Download Artboards-PNG.jsx. I placed mine in Illustrators Presets/en_gb/Scripts folder to make sure it’s always loaded.

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Tagged: adobe, illustrator

 

Jon Hicks: Illustrator export artboards as png24

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 22, 2010 05:52 PM

A recent plea on twitter for an Illustrator script has been answered! I needed to export all my artboards as 24bit PNGs, with the artboard name as the filename, but Illustrator doesn’t come with a built in method to do this. The closest it offers is the standard export, where it can save all artboards, but it always appends the document name to the start of the filename.

Big hurrays then for Dan Smith for creating exactly the script I needed! It’s already made a big difference to my workflow. If you’d like a copy too, Download Artboards-PNG24.jsx. I placed mine in Illustrators Presets/en_gb/Scripts folder to make sure it’s always loaded.

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Tagged: adobe, illustrator

 

Jon Hicks: CSS Filters Slides

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 22, 2010 05:36 PM

Last night I presented a 5 minute microslot on CSS Filters – excluding older versions of IE from seeing your CSS, and feeding extra styles to specific versions of IE and mobile browsers. The slides (with presenter notes) are now available to download from the new Speaking section.

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Nate Weaver (Wevah): Automatron

Posted by Nate Weaver (Wevah) at July 22, 2010 02:15 AM

 

Jon Hicks: A new Ninja for Woo Themes!

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 15, 2010 03:35 PM

I recently created a new Ninja character for WooThemes, but this time, the post about the work is on the WooThemes Blog!

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Jon Hicks: The start of Shelf!

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 15, 2010 03:11 PM

Drew Strojny from The Theme Foundry (who I knew from his lovely Traction theme) recently asked me if I’d like to create a new WordPress theme for him. The offer-I-couldn’t-refuse was complete creative freedom, and the opportunity to make the design process visible. That doesn’t mean ‘open’ in the sense of ‘everything being up for discussion with the internets’ (that way madness lies), but documenting the steps as we go.

Everyone has a different workflow, and my workflow isn’t necessarily the right approach for anyone else and vice versa. However, I still love hearing others explain their thought process – the ‘Design Eye’ panels at SXSW spring immediately to mind as being good examples.

So on this blog, and on my dribbble account, I’ll be recording what happens as it goes along. Who knows, it might be fun! It’s the certainly the first time I’ve ever done a project in this way.

Before I go any further, I have to know the constraints. Even on jobs with creative freedom, there are still constraints. On this project there are 2 main ones: budget (which is usually the case) and saleability. It can’t be so esoteric a theme that no only my mum wants to buy it!

The next stage was to come up with an idea. Drew wanted it be something that I would excited about, that I really felt motivated to do. My original thought was something along an 18th century nautical theme, inspired in no small part by my love for the Kraken Rum packaging:

I discussed this with Drew, but the conclusion was that this was too esoteric, limiting the potential audience somewhat, which was fine. So I went away and sketched a more contemporary idea that had been brewing:

It involves a shelf (very subtle white/grey shades, not wood) with a series of ‘cards’ on it. The content is put into these cards and their size is dependent on the browser window. Content could be identified as different types of ‘cards’ (article, photo, video etc.) and each of these would have a slightly different layout.

There would be a fixed top nav and footer, and these would allow for different colour scheme options – a very modern grey/yellow but the background yellow and text colour could be interchangeable for any colour scheme.

As the content would resize to fit the height, scrolling would be horizontal. We’re always told to avoid horizontal scrolling, but I love a challenge! I’m keen to see if I can make it work, especially with what will be a fluid, responsive design.

This a theme that could multiple purposes:

• a Tumblog or Blog
• Photography or Design portfolio
• Shopping site

Basically sites with a lot of visual information, rather than text-heavy content. Stay tuned for more developments!

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Tagged: shelf

 

Jon Hicks: School of Seven Bells - 'Disconnect from Desire'

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 14, 2010 05:45 PM

Just as it was with their first album “Alpinisims” , the School of Seven Bells second album ‘Disconnect from Desire’ is in heavy rotation at the moment. It’s another one of those albums that even when I’m not playing it, it’s still playing in my head. Especially the closing number “The Wait”, which is nearing 25 plays in just a couple of days.

There’s already a few contenders for favourite album of the year, but this is the top of the list.

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Jon Hicks: Gail's Artisan Bakery Identity

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 14, 2010 01:39 AM

Delicious packaging design for Gail’s Artisan Bakery.

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Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2010 June-Early July Roundup

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at July 12, 2010 08:49 PM

As I alluded to last month, I’ve been in a bit of a posting malaise for some time, so it has been a while since the last Camino update (let alone the last regular Camino update) here.

At the time of our last “regular” update, we were very close to shipping nightlies off of Gecko 1.9.2 and also releasing the Camino 2.0.3 security and stability update. Both of those have since happened.

Since then, we’ve been hard at work on driving the bugs blocking Camino 2.1 Alpha 1 to zarro and readying the release of Camino 2.0.4, another security and stability update. Stuart Morgan updated our Sparkle pull, went on a tear cleaning up deprecated function usage, and started attacking thorny 2.1 bugs, Gecko regressions, and revivified Flash crashes that we’d previously worked around. As a result, we’re sitting at only one blocker for 2.1a1: some continuing performance issues with the new autocomplete. In addition, Stuart pretty much single-handedly got Camino building off of mozilla-central, before we were slammed into a brick wall of embedding-unfriendly code and massive Gecko platform changes landing after the platform had reached the beta stage!

I’ve been working on fixing assorted small bugs here and there, including some changes to our AppleScript dictionary and a long-standing bug with selections in the Save dialogues (thanks to a tip from Wevah). I’ve also worked on shepherding patches into the tree—both for 2.0.4 and Gecko fixes we needed for 2.1—and have done some debugging of other bugs, old and new. In addition, I coordinated the upstreaming of Camino’s crash reporter client localizations back to the Google Breakpad project and reviewed several of Stuart’s build- and update-related patches.

So that’s more or less where we stand in mid-July. We’ll hopefully have 2.0.4 out by the end of the month, and 2.1a1 not too long after that (free time permitting). As always, if you’re interested in helping out, come find us on irc.

 

Caminol10n: Camino 2.0.4 l10n status

Posted by Caminol10n at July 09, 2010 06:40 AM

Release notes can be found at Bug 577527. See the full article for the usual status matrix. Note to Erik and to self: a string fix in the Breakpad Norwegian localization is expected.

Please note that there will be one and only one release of any localized version of Camino. Therefore, it's very important that release notes translations are produced and sent as soon as possible.

The translations are expected to be sent by Sun, Aug 22

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Jon Hicks: New Goodies!

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 09, 2010 01:25 AM

I’ve finally been through the entire site, and kicked out any legacy stuff (some of which went back to 2003!) and implemented the new responsive design. Originally, I’d intended to change the layout in the various sections, but in the end I’ve used the same one. After trying the other options, it just felt right.

Wallpapers

One of things I’ve changed is a new Goodies section. With the exception of the Hill House font (download link now works!), everything is new, including brand new desktop and iphone(4)/mobile wallpapers.

