Jon Hicks: Icons for Interaction

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 29, 2009 07:41 PM

Last week I had the pleasure of attending @media 2009 in London, where it has to be said, I had the best conference experience I’ve had for a long time. I prefer the more cosy nature of the event – a single track, not too large and overwhelming quantity of people, and simply great talks. I can’t pick one favourite presentation, as I came away feeling really inspired and energised by everything.

It was also the last @media curated by Patrick Griffiths, who is moving on to follow other passions (from next year the conference will be in the able hands of the Web Directions Team). I want to take this opportunity to thank Patrick for encouraging me to talk, and giving the best possible environment to do it in.

After giving the presentation, I realised that there are 2 areas, only touched on briefly here, that should be expanded on: Icon Accessibility and Icon Usability Testing. Those are big topics for another day/talk/blog post, so until then here are my slides for my talk on ‘Icons for Interaction’:

Download the Icons for Interaction PDF (18mb). All links are available on my delicious account, tagged icondesigntalk. My speaking notes are also included in the PDF, hopefully this will be enough to make the slides meaningful.

The typeface I used for this was Comic Crafts Astronauts in Trouble.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 24-26

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at June 29, 2009 04:54 AM

The last few weeks feel like they’ve been crazy on my end, but I’m back with another Camino update.

• Last Monday we released Camino 1.6.8 in sync with the latest Gecko 1.8.1.x security release, and we shipped Simplified Chinese in the Multilingual version for the first time since Camino 0.8.5.
• Stuart Morgan has been taking the lead on performing reviews and super-reviews, but he also found time to reverse-engineer the pinch gesture on multi-touch trackpads.
• Sean Murphy produced a couple of revisions of his patch to fix CJK font selection in the main window of the Fonts tab of the Appearance preference pane, which is the first step towards allowing us to finally remove the Advanced sheet in that pane. He also posted a new patch for the notification bar that appears when clicking through a phishing or malware warning; the patch is currently waiting on super-review. Sean also handed Jeff Dlouhy an r- on his Quick Look patch.
• Christopher Henderson continued working on UTF-8 URLs in the Bookmarks Manager, and he also posted a patch to switch the way our zoom menu items work in order to more closely align with the behavior of other browsers.
• Summer of Code hacker Dan Weber’s first patch, which changes the appearance of the autocomplete window, is now awaiting super-review. He has also been working on hooking bookmark URLs up to autocomplete, which should be ready for super-review after spinning a new patch.
• Most of my Camino time over the past few weeks has been spent on release work and on liaising with the caminol10n project; because of our dedicated localizers, there are lots of exciting things happening these days for speakers of other-than-English. When not focusing on those, I’ve fixed a couple of minor localization-related bugs, touched up the website, and I recently spun an oh-so-glamorous patch to fix the capitalization of “Flashblock” throughout the Camino codebase.

Summer’s in full swing now, it’s hot, and people move slowly in the heat but we’re continuing to press forward towards 2.0 Beta 4 and the much-anticipated Camino 2 release.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino in Chinese and other localization news

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at June 23, 2009 06:08 AM

If you read Monday’s Camino 1.6.8 release announcement carefully, you know that we added a new localization, Simplified Chinese, to Camino Multilingual. Thanks to Tianhao for all of his hard work on this translation and for providing a Simplified Chinese localization of Camino for the first time since Camino 0.8.5! This is the fourth language we’ve added since Camino 1.6 shipped, and the second new localization after Catalan (Spanish and Czech, which had been part of Camino 1.5.x, were not quite ready for Camino 1.6 and shipped in 1.6.1 instead).

In other localization news, late last week Jan Jamsek arrived and notified the localization community he had begun a Slovenian translation. The Turkish team (which is targeting Camino 2 for its first release) also recently provided a status update on that localization. In addition to these teams, volunteers have started work on Galician and Hebrew localizations since Camino 1.6 has shipped. We’re excited about the possibility of shipping all of these languages in future releases of Camino!

As always, if you’re interested in seeing Camino in your language, please visit the caminol10n project, join the mailing list, and learn how you can help. You don’t need to have many computer or software skills, and the caminol10n mailing list is full of existing Camino translators who are always willing to answer questions if you encounter problems. The list of registered contributors may have other speakers of your language who can help you, or there may even be a localization effort underway that you can help complete (some languages just need reviewers/proofreaders—the only skill required for that task is your language and the ability to use Camino). We hope to see your language in Camino Multilingual soon!

 

Caminol10n: Current release: Camino 1.6.8

Posted by Caminol10n at June 23, 2009 01:53 AM

The most recent Camino release is version 1.6.8 (Universal Binary, for Intel, PowerPC, needs Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher).
Camino 1.6.8 multilingual contains: Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazillian), Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.
Camino 1.6.x users should receive notice of the new version by way of the internal software update engine. If you have not set up Camino to check automatically for new versions, use the "Check for updates..." item in the Application menu.

 

Camino Blog: Camino 1.6.8 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at June 22, 2009 09:00 PM

 

Nate Weaver (Wevah): Paparazzi! and Flash capture

Posted by Nate Weaver (Wevah) at June 19, 2009 11:45 AM

 

Smokey Ardisson: Remixing John Gruber

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at June 18, 2009 03:53 AM

Commenting on a post about iPhone apps, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes:

[J]ailbreak users expect everything to magically just work and will blame legit apps, rather than the hacks they’re running, for crashes.

Substitute “Users of InputManager hacks” for “Jailbreak users” and you have the bane of the Mac software developer’s existence.

Sadly, you can also substitute “Users of NPAPI plug-ins” for “Jailbreak users” and “legitimate browser plug-ins” for “hacks” and explain most web browser (and many web view-using application) crashes, which are the bane of the web browser developer’s existence.¹

        

¹ Simmons’s final lament is just as true for web browsers as it is for non-browser applications that use a web view. ↩

 

Jon Hicks: Unite

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 16, 2009 10:39 PM

Today, Opera launched it’s jewel in the Opera 10 crown: Unite. Around 3 years in the making, this service and it’s APIs allow you to easily share content from your computer to the world at large or just a select group of friends. It’s an ad-hoc personal webserver where you just choose a service (Photos, Media, Files. etc) and tell it where that content is – Unite does the rest. Lawrence Eng’s post on labs.opera.com does a great job of explaining Unite further.

I was a little nervous that the marketing talk (“Reinvent the web”, “servers belonging to strangers”) would distract from what is a great fun service and idea. Fears were unfounded though, as a majority of people have embraced Unite for what it is, and love it.

If you haven’t tried it yet, head over to the labs and remember: like any service with an API, the real excitement is in waiting to see what people do with it…

 

Caminol10n: Camino 1.6.8 l10n status

Posted by Caminol10n at June 16, 2009 12:45 PM

Release notes can be found at Bug 495738. See the full article for the usual status matrix.

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 final multilingual package is expected to be complete by Sat, June 20

read more

 

Camino Blog: Summer of Camino 2009!

Posted by Camino Blog at June 11, 2009 06:45 PM

 

Jon Hicks: Discovery

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 10, 2009 09:19 AM

Discovery are a new project by members of Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot. Vampire Weekend was my favourite album of 2008 – like a breath of fresh air to my collection – and this looks set to be a contender for 2009. Go see the Discovery site created by David Emery and his team of boffins.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Plausible Promise

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at June 09, 2009 06:30 PM

I recently blogged about Chromium's recent Mac and Linux dev-channel releases, and today it was posted over on the Chromium blog.

http://blog.chromium.org/2009/06/plausible-promise.html

Enjoy.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 23

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at June 08, 2009 05:32 AM

It’s been a busy week, but I’m going to even busier next week, so I’ll sneak in a quick update now and then pick up again in two weeks.

• The big news of the week is that we released Camino 2.0 Beta 3 on Thursday. Read more about its new features or download it from our preview site.
• Stuart Morgan filed the first bugs based on Beta 3 Breakpad reports. He also reworked the script we use for generating Mac OS X symbols, so we now have a more complete list of OS libraries used by Mozilla apps for which we’ll generate symbols.
• Ilya Sherman posted patches this week for a couple of bugs related to our warnings when closing windows, and he also investigated some additional Downloads window-related bugs.
• Christopher Henderson posted a new patch for UTF-8 URLs in the Bookmarks Manager as well as handling reviews for Ilya’s window-closing patches.
• Chris Lawson finished up a backport of one of his stability patches for the upcoming Camino 1.6.8 release, as well as finishing his Downloads preferences patch. In addition, over the weekend he led another round of bug triage with Christopher and me.
• In addition to work on the Camino 2.0 Beta 3 release, I also started working on the forthcoming Camino 1.6.8 security release last week. I also uploaded a fresh set of Mac OS X 10.5.7 symbols based on the new script, as well as symbols from Mac OS X 10.4.11 8S165 (for all of those crashes from 10.4.11 PowerPC users who have yet to apply the latest security update).

In addition, we were excited this week by the arrival of new translator, Tianhao He, with a Simplified Chinese translation of Camino 1.6.x. The translation is currently undergoing review, but it sounds likely we’ll see it in 1.6.8. We last had a Chinese localization in Camino 0.8.x, so it’s good to see Chinese returning. If Camino isn’t currently available in in your language, visit the Camino Localization Community, join the mailing list, see if there are others interested in helping out, and learn how you can help make Camino available in your language!

 

Jon Hicks: Daniel's Daily Monster

Posted by Jon Hicks at June 05, 2009 12:35 PM

Every school day since May 7th I’ve been drawing a little Monster Card for my son Daniel’s lunchbox. Not totally sure why I started this, but he enjoyed the first one, and it’s become a ritual. Every morning when making his lunch, I give myself 5 minutes to draw a monster on paper from one of those memo pad things, give it a name and quickly photograph it with the iPhone.

Sometimes they come out OK, sometimes they’re not so great. The important thing is seeing his reaction at the end of the day. #2 Mrs Wetherby didn’t go down too well – it was a bit girly for his tastes!

So far, I’ve managed 16, and I’ve started a Tumblr account to show them all: danielsmonster.tumblr.com

 

Mike Pinkerton: Camino 2.0 Beta 3 Available

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at June 04, 2009 11:21 PM

(From the "It takes a village" department...)

Camino 2.0 beta 3 is now available for preview. Despite being called a "beta" it's quite stable. I've been using beta 2 for a long time and have yet to encounter a problem that's not caused by a certain plug-in that starts with the 6th letter of the alphabet.

Congrats to the entire dev and QA community for continuing to push this release forward, especially during the weeks where I'm too busy to show up to the meetings. Only some users make the effort to stop by to say "thank you", so I'll say it (as a user myself) for the ones that do not. Thank you!!!!!

For those that want the latest in Camino news, check out our Twitter feed.

 

Camino Blog: Camino 2.0 Beta 3 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at June 04, 2009 06:45 PM

 

Mike Pinkerton: Browsers are hard, mmkay?

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at June 03, 2009 12:29 PM

I'm getting a little weary of reading over and over and over about how "surprised" everyone is by how long it's taking for Mac Chrome to come out. Really folks, web browsers are complicated pieces of software that take a long time. They don't just fall from the sky, fully written. Camino took years (plural) of development before it got to 1.0, and that's with an already mature Gecko engine behind it.

We're lucky in Chromium that we can leverage a lot of shared code from the windows side, but we do have to write a bunch of UI code (unless you want the UI to just look and behave exactly like windows...I didn't think so). We're also not just embedding WebKit and dragging in a couple buttons and a text field. The team has made significant changes to how WebCore works (resource loading, sandboxing, multi-process, etc) and those take time to get right on other platforms.

So the next time you're about to blog about how long it takes to write a web browser, think about the 10+ years of development that's gone into the one you're currently using and just move along. Mmmkay?

 

Smokey Ardisson: Code frozen for Camino 2.0 Beta 3

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at June 02, 2009 07:16 AM

Late Monday night we landed the last of the code changes for Camino 2.0 Beta 3. Special thanks to Stuart Morgan, Mike Pinkerton, Chris Lawson, and Ilya Sherman for their fixes and reviews over the last couple of days that got us to this point so quickly.

We’d appreciate it if testers and nightly build users would start hammering on the nightlies (beginning with the 2009-06-02 build) to make sure there’s nothing major we’ve missed with these last changes, particularly crash report submission, Downloads window behavior, and the Downloads preferences standardization. Thanks for all your help, and we look forward to shipping Camino 2.0 Beta 3 to you very soon.

(In an unrelated note, as of today there finally is one license.html to rule them all—thanks to mento, pink, and ss for helping wrap that up—and I’m auditioning for a new tab #2.)

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 21-22

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at June 01, 2009 04:29 AM

It has been a bit of a slow couple of weeks, whether due to that end-of-semester-beginning-of-summer time-of-the-year or that tinderbox-isn’t-working problem. In spite of that, we did manage to make some nice progress towards Camino 2.0 Beta 3.

• Stuart Morgan perfected our Breakpad symbol generation and extraction, allowing us to produce nightly builds with full Breakpad symbol support. He also fixed a couple of bugs in the script that generates Mac OS X symbols and started work on his “next generation” script that will generate more accurate lists of OS libraries and frameworks with less human interaction required. In addition, Stuart fixed a bug that caused the Breakpad client to fail to launch in certain situations, upstreamed the fix, and synced our version of Breakpad to pick up the fix. He also fixed a bug in Sparkle’s build script, upstreamed that fix, and synced our version of Sparkle to pick up all of the latest fixes in that framework. Stuart also developed patches for smaller Breakpad-integration bugs, a certificate UI inconsistency, an edge case updating Keychain information, a bug with keyboard navigation in <select>s with <optgroup>s, and an annoying Spaces-related window bug.
• Sean Murphy prepared final patches for a change that improves the performance of tab dragging and for code to add test pages to the safe browsing database for that upcoming feature; both of those patches landed late last week.
• Christopher Henderson rejoiced when the landing for his “Allow Flash From This Site” context menu item finally stuck (and, ironically, restored boxset to health). He had the honor of fixing the first bug generated from Breakpad crash reports, and he also started developing a new way forward on the UTF-8 URLs in the Bookmarks Manager feature.
• Ilya Sherman fixed several bugs related to the Downloads window, including a change that causes Camino to stop checking for updated information for non-active downloads and a fix that prevents auto-closing the Downloads window when its Customize sheet is visible. He also developed a patch to make sure that option-clicking a window close button fully respects the preference to warn when closing windows with multiple pages open, and he spent some time reviewing the revised version of Chris Lawson’s patch to improve the preferences for opening and focusing the Downloads window.
• When he wasn’t flying, Chris Lawson spun a new version of the aforementioned patch and triaged bug reports; he was also part of a team (along with Stuart and me) that cut the number of unconfirmed bugs in half the weekend before last.
• When I wasn’t working with Samuel Sidler on boxset’s tinderbox-disease and setting up a replacement tinderbox, I also picked up a couple of old build system bugs. I dusted off mento’s old patch to turn hidden-visibility support on in Camino’s debug build (fixing a pile of warnings) and fixed a bug to make all of our shell script build phases echo what they’re actually doing. In addition, I prepared new or revised patches for two license-related bugs.

Well, looking back over that list, it doesn’t seem like things were as slow as they felt; clearly, we accomplished plenty over the past two weeks. We’re still a few bugs away from Camino 2.0 Beta 3, but most of the major pieces are in place (we’ve even disabled the Mac OS X Crash Reporter again after getting Breakpad crash reports producing the desired output) and we should be ready to ship Beta 3 in the next week or so, schedules permitting.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Diff/Patch Language Module for BBEdit and TextWrangler

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at May 31, 2009 07:03 PM

I’ve mentioned before some of the many things I like about TextWrangler, the free younger brother to Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit. One thing I didn’t mention before is the support for language modules (particularly codeless language modules, which in theory even I could write) for extending the types of files for which syntax coloring is supported. Bare Bones maintains a small list on its website, but slogging through Google you can find a plethora of others.