Icon Reference Chart

Another new goodie is a little labour of love: The Icon Reference Chart. Fed up of checking various sources to get the information I needed, I started compiling it all together in one table. I’ll add to and improve this chart over time.

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Tagged: hicksdesign, updates

 

Jon Hicks: Beautiful new underground ads that dodge the obvious

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 08, 2010 06:00 PM

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Smokey Ardisson: I never thought this would really happen…

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at July 08, 2010 05:26 AM

To borrow a line from the illustrious Jon Hicks, “I never thought this would really happen, but…” I finally got my Camino 1.0 shirt.

Back in December of 2005, Samuel Sidler emailed those of us who had worked on Camino during the post-0.8 era, announcing that there were going to be Camino 1.0 polo shirts in celebration of our forthcoming 1.0 release. Of course Sam was out West and most of the rest of us were not, so there was always the question of how we were going to get these celebratory garments; for most, the solution turned out to be the 2007 Meet-Up. I was one of the Camino team members who couldn’t make that meet-up (or the 2008 version), so, as time went on and my shirt alternately was riding around in Sam’s car or sitting in his apartment awaiting a trip to the post office, I slowly gave up hope of ever seeing it.

Then, in late May of this year, the 2010 Samuel Sidler World Tour™ rolled into town and Sam and I met for dinner—and he had stopped by wherever lost Camino 1.0 shirts were kept and picked up mine before arriving. I never thought the day would actually come…. After such a long saga, it was a surprisingly low-key ending, yet well-worth the wait.

And, because no good story is complete without pictures, here’s Sam in his Songbird kit and me in the long-awaited Camino 1.0 polo, befuddling other patrons outside the restaurant after dinner:

 

Jon Hicks: Using files for page templates in Textpattern

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 07, 2010 06:24 PM

One of Textpattern’s drawbacks has always been that page templates are saved in the database. Editing them means using the textarea in the TXP admin interface, but I’m sure most people would prefer to use their favourite text editor.

Here’s a workaround that works in TXP 4.2.0 (I haven’t tried other versions).

1. Enable ‘Allow PHP in pages?’ in Advanced Preferences if you haven’t already
2. Set up your sections and corresponding page templates as you want them
3. Copy and paste everything in your page template into a php file (such as ‘template.php’)
4. Create a ‘pages’ folder in your textpattern directory and save the file there
5. Replace the content of your page template in TXP admin with:

<txp:php>echo parse(file_get_contents(txpath.'/pages/template.php'));</txp:php>

From there on in, you can edit the php file. There may be a performance hit doing this, but all TXP tags work. Much easier!

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Tagged: textpattern, tips

 

Jon Hicks: iOS icon template for Illustrator CS5

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 06, 2010 01:30 AM

With the iPad and iPhone 4, there are as many, if not more, different size icons to create for iOS than there are for desktop apps. While there are plenty of templates and reference sheets for Photoshop users (see Cocoia) I prefer to use Illustrator CS5 to create mine. So I’ve made my own template, and it’s available here if you find it useful too!

Download the iOS icon template for Illustrator CS5

The top layer of the file contains labels and a mask to add the rounded corners of the icon. Don’t forget to hide these before you export.

Corner Radius

Something that Apple doesn’t include in it’s documentation are the various corner radius dimensions for all the icon sizes. This information has been compiled thanks to investigations of Sarah Parmenter and Tim Van Damme.

It’s best to create the artwork with 90° corners and let the OS round them off, but there is a mask layer to help you check how it would look. The mask also uses the appropriate colour for the context – white for the app store, black for the home screen and light grey for the spotlight results.

Also the icon that iOS uses for spotlight results on the iPad is trimmed by 1px around the edge. So while the artwork still needs to be supplied as 50px, the visible area is only 48px, and the guides reflect that, while the rounded corner mask stays at 50px.

Exporting

The icons are all set out on their own artboard, so when you’re ready to export check the ‘Use Artboards’ option to get each icon as an individual file:

Disclaimer

While I’ve worked hard to make sure this template is as accurate as possible, I can’t guarantee it’s completely error-free. Let me know if you find any bugs, and I’ll update it!

If you’re using CS4 or below, this template may well work for you, but hasn’t been tested and may explode leaving terrible stains. I target CS5 because of it’s the first version that has pixel snapping that actually works!

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Tagged: adobe, icons, illustrator, resources

 

Jon Hicks: Dr Who in Springfield

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 05, 2010 02:42 AM

Springfield Punx have been doing a series of Simpsons-ised characters from Season 5! I’ve also got a soft spot for his Steve Zissou …

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Jon Hicks: Daniel's Monsters featured in Booth

Posted by Jon Hicks at July 01, 2010 02:10 AM

Booth is a beautiful annual poetry magazine (and weekly blog) published by Butler University in Indianapolis. To my surprise and delight, this years edition, which came out in May, featured Daniels Daily Monsters!

First, check out the gorgeous cover, which was part-inspiration for the little illustrations I’m doing on the site:

The first page of the article featured the Monster that Leigh drew:

And the accompanying spread shows not only my monsters, but also 2 that Samantha drew as well. The whole family got published!

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Tagged: danielsmonsters, press, published

 

Jon Hicks: Recent Work: Shopify

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 30, 2010 01:35 PM

I recently undertook a refresh of the Shopify shopping bag logo. An interesting one for me, as the concept was already in place, it just needed a rendering clean up, sort out the perspective and make it more dynamic.

Here’s a side by side, old and new:

Sketches of initial ideas, looking for the right perspective:

Followed by early ‘vector roughs’, getting the shape and colours mocked up (the idea of making the bag handles form a cutesy smile was shelved early on!):

Final Artwork with green and black/white variations:

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Tagged: logos, work

 

Jon Hicks: Drink Tea (for the Love of God!)

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 29, 2010 02:06 PM

This uplifting ditty and accompanying Python-esque video about my favourite refreshment was Kula Shaker‘s free Christmas single from 2007!

We wanted George Orwell for the narration, not just because he was a T.O.F.F., but because he actually wrote a very serious article for the Times newspaper in the 1940’s about how to make a perfect cup of tea. Whilst we don’t agree completely with his rather rigid, and to be honest, quite dogmatic creed of ‘no sugar’, we still admire his pioneering work as a social prophet and old skool tea drinker. Good old George.

Good on you chaps!

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Tagged: british, music, tea, video

 

Jon Hicks: Kyle Bobby Dunn - A Young Person's Guide To

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 28, 2010 07:48 PM

You may call it Ambient, Drone, Minimalism or Modern Classical, but I always think of this sort of music as being like bat detectors. In the same way that they change the frequency of the bat sounds so that we can hear them, it’s as if this is what nature sounds like once converted for our ears.

Whatever the pigeonhole, it’s a form of music I adore and Kyle Bobby Dunn’s A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn is in it. It’s a 2 disc collection of beautiful, atmospheric music. His site even has one of those mediaplayer widget thingies, so pop along and have a listen! Start with my favourite ‘Empty Gazing’ and go from there!

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Tagged: ambient, music

 

Jon Hicks: Orbital's cover of the Dr Who theme, this time with Matt Smith!