While working on some of the symbols generation/upload bugs, I discovered this language module from pudge.net for diff/patch files. I always sanity-check my diffs before I post them in bugs, and I often have to look at other peoples’ patches, and this language module has made those so much easier. Be sure to read the comment at the top of the .plist to help set up the colors.

This diff/patch module was a bit hard to find, and a couple of people have asked me about it since I first mentioned it, so I thought I’d write about it here to make it easier to find in the future. (I should also mention that for those of you who spend lots of time in BBEdit/TextWrangler with Mozilla .idl files, sheppy has a nice IDL language module available.)

It would be cool if BBEdit/TextWrangler could allow modules to use background colors and would treat some language modules as “overlays” so that you’d get native syntax coloring for the files in addition to marking which lines were added/removed, and I’m still looking for an AppleScript language module, but the pudge.net diff/patch module has been a big step up in usefulness.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Please update your Camino nightlies!

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at May 20, 2009 04:14 AM

Camino nightly build users, please check to see if your nightly build is from 2009051815 or newer (to check, choose About Camino from the Camino menu and look for the string starting with “2009”). If your build is older, please update to the latest nightly build!

On Monday afternoon we produced the first Camino build that had a complete set of Breakpad symbols, which means any Camino crashes submitted using that “afternoonly” will produce useful reports for us on crash-stats. Any nightly build older than 2009051815 will produce crash reports that are mostly useless and would only clog the crash-reporting server.

We would appreciate it if all nightly build users update to a nightly that has complete symbols so that we can 1) have accurate crash reports and 2) make sure that crash reporting is working as we expect it to be before we release Camino 2.0 Beta 3. Not very many of you are crashing to begin with ( ), so every crash report counts! Thanks for your help.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 19-20

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at May 18, 2009 03:50 AM

I think I like this every-other-week format better; I have more time (and less pressure) to figure out when to write and when to do other things. On the flip side, it’s sometimes more difficult for me to remember what we did during the earlier week, and apparently my pageviews are down this year. I think I’ll take the quiet, thank you very much, and besides, Bonsai, Bugzilla, and meeting logs are my friends.

• Stuart Morgan continued to find himself up to his neck in Breakpad integration. He’s gone two rounds with the symbol generation code in order to allow us to generate good symbols for Core code linked into the Camino binary itself, and he also helped me write and debug a script to facilitate generating and uploading Mac OS X symbols. Stuart’s patch to allow viewing and deleting certificate exceptions finally landed, which was the last critical change needed to support the new Gecko 1.9.0 certificate model (and in so doing, removed from the tree the last live objects.nib file dating from the Project Builder era).
• Sean Murphy posted a final patch for providing test pages for our phishing and malware protection, and his patch to improve the performance of tab dragging on Mac OS X 10.4 passed superreview. He continues working on pieces of the safe browsing feature, including the reminder bar that appears after a user ignores the warning about visiting a potentially unsafe website.
• Christopher Henderson started tackling smaller bugs with localization impact, polishing off several of them while awaiting reviews on his other bugs, including improved Cocoa localization for about:crashes. His patch to fix the behavior of the “Why is this site blocked?” button in our malware overlay also landed this week.
• Ilya Sherman returned to work on the Downloads window, filing or patching over a half-dozen bugs in this period. He improved keyboard support, adding ⌘A to select all downloads and ⌘↓ to open selected files. He also fixed a number of regressions related to the display of the Pause/Resume button and preserving selections in the window across sessions. When we last left Ilya, he was investigating how to make ⌥-clicking the window close button honor the warning preference just like ⌥⌘W does.
• Samuel Sidler has been tending to boxset, the latest of our tinderboxen to succumb to tinderbox-disease (in this case, an internal compiler error compiling BrowserWindowController.mm).
• In between working with Stuart on Breakpad issues (including Mac OS X symbols and tinderbox-local build symbols archiving) and helping Sam diagnose boxset, I also spent some time working on website changes to support the forthcoming safe browsing feature.

In addition to all of our ongoing work, we decided this week to change the release schedule again; because Breakpad integration is almost finished but Tab Overview (née Tabsposé) and safe browsing, which have large localization impact, aren’t, we are going to release Camino 2.0 Beta 3 once we have the Breakpad work complete. We’ll add a new Beta 4 to the picture that will serve as both the feature freeze and the localization freeze. I’m excited about getting modern crash reporting in the hands of more of our users—and especially about having one less reason to visit the dated Talkback reports! Stay tuned for more, and look for Camino 2.0 Beta 3 in the next couple of weeks.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Mac OS X symbols now available on crash-stats

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at May 13, 2009 11:48 PM

As part of Camino joining the world of modern crash reporting systems, I’ve recently taken over from Ted Mielczarek in the ad hoc uploading of symbols from OS libraries for Mac OS X. As of this moment, we have symbols for Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Mac OS X 10.5.6¹ on crash-stats, and any new crash reports from applications running on those versions of Mac OS X should now have the most common system libraries and frameworks symbolized.

Thanks to Ted and justdave for making it happen, and special thanks to Stuart Morgan for putting up with my typos and weak scripting fu throughout the process of getting me set up to generate and upload the symbols!

        

¹ Apple decided this week was a good time to release a number of OS updates, so the 10.5.7 symbols should be available once I have time to update, likely over the weekend. ↩

 

Mike Pinkerton: Blorg

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at May 09, 2009 03:38 PM

Clearly I haven't been blogging much, preferring to exert most of my effort on my twitter feed. Blogging just takes so much more setup and energy and I can't do it from my phone. The phone part is the real hinderance, and that I have to put together more than two sentences at a time. If you want to get your reality TV and Chromium fix, that's the place to do it.

I'm doing my part to be an Apple fanboi, with two MacBooks and a Mini purchased since the start of this year. Hopefully now I won't have to replace anything for another few years. As I tweeted, Migration Assistant *mostly* worked, but did absolutely nothing for some steps and I had to repeat the process several times. It's almost as if nobody tested it, I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary. Doesn't Apple want us to buy new computers?

I guess I'm just doing my part to put the economy back on track. Now to finish de-tweening my poor beloved basement. What. A. Mess.

 

Jon Hicks: The Art of Penguin Science Fiction

Posted by Jon Hicks at May 06, 2009 07:40 PM

Wonderful collection of Penguin Sci Fi Covers

 

Jon Hicks: Skute

Posted by Jon Hicks at May 06, 2009 08:26 AM

Youworkforthem have released a free version of their handset Skute Pro font, that’s crying out to be used on a record cover (such as they are these days).

A.M. Cassandre produced the typeface Bifur for Peignot in 1929. Bifur broke from rigid typographic forms by combining Art Deco principles of obsessive geometry with the line and stroke of letter forms. Skute picks up Cassandre’s spirit and carries it onward in YWFT hand set fashion. And we are happy to give it out to you. Yep, that’s right, we’re giving Skute to you for your own personal use! Should you need to use Skute for a commercial project or want more letters, buy the enhanced Pro version, Skute Pro.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 17-18

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at May 03, 2009 03:23 AM

We’ve kept busy again the past two weeks!

• Stuart Morgan has continued to run with the baton on our Breakpad integration, both hooking up more pieces of the puzzle in Camino itself and getting necessary changes made upstream. In the past two weeks he has landed Breakpad changes to better support the Socorro crash processing system, to provide the crash reporter application a sane name, and to support dynamic selection of what crash reporter fields are visible (including moving localization entirely into .strings files). On the Camino side, Stuart landed code to generate symbols when building nightlies and to upload them afterwards, including inventing some new tinderbox integration glue. As of today, Camino 2.0b3pre nightly builds are generating symbols and uploading them to the symbol server, and crash reports are being reported to crash-stats. The only major piece that remains before the end-to-end system is working for us is (hopefully) a server configuration issue that tells crash-stats to look at the symbol files when processing Camino crash reports.
• During the past two weeks, Sean Murphy continued working on pieces of our anti-phishing feature, moving it closer to completion.
• Christopher Henderson’s patch to add “Allow Flash From This Site” to the context menu for Flashblocked items bounced in and out of the tree due to unfortunate bugs in the toolchain that ships with Xcode 2.x. Once Sam is free again, we should be able to get the logs we need to figure out the last remaining issue and enable the feature once again. In addition to work on that patch, Christopher wrote additional code for displaying UTF-8 URLs in the Bookmarks Manager, created a patch to fix the behavior of the “Why is this site blocked?” button on the anti-phishing overlay, and started a review of our sample preference pane code.
• Ilya Sherman worked on several downloads-related bugs, including ones to add a keyboard shortcut to open files from the Downloads window and to allow dragging multiple files from the window. In addition, he also fixed a regression that caused the “Pause” button to be disabled at all times.
• Over the past few weeks, I again performed small tasks to facilitate others’ work on our larger projects. Once Stuart had all of the Breakpad symbol upload changes ready, I got to flip the switch to turn uploading on and report on the tinderbox response. I also created a proof-of-concept patch to allow us to easily re-upload symbols in case of a failure (something that happened recently with Talkback symbols for Camino 1.6.7). On the client side, I renamed the crash reporter using the (much saner) new mechanism that Stuart implemented upstream, and I also got about:crashes working in Camino.

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for us, particularly in the crash reporting department. Of course, we hope you never see our crash reporting UI, but when you do, the resulting reports will be far more useful to us than the old Talkback-based reports are. In the weeks ahead, we hope to continue making progress on other features that will be more visible in your daily use!

 

Jon Hicks: TELSTAR THE MOVIE

Posted by Jon Hicks at May 01, 2009 01:57 PM

Telling the story of legendary write and producer Joe Meek. I’m looking forward to this!

 

Jon Hicks: Little Big Planet Garden Theme

Posted by Jon Hicks at April 30, 2009 09:46 PM

Almost all the music from Little Big Planet is available, from The Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra original score, to existing music like Jim Noir’s ‘My Patch’. Almost all, apart from the one that I really wanted, the Gardens theme by Mat Clark. There’s something unashamedly cheery and irrepressible about it.

Thankfully Matt Laskowski of Plastic Shards Blog, has recorded the music directly from the game, and is offering the Garden Theme as a high quality mp3 from. Yay!

(A comprehensive guide to the various LBP tunes is available here.)

 

Jon Hicks: Gameboy Timeline

Posted by Jon Hicks at April 24, 2009 07:47 AM

This fascinating timeline of Nintendo’s handheld gaming device shows the progression from early single game units, through Game Boy to the DSi today. I was particularly interested in the ‘Game & Watch’ from 1982 – a design that was resurrected as the DS.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 15-16

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at April 20, 2009 04:03 AM

We’ve continued making steady progress over the past few weeks.

• Stuart Morgan has continued working on our Breakpad integration. The crash reporter client now ships in Camino 2.0b3pre nightlies, launches when Camino crashes, and submits crash reports to crash-stats. The reports aren’t yet complete, and we aren’t generating or uploading symbols, but we have real, visible progress towards crash reporting designed for this century!
• Sean Murphy continued working on performance improvements for tab dragging this week. He also posted several patches for the safe browsing feature, including a reminder bar that displays when clicking through the warning page, bringing the feature closer to completion.
• Chris Lawson followed up on recent reports of continued problems displaying cookies and generated a more comprehensive work-around for the problem.
• Over the past few weeks, I’ve worked on a couple of things. Once the tree reopened, I landed Christopher Henderson’s patch for AppleScript access to the source or text of web pages or selections and Chris Lawson’s patch to bullet-proof some functions in case Gecko objects disappear out from under us. I also developed a quick fix for the Breakpad client’s lack of a user-friendly name and started logging a list of potential issues to fix in the client. Tonight I spent a little bit of time working on the website, including some changes in support of Sean’s safe browsing work.

In addition to our development work, I’m excited to see that that our resident AppleScripter, Lisa Thompson (aka thom-22 on the forum), has already posted the first scripts to take advantage of the new AppleScript abilities from Christopher’s patch.

That’s it for this week, but I’m looking forward to continuing to polish these new features—and getting modern crash reporting is a QA guy’s dream! (Is it wrong to get excited about submitting crash reports? )

 

Mike Pinkerton: Titanium

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at April 19, 2009 02:53 PM

When it comes to sucking less, I dislike people that either flat out lie to me or spread fear through rumor and urban myth. Perhaps it's a pet peeve of mine. I encountered this very thing yesterday at a jeweler looking for rings.

The jeweler told me, after I noticed a nice titanium ring, that she wouldn't sell it to me because it was dangerous, and that one of her other customers, a nurse, told her titanium rings cannot be removed in ERs. Furthermore, the patient's finger must be amputated in case of an emergency! This wasn't just rumor, it happened in her ER! The jeweler retold ("second hand") this tale of woe and scared the bejezus out of me and Jo. Wow! Better steer clear of those, I thought.

A quick trip to snopes.com, however, proves her story is complete and utter bullshit. Now I'm a little angry that I already put down a deposit on Jo's band. I can't tell if she meant well and was gullible, or was really trying to steer me away from the less expensive titanium. How would a jeweler not know what tools were necessary to cut the titanium that they sell in their own store?

Anyone else encounter this? Tweet at me and let me know.

 

Jon Hicks: Swoon

Posted by Jon Hicks at April 16, 2009 04:12 PM

It’s been many months since I’ve picked up an album that I’ve gone crazy about, and just when I was giving up hope, three come along at once. ‘It’s Blitz’ by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, ‘Two Suns’ by Bat for Lashes, and most of all, the new Silversun Pickups “Swoon”.

This is one of those albums that even when I’m not playing it, it’s still playing inside my head. The easiest way to share a flavour is the video for the single ‘Panic Switch’ (beware of strobes). Yes, I can hear nay-sayers waffling about The Smashing Pumpkins, but my fingers are in my ears… la la la…

 

Camino Blog: Camino is a Webware 100 Finalist!

Posted by Camino Blog at April 16, 2009 04:02 AM

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 14

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at April 07, 2009 05:32 AM

We had a small flurry of activity last week that translated into big steps toward Camino 2.

• After Tuesday’s open-sourcing of Google’s client framework for Breakpad, Stuart Morgan spent a few hours Wednesday afternoon doing the initial integration work. Following that, he began upstreaming changes to support building on Mac OS X 10.4, common localization toolchains, and other fixes. In addition, Stuart hacked in support for managing security exceptions on top of uncooperative APIs, finishing one of the last major pieces of UI remaining for Camino 2. He also tracked recent Sparkle updates, tackled assorted reviews and handled Summer of Code duties.
• Sean Murphy spent time this week working on his tab dragging performance patch, which should also fix recently-reported drawing bugs on Mac OS X 10.4.
• Christopher Henderson continued his work on making our visible URLs UTF-8 friendly, talking to prospective Summer of Code students, and following up on other bugs. In addition, once the tree re-opens, his AppleScript patch is ready to land.
• After the prior weeks’ release-related fun, I stuck mostly to bug triage and minor coordination efforts last week, though I also posted another iteration of the latest omnibus ad-blocking patch.

That’s it; short and sweet this week, but with Breakpad integration and security exceptions management in progress, we’re moving towards completion on two of the last major pieces of UI blocking Camino 2.

 

Caminol10n: CaminoL10n website users: please update your profile

Posted by Caminol10n at April 01, 2009 11:07 PM

Hello, fellow CaminoL10n users and contributors!
You are invited to update your profile on our website, by adding information that is valuable for the Camino development team.
Specifically, the developers wish to know which OS X versions you are using when you work on Camino's localization.

read more

 

Camino Blog: Camino 1.6.7 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at March 31, 2009 09:00 PM

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 12-13

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at March 31, 2009 06:26 AM

Has it been two weeks since the last Camino update? How time flies when you’re driving a release.

First, a reminder that applications for this year’s Google Summer of Code are due this Friday. Camino sample project ideas are here, with more information here and here. We look forward to your applications!