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 28, 2010 03:38 PM

I just died and went to heaven.

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Tagged: drwho, music, video

 

Jon Hicks: Villagers - "Ship of Promises"

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 27, 2010 04:55 PM

Villagers debut album “Becoming a Jackal’ has been my most played album in June. Here’s the the single ‘Ship of Promises’, with a suitably hippy video to go with it. The packaging has great artwork too…

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Caminol10n: String changes expected in Camino 2.1

Posted by Caminol10n at June 27, 2010 09:18 AM

This post will list documented/expected string changes for Camino 2.1.

Bug 569280 - The print dialog settings have moved. A new set of strings is going to appear in the main Localizable.strings file

Bug 534809 - The %s string placeholder in the cookies sheet/dialog has been replaced with %@

 

Nate Weaver (Wevah): Paparazzi! and Flash capture

Posted by Nate Weaver (Wevah) at June 25, 2010 01:05 PM

 

Jon Hicks: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Daleks

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 24, 2010 04:31 AM

Brought up as I was on both Dr Who and the BBC production of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, this video hits the spot with me!

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Jon Hicks: Dr Who: The Big Bang predictions

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 23, 2010 07:25 PM

The Pandorica Opens. Bloody hell. A great penultimate episode to a season that has really impressed me with The Eleventh Hour, Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone, Amys Choice, Vincent and the Doctor and The Lodger.

So many great moments to praise in this story, but one that sticks in my mind is that the Doctors clever, stirring, ‘Let somebody else try first’ speech starts with “…right…sorry…dropped it…”. Genius.

I just wanted to pick over some of the strands from this story, and stills on the BBC site, to try and work out what’s going to happen (because the wait for the last episode is agonising)…

• An earlier shot shows the vortex manipulator next to the Doctor, it could be that this is his escape route from the Pandorica. While we’re on that – poor Captain Jack and his missing hand – I wonder if he can grow a new one?
• Something turns the new ‘Dell-designed’ Daleks into stone. Some sort of encounter with the Weeping Angels or the crack? Or fossilised?
• Amelia Pond (the 7 year old Amy) returns
• We don’t actually see River and the TARDIS explode, but we’re meant to assume that. I bet she hasn’t.

My predictions: Something else is behind the ‘alliance’, something controlling/manipulating all of them, and will get rid of them once they’ve served their purpose. The same person that can be heard saying ‘silence will fall’ over the TARDIS speakers. I’m really hoping it’s not the Master resurrected again, but possibly another old foe such as Omega or the Valeyard. Rory really is dead, but the Auton Rory gains his humanity in the same way as Professor Bracewell did in Victory of the Daleks. I don’t think that Amy is leaving the series, but can’t see how without another convenient ‘reset button’ plot resolution. I’m confident that Stephen Moffat is above all that though.

There is one other thing. Back in ‘Flesh and Stone’ there is a scene where the Doctor comes back to tell Amy “remember what I told you when you were seven?”, and he’s wearing his tweed jacket (which by that point had been taken by the Angels). It could just be a continuity error, but my gut feeling is that this was intentional. His words didn’t seem to make sense in that context., so this could be the Doctor from The Big Bang going back (forward?) to that point in history, either intentionally, or accidentally through the crack. Amy remembering what he said to her when she was seven is somehow the key to resolving events.

Anyway, only 3 more days to find out! I almost don’t want to watch it, as it means it will all be over until Christmas…

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Tagged: drwho

 

Jon Hicks: Finally, a fluid Hicksdesign

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 23, 2010 03:13 AM

I’ve been wanting a fluid layout on this site for about 5 years. I had a brief redesign back in 2005 where I flirted with it for a few months, but it was soon switched back to fixed as I couldn’t get it right.

Last year, I discovered CSS media queries while working on the internal pages of the Opera Browser, and tried to implement it here. It was half-assed and was removed, again after a few months.

It took Ethan Marcotte’s excellent article for A List Apart Responsive Web Design to motivate me to do it properly, as well as know HOW to do it properly. I don’t think I’ve read anything as exciting and inspirational for a long time. So I started from scratch, working on the basic skeleton of the layout, getting the various resolution dependant layouts in place, before re-implementing the design (making a few changes long the way of course).

So now, you’ll see the layout and type size change depending on the available width. From a narrow single column (which should be the view you’ll see on mobile devices)…

To a 2 column…

to the more familiar 3 column style I’ve had here for a while…

and finally to an x-large 4 column layout…

For now, only the journal has been re-jigged, but all the other sections will follow as soon as time allows. It won’t be perfect, and I expect there to be plenty of fine-tweaking for a while yet. Waiting until it’s perfect before launching just means it won’t happen!

The next project for the site is implementing SVG icons …

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Tagged: hicksdesign

 

Jon Hicks: LiveView for iPhone and iPad

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 17, 2010 03:18 PM

If you’re designing anything that’ll be viewed on either the iPhone or iPad, you’re going to find LiveView a godsend. It’s been out a couple of years, but I only discovered it this week.

It comes in two parts – a Screencaster app for your Mac, and a companion app for the iPhone/iPad. As you work on the graphics, you can view it live on the device. An essential, and free tool. I shot a quick video on my iPhone to show how it works:

So far, it only seems to be lacking an option top use it in landscape mode.

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Tagged: apps, design, ipad, iphone

 

Jon Hicks: Comments

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 16, 2010 09:19 AM

I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.

Derek Powazeck Your right to comment ends at my front door

Derek just echoed some of my thoughts, and helps me explain why I’ve turned of my comments recently. I feel able to post more often now, it’s just spare time that I need now.

Spam is also a reason. It used to be that posts over 5 weeks ago would attract comment spam, nowadays it’s a matter of a few hours. While Textpattern does a good job of filtering off a lot of the crap, there are always a few that sneak through. As a discussion system blog comments feel broken.

Instead, I’m in the process of updating the blog design (using the Responsive Design technique) and I will add a simple twitter reply link to each post. If you want to make a comment, just send a reply using that, and we’ll see how it goes!

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Tagged: journal

 

Jon Hicks: CSS Filters

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 15, 2010 03:56 PM

I’ll be doing a 5 minute microslot on CSS filters at the next Oxford Geek Night on July 21st. CSS filters is the practice of linking to your stylesheets in different ways in order to control how different browsers and their versions get your CSS. It’s something I get quite a lot of questions about when people look at my source code, so I thought I’d explain it via a presentation! The OGN microslot is the ideal format for it.

If you live nearish to Oxford, and haven’t been to Geek Night yet, do come and see what you’re missing. It’s a free event (sponsored by local gents/superstars Torchbox) in the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. Beer, geek talk and socialising. What more do you need?

In other news – Family Hicks also waiting to hear about our house move date – what’s the betting that it becomes July 21st?! ;)

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Tagged: css, oxford, oxfordgeeknight, talks

 

Jon Hicks: What happens when the Pandorica opens?