• Stuart Morgan again handled a large portion of the review/superreview queue over the last couple of weeks. When he wasn’t reviewing patches, Stuart also fixed some issues with our default browser lookup code (particularly on factory-fresh systems where the default browser isn’t set in certain places) and vetted Summer of Code project suggestions.
• Sean Murphy finished his work on abstracting the transient bar code this week, which enables him to add a new transient bar to support the coming anti-phishing feature. Also, for any Git aficionados, Sean documented the process he uses to manage his Camino development with Git.
• Christopher Henderson posted several new or revised patches, including UTF-8 URL display in the Bookmarks Manager, the “Allow Flash From This Site” context menu item, and AppleScript support for getting the text or source of web pages. He also fixed a regression in the display of the bookmark bar on Mac OS X 10.4
• Ilya Sherman fixed a regression that caused new downloads sometimes to appear at the top of the Downloads window, and he also posted a patch for more cleanup of our downloading code.
• Chris Lawson has been on crash prevention patrol recently, finding and fixing places where Camino might crash if Gecko objects disappeared unexpectedly. He also added support for localization of the folder name used when saving a web page as “HTML Complete.”
• Most of my Camino time over the past two weeks has been spent on the forthcoming Camino 1.6.7 security and stability release, checking in patches, working on release notes, and joining in on the general Mozilla fun of zero-day exploits popping up in the middle of the release process. (As a result of all this fun, I got to do my first-ever respin. ) I also worked on some test scripts for Christopher Henderson’s new AppleScript features and finished the patch for the latest omnibus ad-blocking bug. In my spare time, I began writing a password migration utility and ran into some fun endian-related Apple bugs, so I now owe Apple a pair of rdar:// bugs instead of having a working utility. On the other hand, I didn’t have Sam’s job, so for that I should be thankful.

That’s it for now. Look for Camino 1.6.7 very soon, and we’ll be looking for your Summer of Code applications!

 

Camino Blog: Camino and the 2009 Google Summer of Code

Posted by Camino Blog at March 27, 2009 02:20 AM

 

Jon Hicks: Doctor Who Season 5

Posted by Jon Hicks at March 26, 2009 09:52 PM

As fans know, there isn’t a ‘proper’ season of Who this year, but we do have 4 specials to look forward to, and details of the first one are starting to come through. ‘Planet of the Dead’ looks set to air on Saturday April 11th, so I’ve updated the subscribable iCal feed for Dr Who Season Guide (please note, this is a new address for the iCal feed). As the air date and time are confirmed I’ll update the calendar.

It’s David Tennant’s last season too – and I worry for the tone of the final story. Will it be a good, well scripted, send off? Or an overblown variety performance bring-everyone-back-for-one-last-one extravaganza? Rumours in the tabloids are pointing to the latter, but I hope they’re wrong!

 

Mike Pinkerton: Camino Summer of Code: We Need You!

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at March 19, 2009 09:22 PM

The trees and flowers are starting to bloom, which means it's time again for Google Summer of Code to get into full swing. As we try to do every year, we want to have a project or two focused on Camino. We've had some very good contributions in the past and have found it an excellent way to get students involved in our community and in open-source in general. While they do get paid for the work, I think everyone would agree that the primary reward is the experience gained from being a part of a real project, writing real code, with real deadlines.

To get the ball rolling, we've seeded our SoC wiki with some ideas and past projects so you can gauge the level of commitment and workload that gets approved. This list is far from comprehensive. We'd love for you to suggest something new! The best part is you don't have to volunteer to do it, just suggest it so that someone else can take your idea and run with it. To suggest ideas, all you need is a wiki account which you can get by joining us in #camino on irc.mozilla.org and asking ss or ardissone for an account (we've locked down registration due to past spamming).

What if you want to participate in Camino's SoC? Pick a suggestion from the vetted list on the wiki and write up a proposal on how you'd go about accomplishing the task over the course of the Summer. The more detailed you can be, the easier is for us to gauge whether or not you know what you're talking about and how successful you would probably be. Applications are submitted via Google's site and are accepted March 23 - April 3. Feel free to come and discuss your proposal with us in #camino before you submit it. We'll be able to help point out areas that need further detail and ensure you're on the right track.

That doesn't give us much time to get a list of great ideas for people who want to apply, so put on your thinking caps! I can't wait!

 

Smokey Ardisson: Overheard

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at March 17, 2009 05:38 AM

…today in #camino:

[7:14pm] hendy: this works for me now too: get source of current tab of front browser window

 

[9:34pm] hendy: “You want a selection? I can get you a selection, believe me. There are ways, Dude.”
[9:35pm] sauron: i do believe Safari cannot do that

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 6-11

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at March 16, 2009 05:39 AM

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit down and write a weekly Camino update—a month and a half, if you believe the calendar. However, we’ve been working on lots of exciting bugs and features in that time, many of which are already available in the nightlies.

• In case you missed the announcement (or the software update notification), we released Camino 2.0 Beta 2 on February 27. That release contained Ilya Sherman’s Growl integration work and a number of Gecko fixes that made milestone life a lot more pleasant.
• In addition to his ever-present reviewing and superreviewing, Stuart Morgan hacked on diverse areas of the codebase. He updated our software update feed-generation script to fully support multiple branches and polished off one of the follow-up bugs for the safe browsing feature. Stuart also investigated several possible causes of shutdown crashes and reduced the likelihood that various Gecko objects related to our UI could cause crashes when quitting Camino. Finally, he spent some time poking Core regressions that adversely affected Camino and whipped up a quick patch to make our default browser detection more robust on factory-fresh Mac OS X 10.5 systems.
• Sean Murphy has been busy working on bringing the safe browsing implementation up to shipping quality. He reworked the initial Gecko-based implementation in order to make the new feature localizable, and he’s been working on abstracting the code that runs our current “transient bars” (the Find bar and the pop-up blocker bar) so that it can better support new types of bars, such as the one that will arrive with safe browsing. In addition, Sean revised his patch to speed up the tab dragging code and fixed a dragging-related drawing problem with background tabs on 10.4.
• Christopher Henderson has posted a couple of iterations of his patch to add Flashblock whitelisting to the context menu of blocked Flash objects. He has also investigated a bookmark bar appearance regression on Mac OS X 10.4 and helped out with reviews, branch backports, and whatever other code questions I threw his way.
• After taking a breather for homework after finishing the Growl integration, Ilya Sherman continued finding, fixing, and reviewing patches for download-related bugs during the past few weeks. His latest patch finally resolves the longstanding complaint that we fail to scroll to a sane place in the Downloads window when restoring the window after launch. Ilya also discovered an additional performance problem with Flash that wasn’t resolved by last month’s Gecko fixes.
• When he was not flying, Chris Lawson continued work on his downloads preferences migration bug. With help from one of our forum regulars, he also finally got to the bottom of a bizarre bug that had caused the cookies sheet to fail to open in certain cases (a website had set an invalid cookie) and coded up a fix. Chris also helped investigate several other bizarre bugs that appeared during this timeframe and reviewed some of the patches that fixed them.
• Jeff Dlouhy reported some progress on his Tabsposé bugs, and he also posted a revised in-progress patch for integrating Quick Look into the Downloads window.
• Philippe Wittenbergh has been working on polishing the appearance of our error page overlays. Way back at the beginning of this reporting period, he produced a final set of full content zoom toolbar icons after we (finally!) came to a decision on the style and color that we wanted. Philippe has also helped investigate and tirage many of the bugs that have been filed during this time.
• In addition to driving Camino 2.0 Beta 2 last month, I’ve been coordinating the forthcoming Camino 1.6.7 security and stability release. I’ve also worked with Flashblock developer Philip Chee to investigate several Flashblock-related bugs discovered by Camino users and to push Philip’s fixes into our builds. In addition, I finally got to land my long-suffering patch to make Camino use maintained XUL theme files so that things like error page buttons no longer look deformed.

Whew! A month-and-a-half is a little bit too much time between updates.

One final note for tonight: it’s Summer of Code time again (an entirely different type of March Madness for college students), so if you’re a student, please keep Camino in mind for your project application for this summer; if you’re no longer a college or university student, we’re also soliciting ideas for potential projects from all of our users. Mike Pinkerton will be writing more about this in the near future, so keep watching his blog for the full set of details about submitting your ideas and for the Camino Project’s own list of sample project ideas.

 

Caminol10n: Camino 1.6.7 l10n status

Posted by Caminol10n at March 13, 2009 09:21 PM

Release notes can be found at Bug 481575. See the full article for the usual status matrix.

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

As of Mon. March 30th, I have received all the needed files from the l10n teams.

read more

 

Smokey Ardisson: Fixing Bugs

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at March 11, 2009 06:31 AM

(Trying to make this a quick little post before bed, because active bugs+meeting agenda took too long…)

In the process of investigating another bug, Chris Lawson and I found, filed, figured out, fixed, and checked in the fix for a bug today:

[11:54pm] cl|zzz: i like these bugs we file and fix in one day.

This was a pretty simple fix, which is why I was able to do it, and after chasing some really bizarre bugs over the past few days, figuring out the cause and writing the patch certainly made me happy.

It’s relatively rare that I fix a Camino bug that involves actual code, given that I can mostly AppleScript my way out of paper bag. When I am able to fix such a bug, like today, it reminds me that over the last four or so years, I have actually learned something useful about our codebase. I could guess the cause was related to isTextBasedContent and menu item validation, head over to MXR and find the isTextBasedContent function, and then stick in a fix.

It’s the little things, really. Every little bug-fix counts, and even though I spend most of my Camino time doing lots of other little things that also matter, it’s good to be able to knock out a code bug every now and again, too.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Twitter and/or Facebook?

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at March 10, 2009 11:33 PM

After being a Twitter member for a few days, and a Facebook member for much longer, it's hard to reconcile the two.

I know it's simple to have everything you tweet show up on your Fb, but that doesn't seem right to me. For starters, their structure is fundamentally different. Fb wants something in the form "Mike is watching dancing bears" while nobody on twitter posts that way. So if you tweet, it can end up awkward and wrong in Fb ("Mike Dancing bears, oh my!"). Then there's the re-tweets, hashes, and messages that are totally out of place in a Fb status ("Mike RT @ryanseacrest It's Chuck Norris' 69th birthday today"). The two great tastes just don't taste great together.

So I'm left updating status in two places, which I really don't want to do. As a result, I find myself ignoring Fb, which is a shame because it's a great way to stay in touch with (and locate) old friends. Maybe I'll just have to suck that part up.

What's the lure to Twitter for me? I think it's fun watching celebrities be real and normal people. It's fun watching them send messages to each other. It's fun that you can even send messages to them and they *read them*! Whether it's Shaq or Ryan Seacrest, John Mayer, Carla Hall, or Dr Drew, or just people that you know (or those that you don't!), this *is* new media. PTI tweets to get topics for the day's show. Why even have reporters? Why involve the middle-man? Let the people speak for themselves. Immediate and unfiltered.

So what to do about Fb? What to do, what to do? I'll get back to you. In the meantime, don't be shocked if I'm not updating my Fb status as often as I used to.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Tweet

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at March 08, 2009 02:50 PM

I've decided to jump feet-first into the 21st century and start tweeting. Don't ask me why. If anyone cares, I'm at http://twitter.com/mikepinkerton

 

Mike Pinkerton: Camino 2.0 beta 2

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at March 06, 2009 01:37 AM

The tail end of last week saw the quiet release of Camino 2.0 beta2. We're getting pretty close and I'm really excited about the progress the team has made. Especially with some of the (I'll say it: wacko!) features other projects have recently debuted, the team has stayed true to their goals and beliefs about simple software. I believe our users will appreciate that.

 

Camino Blog: Camino 2.0 Beta 2 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at February 27, 2009 07:45 PM

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino Schedule Update

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at February 23, 2009 04:50 AM

It’s been a while since I’ve made a Camino post, mostly because I’ve been sick and incredibly busy (simultaneously) over the past few weeks.

However, I did want to provide a little bit of an update on the Camino 2 schedule and plans. Right now we’re hard at work on the last two major features for Camino 2, one that’s under development and one that’s still being polished to the point where we’ll consider it shippable. On the other hand, Camino 2.0 Beta 1 has been out for a while now, and we have a handful of significant Gecko fixes, new Growl support, and a handful of smaller improvements that have landed since then.

In light of those items, we decided at last Wednesday’s meeting to insert a new beta into the Camino 2 schedule. The localization and feature freeze will still coincide with our final beta (now to be Beta 3), but in the next week or so we’ll release Camino 2.0 Beta 2 with the last several months’ improvements.

As before, everyone using Camino 2.0 Beta 1 or Camino 2.0b2pre nightlies will be automatically updated to Beta 2 when it is released, so just watch for the update prompt!

(For those of you using the stable version, Camino 1.6.6, we’re also planning an update sometime in March, to coincide with the next Gecko 1.8.1.x release.)

 

Smokey Ardisson: A Note to Web Developers

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at February 22, 2009 04:08 AM

If any of your scripts (or any of the external JavaScript files your site may use) contain any of the text

• http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/browser_type.html
• Ultimate client-side JavaScript client sniff
• The Ultimate JavaScript Client Sniffer

here’s a tip¹ for you: You’re Doing It Wrong.

Sincerely,
Everyone using the Internet since 2002

        

¹ Here’s an additional tip, free of charge: the method you are using is not only wrong, but it’s also overly complex and unmaintainable, and you are misidentifying current, fully-capable browsers and annoying your users.² ↩

² A third tip, also offered free of charge: if you don’t know where to find information about properly detecting which features of various web specifications your users’ browsers support, you can start by reading this article about feature detection and rendering engines. ↩

 

Mike Pinkerton: The [cable] is in the mail

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at February 17, 2009 11:36 PM

Thanks to everyone who responded that all I needed was a FW 400/800 cable. I did actually know that. My main complaint was that I shouldn't have needed it in the first place. The Time Machine restore should have "just worked" using the mounted drive over the network. The Migration Assistant also failed miserably, it should have been able to migrate from the backup. The cable, however, is now on its way from Amazon, though I'll continue to back up Jo's laptop over the network (since she is totally lacking any Firewire). For the curious, it ended up only costing me about $17, instead of the $35 that Apple wanted to charge me.

I do so enjoy (read: loathe and despise) the comments from the digerati on the Interwebs. It fills me with happiness (read: night-sweats) whenever I read what people take time out of their busy day to post to forums and blogs. They're always so witty and insightful. It's part of living in a fishbowl, I guess. I alternate between moments of peaceful calm and understanding, and wanting to chase these self-proclaimed experts around with a bat. It's a very big bat. Their head and kidneys will never be the same.

Even in the past couple of days, things in Chromium are working much better. Avi landed the "sad tab" page and fixed many of the scrolling, resizing, and redraw issues. Tabs now take on the title of the page they're rendering and typing in the url bar no longer creates a new tab when you hit return. Um, duh, it's not done yet. There will be plenty more of these "how could these Google morons have released this with XYZ being so sucky!?!?!?" That's exactly why we haven't released it, but it's absolutely moving forward.

This experience reminds me why it's important to release early and release often. It's about demonstrating progress so people will want to get involved. We've already seen an increase in interest and involvement in our Mac effort since I first blogged. That's great!! We want you to get involved and help make this a better app. At the end of the day, we want to build more than a product, we want to build a community! We also want to work hand-in-hand with other open-source communities, such as WebKit and Mozilla, as a lot of the work we're doing (separating the renderer and plug-ins) can make those products better too. They may not use any of our code, but maybe they'll use some of the ideas, and designing everything out in the open helps them figure out the right questions and answers for their own product.

Of course, this is all just my own viewpoint. I don't speak for anyone but myself.

 

Jon Hicks: Playstation 3 Media Centre

Posted by Jon Hicks at February 15, 2009 10:03 PM

So, in what may be my last ‘media centre’ post, here’s a solution that I’ve finally found to work for me: a Playstation 3. This wasn’t in consideration until recently – I already have a Wii, which suits gaming on a family level really well. The Wii is small, white, minimal, fun and child friendly. The PS3 is a large high definition console for the serious gamers (which I am not). I’d thought of it as a nasty, evil console for violent, bloodthirsty shoot-em-ups. At least, until I saw LittleBigPlanet on my brother-in-law’s PS3 and realised how it good it was. I also realised how capable it was a media centre.