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 08, 2010 02:47 AM

We’ve only got 3 episodes left in Season 5 of Dr Who, the 2 part finale (“The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang”) and next week’s wacky-looking “The Lodger” starring James Corden. This means that it’s now possible to tell what bits from the Season 5 trailer are from the finale! While it’s possible that some of what’s left is from The Lodger, I’m pretty sure that the final involves:

• River Song. (we knew she’d be in it anyway from the giveaway line “I’ll see you again when the Pandorica opens”)
• Cybermen, one of which has one arm, and had to pick up it’s own head
• Roman soldiers
• Stonehenge
• An underground cave/labyrinth/catacomb (underneath Stonehenge?)
• Horses

I’ve uploaded a Flickr set of video captures for anyone that’s interested.

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Tagged: drwho

 

Stuart Morgan: A “Fix” For The Flip4Mac Bug

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

If you are a Camino user, and you've encountered WMV video or audio online in the past couple of years, you've probably seen pages inexplicably scramble themselves as you scroll, type, or select text (although you probably didn't realize that it was because of WMV content in another window or tab). This is due to an old bug in Telestream's Flip4Mac plugin which, since it's a third-party plugin, we rely on them to fix.

Six months ago, I had the opportunity to talk to a Telestream engineer about this issue. To make sure I could describe the problem as accurately as possible I spent about an hour testing pages with WMV content and looking at what exactly happened to other tabs and windows (that was the first time I'd personally looked into it, since I knew that others involved with Camino had talked to Telestream and been told that it was being investigated at their end). After that hour, without looking at any code or having any special knowledge beyond a basic understanding of how plugin drawing works on the Mac, it was clear how they were corrupting the graphics context: the plugin was changing the location of (0, 0) out from under us.

I had assumed that they already knew this, and that the problem was figuring out how to fix it, but as it turned out, the step from knowing that to finding and fixing the bug in the Flip4Mac plugin was tiny. So I found myself wondering: if it took me an hour to do essentially all of the work necessary to get this bug fixed, just by looking at the behavior, how much time could Telestream—with access not only to their code, but to the specific changes that they made in the version that first introduced this bug—have put into investigating in the year and a half since we had been assured that they would look into it?

If it were just that, I would write it off to a communication failure and think nothing more of it. Perhaps it was never made clear to them just how severe the problems this bug caused were, and certainly we should have followed up with them regularly to ensure that the bug didn't fall though the cracks by accident. The important thing was that now they had a fix in hand, and they understood the severity of the issue, so surely a fixed version would be available soon.

But here we are, six months and two releases of Flip4Mac later, without a fix. I was disappointed that the 2.2.0.49 release at the end of December didn't have the fix, but not too surprised; there's a whole release cycle to go through to get fixes out to users, and a month-long cycle isn't at all unreasonable—although it certainly suggested that they didn't take this issue as seriously as we do (if somehow Camino were making the entire system unusable for 2% of our users every time they launched it, and we had a fix, we'd risk slipping a release slightly to get it in, without hesitation). We followed up, just to reiterate that we viewed the fix as critical, and why: that it was not only damaging the WMV experience for hundreds of thousands of their users, but that it also crippled the entire browser for those affected, creating widespread problems for users, and offloading the large support burden of their bug onto us. We made it clear that this was by far our most frequently reported bug. We've made these points to them a number of times over the past six months.

Earlier this week, there was a new Flip4Mac release (variously labeled in the download as 2.2.0.49A, 2.2.0.49R, and, confusingly enough, just 2.2.0.49 again), the second since they have had a fix. It didn't include any release notes (the release notes they link to are the original 2.2.0.49 notes), so we don't know what they did fix, but it definitely didn't include the Camino issue.

A release process where an important fix takes more than six months to get into a release isn't plausible, so the only possible conclusion I can reach is that Telestream's management has made the explicit decision that fixing a problem that affects every single Camino user using their product isn't even moderately important: not important enough to slip into a release that was winding down, not important enough to get its own tiny bug-fix release in a span of five months, and not even important enough to put into a release that could not realistically have been assembled until well after they had this fix. So users continue to suffer, and we continue to shoulder the support burden and the negative publicity of their bug, because they apparently don't think that Camino matters.

Since Telestream is choosing not to fix the bug, I'm releasing a stop-gap fix: this tool will modify the released version of the Flip4Mac plugin to remove the problematic code, so that it will no longer corrupt drawing throughout Camino. I can't easily make any complex changes, so unlike a real fix to this bug it won't be selectively applied to Camino; as a result, WMV content may behave differently in Firefox once you run it (Safari uses a different plugin, so should not be affected in any way).

Hopefully, Telestream will reconsider the importance of this bug, and the workaround won't be necessary for long.

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Stuart Morgan: Where Do We Go From Here?

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

I've been looking around at reactions to the release of Camino 1.6, and a lot of it could be summarized as: “So?” The points are generally valid; amid the hype around the upcoming release of Firefox 3 (and to some extent, all the WebKit hype), releasing a new version using Gecko 1.8 (as seen in Camino 1.5 and Firefox 2) is hardly ground-breaking. But then, it wasn't meant to be, which is why it's Camino 1.6, rather than Camino 2—that would have been more clear if we'd released it last November as we had originally hoped, but such is the nature of trying to do scheduling in a volunteer project. Camino 1.6 is, as it was intended, just an incremental improvement; nice if you were already using Camino, but not nearly as exciting to read about as Firefox 3. (Here's a hint for the people wondering why we didn't use Gecko 1.9 by the way: Gecko 1.9 development is very, very closely tied to Firefox 3 development, and Firefox 3 isn't out of beta yet.)

If it were just the unfortunate timing of releasing amid flurries of stories about how Firefox 3 is just around the corner and will bring about world peace and cut through tin cans without getting dull, having press coverage like “Good news for those of you who are part of the ever-shrinking community that still uses Camino” (thanks for the love, Ars) would be easy to ignore, but I think the real issue is a more lasting one: the change in Safari's place in the web.

In the past year or so, WebKit has made very significant advances in compatibility, the iPhone has raised WebKit prominence, site authors are finally starting to get the idea that locking out the browser that comes installed on the machines of 5+% of their potential visitors (as well as the only one available to iPhone users) is probably not a good idea, and Safari is available for testing (and with Drosera, potentially development) on Windows. All that adds up to far fewer people finding themselves in need of a browser other than Safari to use all the sites they need to, which used to be a big part of why people turned to Camino.

That leaves us competing almost entirely on browser features and UI. But things have changed there too: with Safari 3, Apple changed their approach and actually back-ported a new version of Safari to the previous OS, rather than just back-porting WebKit as they had been doing. Assuming that continues, historical OS X adoption rates tell us that new versions of Safari will be available to almost all Mac users, rather than only about half, and so we lose another large uncontested (by Safari) user base. In a head to head match between Apple and a handful of very-part-time volunteers, it wouldn't take much effort on Apple's part to move fast enough that we wouldn't be able to keep ahead of them.

To be clear, I'm not complaining. Camino is about giving users a sleek Mac browser that Just Works; if Safari is equally good at being the browser that we have been working to build, then users win, because the browsing experience we wanted to provide is pre-installed on their machines. And it's not like we are in this for the money. I'm also not saying I'm ready to hang up my hat just yet (nor am I in any way, shape, or form speaking for the Camino project; this is all just my own musing and opinions); just that I spend a lot of time recently thinking about what might be next for Camino. Certainly, in the short term, we work to get Camino 2 out there soon, based on Gecko 1.9 and with a few new features that we've ween working on tossed in for good measure. Beyond that, the path is (to me, at least) unclear.

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Stuart Morgan: On Bugs And Feature Requests

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

This is another post in my informal series of Camino public service announcements (yes, I know I promised to post about things other than Camino, but not today).

I see a lot of feedback from Camino users. I read basically every feedback email, Camino forum post, and bug report that comes it, and I answer a fair number of those. Mostly, people are fine, and I don't mind doing it. However, there is a class of feedback that comes from users who are apparently very misguided about the way things work, and there have been enough of them recently that I feel it's worth commenting on. I know I'm far from the first to talk about how not to interact with an open source product as a user, but everyone's take is a little different. I'm not foolish enough to claim to speak for the entire open source community (as in the case of the much-discussed HandBrake post, which makes the absurd claim that no open source software cares what its users want and that feature requests are therefore pointless). I won't even claim to speak for the Camino project; just myself, from the standpoint of one of the people dealing with all the feedback we get.

As I said, mostly people with bugs or requests are perfectly reasonable, and I'm glad to help. However, there are some people who come out of the gate rude, belligerent, and/or with an attitude of entitlement. They seem to be operating under the delusion that they can treat us however they like, and we have an obligation to be friendly and helpful anyway. Nope. If you send me email because you want me to help you, but you start it off by insulting me, I'm not likely to bother.

Since the common refrain is a variation on “do what I want right now or I'm never using Camino again”, I assume the belief is that we are desperate to keep every user. What these users don't seem to understand is that while this tactic may work in the commercial world (although I'd suggest that perhaps they'd have better results there if they started off at least being civil), there's a huge difference between what you can get away with while dealing with someone being paid by a company that wants to keep getting your money, and what someone is going to put up with when they are spending their free time helping you with a product they made in their free time, and give away. While in many cases I probably could be obsequious and calm these users down, convincing them that Camino is worthy of them... why would I? If they stick around after having learned that being obnoxious is a useful strategy, what have I gained for myself and the Camino project? More abuse down the road.

I'm thrilled that lots of people like Camino, and I'm always glad to turn reasonable users with problems into happy Camino users by helping them out when I can—but I couldn't care less how many abusive users storm off in a huff because I wouldn't fall all over myself to placate them. That's not to say I'm abusive to those people in return; stooping to their level is not only pointless, it reflects badly on the project. But anyone who tries to use the threat of changing to another browser as a club to force me to do something for them or as a shield for rudeness shouldn't be surprised when I happily tell them to enjoy whatever browser they choose instead.

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Stuart Morgan: Camino 1.5

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

We released Camino 1.5 today, at long last. Lots of good stuff that we are really excited to get out there to wider audience of users. I won't go into all the new stuff, since the site does a great job of covering all that. Instead, I want to preemptively respond to some of the feedback that we routinely get around release time:

“Big deal, <some other browser> already has those features.”
Yes, but <some other browser> has a paid, full-time development staff. If the worst that can be said about us is that we, a very small group of people doing volunteer work in our free time, can stay largely competitive with browsers that people are paid to work on, I'd say we are doing pretty darn good. That's not to say we don't ever want to innovate, but we have to be roughly on par with everyone in terms of core features for any innovations to matter.

“It crashes on every launch/never renders any pages/other catastrophic failure on every basic task. Nobody download it!”
Um... did it occur to you that if it didn't work at all, someone would probably have noticed before we released it? If you want to use input managers to hack your apps, that's fine, but it's irresponsible to use them without understanding that when you hack something, it may not, you know, actually work anymore if it's done wrong, and that that's not our fault. Remove your input managers (in this case, 1Passwd and CaminoSession, both of which will cause total meltdown if you aren't using their latest versions) before flaming us or telling everyone you can find that our product doesn't work.

“Who cares, it still doesn't do <X>. What have they been doing all this time?”
See above under “small group” and “free time”. If your complaint is that we don't spend enough of our free time making you happy... well, as our fearless leader likes to say: “Bite me”.

Of course, most people don't treat us like dirt; I just have to vent around release time as a coping strategy. To everyone who gives us positive feedback: thank you! To everyone who gives us constructive feedback, thank you as well, and we certainly listen—and be sure to check out 1.5, as it may have that feature you've been asking for!

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Stuart Morgan: Toys For The Sandbox

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

I've made a small foray into the world of Camino add-ons myself. Somewhat ironic, perhaps, but at least I did follow my own advice.

It started with ChimericalConsole, which is a simple JavaScript console for Camino. We've always said it would be something that would be best done as a third-party tool, since we aren't developer-targeted, and since no-one had done it yet and I found myself using the ugly Console logging hidden pref one too many times, I went ahead and wrote it as an add-on. I'm still not really happy about using an input manager, but hopefully this will motivate me to work on a real plugin architecture.

Then, mostly just to show the vocal minority that wants it that it could in fact be done outside of Camino itself, I wrote AsceticBar, which removes the favicons from the bookmark bar and adds Safari-like markers to folders and tab groups. I still think it's a much worse UI, but hopefully it will mean one less group of people agitating for the aesthetic prefs we have always said we won't be adding to Camino.

Both are available at my new hacks page. Enjoy!

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Stuart Morgan: Camino's Future

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

Although I said we are entirely focused on getting 1.1 out the door, we have been giving some thought to what comes next. One big goal is to start iterating faster; there's a balance between releasing often enough to keep people interested and getting new features in their hands and not releasing so often that people stop bothering to update because each new version brings only one or two small things that they don't care about.

Since it's hard to know what the development team will look like in the future we can't plan too much yet, but we have started looking how to make 1.2 happen soon by targeting a few feature areas and focusing pretty closely on those. That's not to say we won't keep fixing miscellaneous bugs; just that we'll be mindful of not tackling anything too big that isn't something we really need for 1.2

Once 1.2 is out, we can turn our attention to 2.0. That may seem like a strange version number jump, but 2.0 is when we plan to move to Gecko 1.9, which will be quite a change. The biggest is the switch to Cairo, an entirely new drawing system that should solve some long-standing performance issues in Camino. Perhaps more visible to many people is the awesome work that Josh has been doing to rewrite the form widgets that Camino uses and Firefox will start sharing with us; it's still in progress, but already it fixes many of our old widget problems, gives us a much cleaner code base to work from, and (probably most controversial to some Camino users) will give us the fall-back behavior that lets simple widgets look aqua, but styled widgets look like the page author intended.

What about Camino-specific changes in 2.0? Definitely too early to say. Have some ideas, and know a thing or two about Cocoa? Stop by #camino on irc.mozilla.org and we'll be glad to start assigning you features :)

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Stuart Morgan: The Road To 1.1

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

“So 1.1 beta is pretty cool,” we hope you are saying to yourself, “but when is 1.1 going to be released?” Hopefully the answer is very soon, but as always the real answer is, “When it's ready.” We really want to get 1.1 in everyone's hands, but we need to make sure it's solid. Right now we have at least one random crasher that we are hunting down, the sporadic “some pages don't render until the window is resized” bug, and a few smaller regressions. What we really don't want is to ship 1.1 and have people saying “1.0 was much more stable; I guess I'll stick with that.”