Here was one machine (resembling the monolith from 2001 I grant you), that could do all of this:

• Play DVDs
• Play CDs (and get track information from the internets)
• Play Blu-Ray discs. I don’t own any yet, but we subscribe to LoveFilm (Best UK equivalent of Netflix) and get BR discs through that
• Play Media (Music, Video and Photo) stored on a USB Stick or drive
• Streams Media via UPnP server. I use Medialink for OS X
• Plays and records freeview TV with the PlayTV add-on box, which by extension, includes Radio too. More on this below.
• With the built-in browser, and BBC iPlayer’s Big Screen Version, I have access to the one online video source I really care about. Quality is surprisingly good (perhaps some sort of upscaling happening?), and I’ve never seen the buffering spinner.
• Oh, it also plays games.

It replaces the DVD player, CD player, Mac Mini and Eyetv in one go. Also, compared to a Mac Mini, it’s made to be controlled by remote, so it’s very easy to control and administer.

The Sony XMB interface is themable, and there is a Windows based compiler available to create a theme from your PNG files. I’m considering making a theme, but in the meantime I’m using the Leopard v2 theme, which looks great:

To be fair, I’ve encountered a few drawbacks, and feel I should point these out before waxing lyrical further:

• It’s fussy about drive and file formats. USB drives must be formatted as FAT32 (which feels a bit primitive somehow), and files need to be arranged in ‘VIDEO’, ‘PHOTO’ and ‘MUSIC’ folders (yes with caps!) in the root of the drive. Using FAT32 also imposes a maximum 4gb file limit, so large HD rips may be out of the question.
• It doesn’t support as wide a variety of codecs as the Popcorn Hour or WDTV, but you’re generally good to go with .mp4s, and that suits me fine.
• Arranging video into folders and sub-folders is a clunky. It works better when using an external drive, or streaming, where you can arrange media exactly how you like it. Photos and Music are straightforward however, as arranging them by date and ID3 tag (such as Artist) respectively, makes sense.
• The latest PS3 consoles come with only 2 USB ports, whereas previously they came with 4. When you’ve got a PlayTV in one, and a USB drive in the other, you’re full up. Also, they’re both on the front – my ideal would be 2 ports at the back for the permanently attached devices, and at least two at the front for the occasional USB stick and charging the controller.
• Medialink works really, really well, with the exception of stuttering video, which I suspect is due to my home wireless network.

Also, not really a drawback as such, but I would love music playback to just show the album artwork, rather than a visualizer. If any PS3 users have found a way to do this, please let me know!

Despite these niggles, the PS3 has won me over as the solution I’ve been looking for – it suits my needs perfectly. Part of that is the PVR functionality from the PlayTV add on:

PlayTV

Play TV comes with just a USB box, cable and installer disc, giving your PS3 the ability to watch and record Freeview digital channels.

The USB plugin box rather feels large and hollow for what it does. Compare with an Elgato device, and you can’t help wonder why they couldn’t have just made it smaller. It really does feel as if it’s full of air. No matter, as once it’s in, it’s forgotten about, and everything happens smoothly from there. You insert the disc, install the PlayTV software, and once it’s scanned for channels, a TV icon appears in your XMB. I found everything about PlayTV to be smooth and easy, and the interface is very pleasing to the eye:

If you google for PlayTV information, you’ll find 2 common links: old press releases announcing that it will record using a non-drm format (like mpeg), and slightly later ones explaining that it’s actually going to use .m2ts (a sony-specific video format). There’s precious little information after that, but to clear this up: you can get your recordings off your PS3. Just copy them to the XMB, and from there to an external USB drive. You can then convert the .m2ts file easily using Handbrake. (Handbrake even has a ‘PS3’ output preset, which is also handy for your DVD backups!)

Recordings take roughly 1gb for every hour, but you can upgrade the internal HDD using just about any 2.5” SATA disk. Currently you pick up a 500GB Western Digital for about £84.

While not as feature-filled as EyeTV, I did find it easier to control, and much quicker to browse the EPG. While it doesn’t have a one-button ‘record series’ ability, you can choose a programme and ask it to repeat that recording to a pattern, such as weekly. So far, that’s working just fine for me.

Also, if you happen to own a PSP, you can use it to watch live TV or recordings in your library. If your PSP is a slim & lite version or newer, you can connect it to a TV. Having borrowed Mr Oxton’s PSP, I can confirm this works really well, at least on an internal wifi network.

So to quickly sum up, with perhaps the addition of a NAS in the future, I feel like I’m finally done here. The Mac Mini and WDTV have been sold to make way for this, and while separate components (such as a dedicated DVD player) may ultimately offer more features, I love the one-box does all approach.

 

Mike Pinkerton: More fail

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at February 13, 2009 05:31 PM

As if the trail of hardware failures plaguing my existence isn't long enough already, my AppleTV now seems to be fritzing. It wants to constantly reboot itself and a couple of days ago I found it locked up entirely. I reset it back to factory settings to see if that would help, but that sets it back to the 1.0 software. Several attempts to run the system updater resulted in "The download is unavailable at this time, try again later". Gor!

Adding to the fail, it appears Mac Rumors has picked up my screenshots, and along with it, a trail of haters of everything Google and not Safari. Don't they get that we're helping make WebKit better too?

Fail, the third: Time Machine. My new MacBook Pro finally arrived and it was time to restore my life from the Time Machine backup drive, a FW400 external. Well, the MBP has no FW400. I had reasonable luck backing up Jo's MacBook over ethernet to a drive mounted via FireWire on my work Mac Pro, so I did the same hoping that Time Machine on the MBP would see the remote drive. Nope. There's even an option to browse other Time Machine volumes. Nope. Nada. Zilch. Zero. The MBP would not see the backup on the network volume. I ultimately got Time Machine into a mode where it would show me that there were backups in the time line, but they were grayed out, presumably because I didn't have permissions. They're my files! It's my account, just on another machine! I didn't even get the option of authorizing to access them.

So I figured I'd copy everything over by hand, since I could still see all the files. That half-worked. The problem is that it's full of ACLs and incorrect permissions. iPhoto and iTunes had a beast of a time trying to do anything with the databases when not even I had write permissions to update them. That took many, many hours to resolve. In the end I resorted to chmod -R 777 *, which made me sad. The files all still have an ACL on them, which I doubt I'll ever be able to remove, and will probably screw things up in other ways. In the end, I'm happy I had a backup, and Time Machine made it easier to make backups, but what good is it if the new machine doesn't recognize the backup and fights its permissions?

I know I'd still be doomed if these were PC's, but I can't help but wonder in what scenarios they expect people to use this stuff. Oh, and by the way, the interwebs tell me I don't make compelling products either, so I'm allowed to wonder.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Aw Snap

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at February 12, 2009 11:40 PM

Avi just came through with the "sad tab" page when a tab crashes.

 

Mike Pinkerton: It's Alive!

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at February 12, 2009 10:23 PM

Over the last couple of months, the group working on Mac Chrome (myself included) has shifted gears from layout tests and WebKit compatibility to getting the application user interface up and limping. That also means getting the separate WebCore renderer processes to communicate over IPC to the browser.

Last week, while I was in Cali, the entire team made a tremendous amount of progress getting the cross-platform model and controller classes scaffolded, topped off with a Cocoa UI (with similar strides on Linux using Gtk). We were at the point where you could create new windows and tabs (and close them too) using the shared code, which would spawn/quit associated renderer processes. It was pretty exciting to watch them come and go in Activity Monitor, knowing how close we were to getting bits on the screen.

This week, everything came together and we can now load web pages in the renderer processes and display them in tabs. Here's a screenshot of the very first time I ran Mac Chromium and loaded a webpage:

Now mind you, clicking doesn't work, and the renderers crash like nobody's business, but the other great thing is that the user interface stays running even if they do. Just open a new tab and keep going! It's important to point out that's part of what's taken us so long to get to this point. The WebKit that ships as part of Mac OS X can't run this way -- it took a lot of work to marshall it to do so. In addition, the UI clearly needs much love, but it's an indicator of the clean and simple direction we're heading.