So we've basically locked down our features, and are limiting most bugfix work to things that are regressions from 1.1. The last thing we want to do at this point is risk adding more bugs while we squash the last of the bugs we know we have in 1.1 beta. So while we are definitely filing away all the feature requests we are getting in response to the renewed interest sparked by the release of the beta, whatever awesome new feature you suggested, no matter how much we would like to implement it, is not going to be in 1.1 if it's not 1.1 beta. Right now our all-consuming priority is to get 1.1 out to everyone who has been patiently for all the cool new features we've already added since 1.0. On the other hand, we do want to hear about each and every “this works in 1.0.x but not in 1.1” problem you see, so we don't accidentally leave you wanting to stay with 1.0.

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Stuart Morgan: Random Thoughts On Reactions To 1.1 Beta

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

I've been reading a fair number of the little mini-reviews people have been posting, and the comments in response to them. In no particular order, some thoughts about various things I've seen:

• Session saving seems to be pretty popular with everyone, so I'm glad we got that for 1.1.
• People still think the Acid 2 test matters. I guess I was hoping it had died down and people had forgotten, but no such luck. The most disturbing was a comment someone made that “Safari is a more standards-compliant browser because it passes the Acid 2 test and Camino doesn't” Um... not so much. WebKit is getting better and better at compatibility, but when it comes to actually working with the most sites, WebKit most definitely does not beat Gecko. Large portions of the Acid 2 test are about obscure edge cases that may never appear on any site. The fact that jinglepants did a serious of very target fixes to make WebKit pass Acid 2 was cool, and apparently a huge publicity win, but it did not magically solve all of WebKit's other compatibility bugs. It's like all the hubbub that comes up periodically in the video-card world: it's nice that they can micro-optimize their cards to look good in the benchmarks that everyone uses, but what actually matters is whether or not the hot new games will actually run.
• Yes, we are not on the leading edge of browser features. There were a fair number of “Yawn, Browser X had that feature a year ago”. comments. You know what Browser X has for every value of X I saw in those comments? Paid, full-time developers. The fact that we are staying at least somewhat competetive despite having less that one full-time developer if you add all of us up and all of us being volunteer is, I think, pretty cool.
• Either most people didn't read all the release notes, or they all work for the government. The notes were organized by release, top down, so “New in 1.1b“, then ”New in 1.1a2”, etc. Many, many mini-reviews mentioned Kerberos support as one of the big new features they picked out of those lists—a feature that I think we only ever had requested twice (both by people with .gov email addresses), but was new in 1.1b. So unless there was massive hidden demand for it, its prominence in other people's versions of the feature list suggests a lot of people just never read past the first section.
• We don't have anti-phishing support. This is the one that bothers me, because we never said it, and it's not true. This appears to be people blowing the MySpace password-stealing fix out of proportion; if I have a page on a site you log in to, and I can steal your password without your knowledge, that's not phishing, and that's what we fixed. We'd like to have real anti-phishing as a feature, but we don't yet, and it's unfortunate that people will likely judge us as not having lived up to claims that we didn't actually make.

Of course, that's all smaller, random stuff. The overwhelming tone I saw is that people are happy with the way 1.1 is shaping up. Once we squash a few important bugs, we'll be ready to ship a 1.1 that a lot of people are really going to like.

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Stuart Morgan: Playing Nicely In Other People's Sandboxes

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

With the fairly wide-spread announcement of 1.1 beta, there have been a whole lot more people trying out development builds than the usual nightly build users. With them is coming a flood of emails, forum and software tracker posts, and feedback emails with variations of “I downloaded 1.1 beta and it doesn't work at all”. The problem usually takes one of two forms: CamiTools, or an older version of CaminoSession. But of course, most users just blame us.

This is partially our fault, because there's no extension API in Camino. We'd like there to be one, but frankly we just don't have the time and manpower right now, as getting the browser itself right is higher priority at the moment. So, naturally the people who really want to make extensions are finding other ways. But it's also a significant amount not our fault, because we don't control other people or their code. So if you are one of those people who really wants to write a hack for Camino, here are some guidelines that, if followed, will make us much, much happier. The less time we spend trying to support users having problems with code we didn't write, the more time we have to code. Who knows, maybe we'll even find the time to write an extension system.

1. Don't. Ask yourself: do you really have to write it as an add-on? Camino is open source, and we like contributions. If a feature you want is missing, there's a reasonable chance that we'd like to see it too, and just haven't had the time. CaminoSession is an example of something that I wish had never been developed as an add-on, because we had an open bug for it, and it could have just been built right in. Yes, there are plenty of things we have said we aren't ever going to do in Camino, so this isn't always an option, but please consider it first.

2. Assume nothing. Far and away the biggest headache that CamiTools brought on was the option to use the Metal style for Camino. It worked (during the times that it did work) by shipping a copy of our main nib file with the Metal flag turned on. The assumption here is that we would never change our nib. Meaning, nothing about the UI in the browser window would ever change. If CamiTools had checksummed the original files and only replaced them if the checksum matched, then it wouldn't have been a big deal, since it would have just not been able to enable Metal until a new version was released. Instead it blindly replaced, and if we had changed the nib since the last CamiTools release then Camino just wouldn't open any new windows. Not so fun.

   This applies to input manager hacks as well. CaminoSession called a lot of methods in Camino code with the assumption that they won't change. Several times we changed methods that CaminoSession happened to use, and because it interposes critical methods, when it fails it brings all of Camino down with it. Our number one support request for Camino 1.1 beta has been people who just see blank pages that say “Loading...” because they have an old version of CaminoSession. People forget they installed it, or think they uninstalled it when they haven't, or it just never occurs to them that it's CaminoSession. Camino 1.0.3 works, Camino 1.1 beta doesn't, therefore 1.1 beta is buggy and broken. If you are calling Camino methods, check for all of them when loading, and if any of them are missing, either silently disable or tell the user “Hey, you need a new version”, and either way it'll just be your add-on that stops working, instead of Camino itself.

3. Call a spade a spade. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I really don't like to see hacks being called plug-ins. To me, plug-in implies a supported method of extending an application's functionality. Hacks are not supported. More importantly though, just make it really clear that it's not supported somewhere that users may actually read it. I had at least one user actually arguing with me in a bug that because a nightly build broke CaminoSession it was a bug in Camino, even after I tried to explain. After that, Ben (the author of CaminoSession) helpfully added a prominent note to his download pages, and that did make a noticeable difference (of course not everyone will read disclaimers, no matter how prominent, but that's just the way of the world).

4. [Edit 3/20]: Honor CAMINO_DISABLE_HACKS. Troubleshoot Camino is a helpful tool that we can point people to for debuging that lets them run with a fresh profile. Unfortuntely, input managers and other such forms of hackery don't live in the profile folder, so they can cause problems even with a fresh profile. To make it easier to isolate problems when they happen, please respect the CAMINO_DISABLE_HACKS environment variable; if it's set (which we can easily do from Troubleshoot Camino), just don't load:
   

       const char* disableHackValue = getenv("CAMINO_DISABLE_HACKS");
       if (disableHackValue && strlen(disableHackValue)) {
           // Troubleshooting mode is on; don't do any swizzling
       }

Number 2 is really the key take-away. If you are willing to ride the choppy waters of keeping something working in constantly changing nightly builds, great—just be careful not to sign us up for the added workload too.

Note: To be clear, I'm not trying to hate on CaminoSession in particular, it's just that it's where we learned these lessons the hard way. I think both we and and Ben were broadsided by the problems, as it was new to all of us, and things got significantly better as we started talking more. And I guess that's point 5: come to #camino and chat with us, or email the mailing list. Communication makes all the difference.

[Edited 3/28; I wasn't aware that “haxie” is an Unsanity trademark.]

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Stuart Morgan: Happy (Belated) Beta Day!

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

Another long dearth of posts, as I've been really busy lately. In very related news, Camino 1.1 beta is out, so get it while it's hot!

In honor of the beta, this installment of my post-silence post-a-day-for-a-week will be Camino-themed. I'll have more to say about the beta itself later this week, but today I want to announce my beta-day present: CookieThief. It's not much of a present, I grant you, but I made it myself, and it's the thought that counts. After I got Safari Keychain integration working and was talking about how I hoped it would help Safari users try out Camino, Smokey pointed out that it would also be nice if there were a way for Safari users to bring their cookies over too, and thus was born CookieThief. Since it turned out to be almost no additional work to make it go the other way too, it's a full Camino <–> Safari cookie sync tool.

Sure, it lacks a disk image, a ReadMe that no-one will ever read, fancy artwork, and other such amenities, but it does its job, and hopefully it'll be one less barrier to trying out Camino. Eventually I'd like to work an initial cookie import into Camino if we can get the UI right, but even then CookieThief might be useful for those who bounce back and forth between the two browsers.

It's not very widely tested, so I apologize in advance if it sets your dog on fire. If it does, I'd definitely like to know about it so I can fix it.

Unless you have one of those annoying little yippy dogs, that is.

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Stuart Morgan: Now Easier Than Ever!

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

Safari keychain interoperability landed today, so there's now one less reason for Safari users to resist trying out Camino when 1.1 is released. Yay! It should also be a big help to people who keep both around to deal with sites that are problematic in one or the other; not everyone is going to use Camino full-time, and hopefully this will make it a little more useful for those people to keep around.

There's certainly work left to do in keychain—storing multiple accounts for a site is still something we need to support—but this was a big step forward and I'm excited to see it land. I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works for people in the coming weeks; I know there are likely to be some corners I missed, but I'm hopeful that they will mostly be small ones.

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Stuart Morgan: Make The Burning Stop!

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:06 PM

Today was cascading build failure day. Whee! Fun for the whole family. It's going to be a while before I start feeling bad about at any times I might briefly break the Camino tree again; today I spent enough time on build failures that were not my fault that I think I have a large stockpile of build karma.

The fun began with an SVG change that assumed Cairo, which therefore started the Camino tree burning. So SVG was disabled in Camino, but then Xcode was unhappy about a missing file. I misunderstood the reason for the missing file and thought the best way to deal with the problem was to go ahead and land my Cairo build patch right away. Which did need to happen soon, but in retrospect it would probably have been nice to wait for another day just to spread out the flames a bit. So anyway, when the tree stayed red I learned that the file was missing even with SVG enabled, on purpose, so turning on Cairo didn't actually help that particular problem. So I ripped out references to that file, and would have gone back to doing something useful with my day except that right around then we discovered that Cairo didn't build on 10.3. Oops. And the red continues.

What followed was a tedious debugging process where we finally found that this was a latent bug in cairo-cocoa, that no amount of testing on 10.4 would have found (yay! not my fault!). One of the files was being built in a very un-kosher way that hid (on the Firefox build machine) the fact that it was written using 10.4-only stuff, when it's supposed to build for 10.3. And our build machines are 10.3. And there was no easy fix. Good times.

So faced with either backing out Cairo (which would just open us up for more pain due to the trunk==Cairo mindset of the moment) or hacking around it in fairly ugly ways, I chose the latter. All was going well, until I discovered that one of our build machines is 10.4, and because of how badly messed up the compiling of that file was handled, My hack had broken the ability to build for 10.3 on 10.4. So the hacking got uglier, to the point where I thought long and hard about just backing out Cairo instead. But there the new hacks are, and over nine hours after this roller-coaster of build excitement began, things are finally green again.

Thanks for asking—how was your day?

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Stuart Morgan: Converging

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

The list of bugs for 1.1 is definitely shrinking, and I just landed both the first part of session saving (woohoo, easy nightly-build upgrading!) and a fix for a big popup-blocking regression. Keychain is also getting very close to landing, so I'm hoping that in the next week or two I can get some cool new feature work done on both that and the session saver.

It feels very good to be splitting time between feature work and polish, since it means I feel like we're neither rushing features out without smoothing edges, nor delivering an update that won't have some substantial new user features. Should be a solid release.

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Stuart Morgan: Lesson Learned

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

My lesson for the day: the time before you can actually go to sleep is substantially longer than the amount of time it takes to discover that you accidentally broke the build and back out the offending patch. I'm definitely not doing checkins less than two or three hours before I plan to go to bed in the future.

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Stuart Morgan: Camino Progress

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

Most of the time I haven't been working recently has been spent on Camino, which is part of the reason it's been so quiet around here. For a while I was averaging about a bug fix per day, which was pretty satisfying. I'm scaling back a bit now, partially because I need to spend time on things besides Camino at least occasionally, partially to make sure I don't burn out, and partially because I've overloaded the review queue lately and don't want to make it too much worse until it's had time to drain.

Most of the work I've been doing has been to try to chip away at the 1.1 bugs, many of which have been minor polish that Camino has been needing for a while but weren't ever really high enough priority to fix. Having them on the 1.1 list was good incentive to just burn through them instead seeing many of them punted (again, in many cases).

There are some bigger ticket items on my plate too though; on top of the Keychain rewrite I did to celebrate my return, I'm hoping that there will be time in the 1.1 schedule to do the part users will actually care about: Keychain interoperability with Safari. We've heard lots of times that people trying Camino after using Safari are dismayed to discover that they have to try to remember all their site passwords... which mostly they don't because they've just been letting Keychain do it for them, that being the entire point of the Keychain. I think a lot more people will be willing to give Camino a try once we pick up Safari-stored passwords, and it should also be a boon for those who can't quite decide and go back and forth regularly.