If you can't tell, I'm really excited. We've got a very very long way to go (don't dare ask me to predict a date -- I won't), but it's progress indeed.

 

Jon Hicks: Boxee and Plex

Posted by Jon Hicks at February 09, 2009 08:14 PM

My journey to find the ideal Media Centre has brought me via Plex and Boxee. Both are media center applications based on the popular open source XBox Media Center (XBMC), with Boxee focussing on the social network slant, and Plex solely on OS X integration.

Plex has a very slick interface, and everytime I mention Boxee, there is the inevitable “Why not Plex?’ cry from other Mac users. At the moment, the answer is that Plex doesn’t yet offer me much over just using Front Row. The slick interface has more character than Front Row though, particularly in it’s use of online databases to provide metadata and large format photographs:

It doesn’t always get the show/movie right however. The Secret Show recordings were believed to be ‘Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show’, and this couldn’t be manually removed.

The main appeal of Plex is that it’s built for OS X only, so you’re getting the best integration – no pandering to cross platform needs. In particular iTunes library scanning works really well, and plays iTunes store DRM’s material, an area where Boxee failed (see below).

What I miss from Plex are services like BBC iPlayer and EyeTV integration, which I believe are planned. That’s where Boxee comes in.

Boxee, on the face of it, doesn’t have quite as much UI sexiness as Plex, but I think it’s more thoughtfully laid out. For example, when you log in, the home screen shows you not only what you and your friends have been watching/listening to, but what you’ve recently added. Here is your new content – go straight to it.

The social network side is intriguing, but the integration of internet services (too numerous to mention) is it’s forté. In particular, the one that interests me the most, is that the latest release supports BBC iPlayer, and does it rather well, using the Beeb’s Big Screen Interface :

There are only two downsides I’ve experienced so far: Firstly, it doesn’t show all of my Music (around 800 non-DRM albums are just missing), despite leaving it overnight to process the collection. After digging around on forums, this seemed to be caused by scraping Last.fm for information, and that a different source was intended for future releases. That doesn’t explain why random songs are missing from albums though. Until then, I have to browse the folder structure to find what I want to play.

The biggie is stability. In the middle of watching a movie with the family it crashed. I installed the EyeTV plugin from XBMC and it crashed. I asked it to look for a SMB share and it crashed. When it crashes on the Mac Mini the only solution is turn it off and restart it. It feels churlish mentioning this when Boxee is in Alpha, and if you follow Team Boxee on their blog and twitter, you’ll know it’s progressing at a good pace. It just means it’s not that usable for me at the moment.

While playing with Boxee, I found a few useful tricks and add-ons, such as:

• You can also get a Front Row appliance to put a Boxee entry into the Front Row Menu, making it easy to launch with the Apple Remote
• If you have problems (like I did) getting TV Shows to show up in the TV Show menu, editing the filename does the trick, but obviously that’s a bit tedious.
• To stream from your Mac, you can set up an SMB share, which will then show up as a media source in Boxee:
  
• The snappily title XBMCEyeTVParser will allow you to watch EyeTV recordings in Boxee. Oddly, it places it in Videos > Internet, rather than TV Shows. As mentioned above, it did cause crashes for me, but your mileage may vary.

Ultimately, Boxee is geared up for the US market – Hulu, ABC, Netflix and such, some of which can be accessed in the UK via VPN trickery. You would then have to disable that in order to watch BBC iPlayer, which I’m more likely to watch. Not a big deal on your laptop, but when you’re trying to control a Mac Mini with a little remote, it’s going to require clever scripts and patience.

Despite stability and iTunes library niggles, I prefer Boxee over Plex. In fact, Boxee instills feelings of love and devotion in me for it’s online services, recommendations and layout. However, I’ve come to realise that the problem for me isn’t ‘Boxee or Plex’, it’s that controlling a Mac Mini remotely can be a pain in the arse. I haven’t tried Boxee on AppleTV though, which may well be the answer, but the hacky nature of it put me off.

Neither Boxee or Plex have ended up being my ideal solution, which is in fact a Playstation 3 with PlayTV. That’s for another post!

 

Smokey Ardisson: Gecko Fixes

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at February 06, 2009 06:12 AM

In the past couple of days, the Gecko fixes I alluded to earlier in the week have landed. Those of you using nightlies (or even Camino 2.0 Beta 1) will want to move to today’s nightly build.

In particular,

• One cause of crash-on-quit on Mac OS X 10.5 and leak-on-quit on 10.4 has been fixed.
• Flash that was activated after being blocked by Flashblock no longer continues playing sound after its tab or window has been closed. The fix for this bug also appears to fix a much older set of problems where Flash would apparently continue running (silently!) and eat CPU until quitting Camino.
• The hang when trying to book a flight with Lufthansa has also been fixed; special thanks to Boris Zbarsky for the amazing turn-around time on that fix and to the Mozilla 1.9.0 drivers for approving it to land this week!

So go enjoy your Camino, now with more Gecko-related fixes!

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Week 5

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at February 03, 2009 04:01 AM

Last week felt pretty busy again in Camino-land, perhaps because of two major landings (complete with lots of file additions to keep me on my toes during check-in).

• Stuart Morgan again kept the review queues moving during the week.
• Sean Murphy posted a patch to fix the tab dragging bug on 10.4 and a patch to work around the double-encoded ampersand in search plug-ins on 10.3.9. He also resurrected his patch implementing the back-end for anti-phishing, and after it was checked in, he spent the rest of the week investigating issues with the static build.
• Christopher Henderson continued work on a “Allow Flash From This Page” item for easy Flashblock whitelisting. In addition, his patch to auto-close bookmark folders opened while dragging bookmarks landed during the week.
• Chris Lawson did some more work on his bookmark bugs last week, and he also updated his patch for downloads preferences realignment.
• As mentioned previously, Ilya Sherman’s patch to enable Growl notifications for completed downloads also landed last week.
• Philippe Wittenbergh produced another half-dozen variations on the full content zoom icon, and he also continued debugging the tab-switching failure on whitehouse.gov.
• Samuel Sidler welcomed a brand new tinderbox into the world during the week. Like most newborns, this tinderbox has been fussy and demanding of attention.
• I continued the debugging theme from the prior week, helping Sean look at the 10.3.9 ampersand bug and providing some debugging data for Boris Zbarsky, who had been looking at the hang on lufthansa.com. I also attempted to help Sean figure out the static build issues with his anti-phishing patch—before realizing I had forgotten the cardinal (and ultimate) rule of adding components. It was not a winning week for my memory, but we survived my lapses. I also managed to check in a few of my own patches and to perform some tinderbox maintenance during the week.

As for the week ahead, a number of the recent Gecko bugs that have been annoying Camino nightly users look like they’re on-track for landing, which should be a welcome relief to many!

 

Jon Hicks: Designing for the Web

Posted by Jon Hicks at February 01, 2009 10:19 PM

Ever feel that the web design market is over-saturated by books, both coffee-table and technical? There’s too much choice, and “What books would you recommend?” is the top (non cheese related) question I get asked. Depending on the topic required, there are various degrees of ‘hmmm well…you could try…” that’s replied.

This is where Mark Boulton’s new PDF book A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web comes in. I’ve been watching the previews on Flickr and now that I’ve actually had the chance to read the full book, I can declare it a triumph. It doesn’t feel preachy or stodgy, or conversely, too light and insubstantial. Mark’s tone strikes the right balance, and is engaging from the start.

To those who don’t know, I’m not a trained designer – my background is firmly in illustration. As part of my 5 years studying illustration, we covered some graphic design, but it was about 20% or less of the curriculum. Since leaving college, and getting my first job as a Junior Designer for Coventry City Council, I’ve been ‘picking up’ the elements of design ever since, but have never had the benefit of formal training.

For me, this book is the equivalent of ‘Zeldmans Orange book’, taking those bits and pieces I’ve learnt over the years and filling in the gaps, finally creating an overall understanding.
However, it doesn’t just cover design theory, as practical business advice is given to complete the picture. Something that I’m sure all those people who ask me for recommendations will love.

It’s left me wanting the physical book, which if I have understood correctly, is on the cards. Yippee!