The other larger thing I'm working on is session saving, which is something I've wanted for a while. I tend to accumulate lots of open pages over time as a sort of holding area for my brain. This works fine up until a) I want to either install an OS update or upgrade Camino, or b) Camino crashes (pretty rarely, but it does happen since I live on development builds). When I find myself delaying system upgrades for upward of a week just because I don't want to go to the trouble of manually saving all my browser/brain state, there's definitely a need for the software to be doing something different—and of course minimizing data loss is always a good thing. I'm a little concerned that users won't understand why things like forms and AJAX-y pages don't look just like when they quit; I suspect there will be some unhappiness the first time people discover that it's remembering where they were, not the actual page as it was when they were looking at it. There's some hope that we may be able to leverage the work Firefox did for session saving and get the whole experience, but if not, well, losing a bit of data is better than losing lots, and there are still a lot of pages out there that do actually look the same when you reload them.

In short, I'm definitely feeling good about developing again, and definitely feeling good about the upcoming 1.1 release.

Oh, and I also did my first (mini) super-reviews and my first check-in recently, so that was pretty cool.

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Stuart Morgan: Tada!

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

I celebrated my return to Camino today with 6 patches. Granted only one was at all sizeable, but it was still fun.

It's good to be back.

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Stuart Morgan: Score One For Camino

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

Congratulations to Josh! A great day for Camino (and Firefox), but a sad one for any other fine company that might have wanted to hire him. I expect that Camino will rock even more now.

(I also expect some tasty vegan dinners in my future ;) )

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Stuart Morgan: Suspended Animation

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

As my change over to the new job and new home gets closer, I'm finding myself in a state of limbo—my standing with the Camino project more so than anything else. Although I haven't actually started work yet, I have signed the requisite IP agreement. In absence of other information, I'm assuming that it took effect when I signed it, not when I walk in the door for the first time.

Now, this certainly isn't the end of the story, as I fully intend to begin the paperwork to see what my future is as soon after getting there as possible (without being a colossal pain to my superiors, that is). So in a few weeks I'll start the process of seeing what's what. Until then though, I'm playing it safe. Unfortunately, I don't actually know how safe to play it, so I'm leaning toward really safe. That means:

• No code contributions
• No bug triaging
• No substantive contributions to #camino on IRC
• No forum posts

The last at least is probably overly careful, but it's easier and safer to just take a clean step back for a while.

It's hard though, because I like troubleshooting in the forums, and (as sick as it sounds) I like bug triaging. And it's hard because I feel disloyal to the Camino team. It's not like we are swimming in developers, and it's looking like there will be almost no-one for the next month. The Camino team is awesome, and I hate to abandon them even for a short time—they took me in, answered my dumb questions, helped me get going doing real work, put trust in me, and generally made me feel like a real part of the team almost immediately. They're all very understanding of my hiatus, but in a way, that almost makes it worse. Since I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I wouldn't have my new job without my Camino experience (both resumé and real-world Objective-C), and since it's because of that job that I'm taking a hiatus (hopefully nothing more), I can't help feeling like I'm giving them the short end of the stick here.

With luck, I'll be back soon. I'm sure given enough persistence I can find some way, even if it's curtailed or slightly indirect (e.g., working on some of the Moz Mac-only bugs, rather than Camino specifically), of helping out. And if I'm really lucky, the higher-ups will agree with my view: Camino isn't about competing with Safari, it's just about having more choice, and filling a slightly different niche. It's about enriching the platform.

Stay tuned.

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Stuart Morgan: Belated Camino Celebration

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

Camino 0.8 came out somewhere around my layover in Denver last week, so I've been behind on the celebration. I've been catching up on the user reactions, and it's been quite heartening; besides the (surprisingly little) requisite bitching about how it's worthless because of one missing feature or another, the comments are very positive. The consensus seems to be:

1. It's much better than 0.7
2. It's quite solid
3. It's either almost as good as Safari, or better than Safari.

The fact that many people consider it to be on par with something 8 people work on full time, despite the fact that all the Camino-specific stuff is being developed by a handful of of people in their spare time, is very nice.

The best part, though, is simply the feeling of progress. Camino is not dead, and it is improving. We still have a ways to go, but we are going there! Unfortunately my contributions to 0.8 were fairly small, as I joined late in the game, so most of my pride isn't warranted. Here's hoping I can help see Camino through to 0.9 and beyond, in order to really make a difference.

Pink already thanked all the contributors, but being a modest guy he didn't thank the person who deserves the lion's share of the praise and thanks: himself. He's seen the project through lean times, a new Goliath challenger, several names, and continuous abuse by smart-alec contributors like myself. And he keeps it all going. Seeing just how much is involved, especially beyond "just" coding new stuff and bug fixes, I have a whole new level of respect for the job he does. Pink: you rock.

Oh, and I can't forget a big shout out to the donkey. As botbot will tell you, he's a vital member of the Camino team.

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Stuart Morgan: Go Team

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

The final candidate for Camino 0.8 should be released today, bringing us very close to the 0.8 release that's been eagerly awaited for so long. We've all buckled down recently and cranked out some good stuff—it's nice that we can have a release in a time-frame that we were shooting for without giving up being a bug-fix-driven release.

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Stuart Morgan: Mmm, Fruit

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

Pink asked me to take a look at a bug causing Camino to open very slowly for people with a lot of bookmarks (read: way too many) to see if I could find any low-hanging fruit. Some profiling pointed at most of the time being spent posting system notifications to other components of Camino, telling them that a bookmark had changed and to update appropriately.

Only, those other components don't exist while bookmarks are initially loading. They haven't been set up yet. The upshot being that the bookmark-reading part of launching Camino will be about 6-7x faster once my patch lands. It doesn't hang much lower than that.

Note: the only people likely to notice this are those insane enough to have bookmark files that are, like the one I was testing with, 3+ Mb. (For reference, mine, which I consider reasonably-sized, is 100 Kb.)

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Stuart Morgan: Didn't Your Mother Ever Tell You?

Posted by Stuart Morgan at May 28, 2010 05:05 PM

Camino 0.8b is out, which should help put down the greatly exaggerated rumors of the Camino project's death.

The release was picked up by several mac sites. So now the feedback is starting to roll in on each of these sites, which is a mixed blessing. Yes, we want feedback. And people are using it and trying it out, which is great. But the problem is that most people online are 1) stupid 2) rude or 3) both. I'm not saying I want all the feedback to be positive, but a basic level of respect for others wouldn't hurt.

Good: Feature X would be very useful, and I really hope it can be included in one of the upcoming releases.

Bad: WTF is wrong with you?!! A brain-damaged monkey wouldn't make a browser without feature X!!! Every idiot knows that! I've been saying Camino needs it for weeks, and no one has done anything about it! What are you slackers doing?!?! Oh, and it's the slowest and ugliest POS browser I've seen in my life! If you weren't all so st00pid, maybe you could make a something that doesn't _SUCK_!!!!!

I exaggerate (slightly), of course, but plenty of comments and feedback have elements of the latter. Even if we weren't volunteers doing this in our spare time, that would still be very uncool. Given that we are, it's just totally beyond the pale. Yes, I mostly ignore those sorts of comments. But I like to dream of a world where I don't have to start every day with the assumption that many people I interact with are going to to be stupid, rude, and aggravating, and adjust my attitudes accordingly.

So for anyone wondering why I'm an arrogant elitist who thinks he's better than most people, all I can say is: spend some time on the internet.

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