Smokey Ardisson: Standing on the shoulders of Kiwis

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at February 08, 2010 06:49 AM

It has been some time since the last regular Camino development status update, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work—it just means that I’ve been pretty busy with all sorts of things, and the status updates have been fairly low on my to-do list.

As I said, though, we’ve been working on all sorts of things so far this year. Dan Weber has been hard at work on patches for some of the most visible issues with the new autocomplete experience, and I landed the fix for the magically-reappearing autocomplete window tonight. Dan is also still working on improving the speed of autocomplete for large histories, though that patch is not yet ready. Chris Lawson has also been working on various and sundry other bugs, including changes to the Flashblock exceptions list so that pasting URLs into the field will work as users expect. Philippe Wittenbergh is hard at work polishing some of our toolbar icons.

Christopher Henderson has been working on a patch that moves our history off of Mork, which is both the sane thing to do and critical for moving forward to the new Mork-less world. As usual, I have been chasing down bugs here and there and wrangling patches to get ready for the upcoming 2.0.2 and 1.6.11 releases. We’ve also seen Alex Jones, who has been working off-and-on on supporting Mobile Me sync, again recently, though it sounds like Sync Services wants to do things in a manner that is not easily compatible with Camino’s bookmarks implementation. All in all, we’ve been fairly productive since the new year began.

Which brings us back to the title of this post and to this weekend’s developments. Late Saturday afternoon, I got a debug version of Camino to build, launch, and run using Gecko 1.9.1, and early Sunday evening I was able to make a static (i.e., distributable) build do the same thing. (Even better, Christopher Henderson was able to replicate my success.) This feat would not have been possible without all the hard work that Christopher put in for the aforementioned history migration, as well as a good bit of debugging and patching he did this weekend as we hit some unexpected code-change-related build failures. After applying those patches, I mostly deleted and added things to the project and waited for the next build failure. At the end of the day, though, Camino launches and runs, plays <audio> and <video> (with Ogg), and displays pages with @font-face (with raw TrueType fonts).

This doesn’t mean that we can turn around and release a version of Camino based on Gecko 1.9.1 (and there’s a very strong possibility we may not); for starters, there are a number of known regressions (including the loss of Find-As-You-Type), as well as possibly hundreds of other serious problems we haven’t discovered in our limited test browsing. Beyond that, the “build system” is not yet a system at all; it involves pulling mozilla-1.9.1 from hg, checking out Camino from cvs into mozilla/camino, and applying a large patch. But if you’re brave or crazy, you can try this at home now (and for those less brave or more sane, there’s an Intel-only build here that you can use to help us find other broken things. N.B. You should treat this build as highly experimental. It might eat all of the cheese in your house. It will eat your profile, so make a backup copy first).

We also know (thanks to earlier attempts by Philippe Wittenbergh and Kai Rune Mathisen to build mozilla-central) that there are more serious code breakages in newer versions of Gecko, so this is only the beginning. In between other things the last few weeks, I’ve also been working on a new repository and fleshing out issues and solutions for the build system. There’s a long road ahead, and Camino 2.1 might be ready before we’ve gotten to the end of the road; we’ll have to see. However, as Christoper said on Saturday night, “it’s been a great day in Camino Land.”

 

Smokey Ardisson: And the winner is…

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at February 08, 2010 04:21 AM

FCKEditor!

This news is a bit old now (since it appeared briefly on Planet Mozilla the other day half-buried in a PR round-up, and since reader James reported it in a comment on January 21), but FCKEditor is the winner of the 2010 edition of the annual “we break our site for your browser when the new year rolls around” broken browser-sniffing contest.

If you use FCKEditor on a site and it doesn’t work with Firefox 3.6 or nightly builds of any Gecko browser built since January 1, you’re probably seeing the bug that won FCKEditor this year’s prize with a stunning upset of two-time defending champion Yahoo!

My gut feeling is that this new type of contest winner is much worse than the old “major site is broken” type, since there is no single point of contact for the fix (everyone who uses the affected versions of FCKEditor will have to patch or upgrade their install), since unpatched instances of FCKEditor could break functionality on websites far and wide for years to come, and since in some ways the distributed nature of the problem means there is less visibility than when a major website suddenly ceases to work correctly.

I think this also highlights the importance of web “library” or “component” authors doing things correctly from the beginning—not browser sniffing at all, but instead testing for features—because their code will be used widely and, as I understand it, they have little control over getting consumers to update when there are fixes for broken things like this.

If you’re going to write something for wider consumption, or that you think may one day be useful to large audiences, please take the time to get things right from the beginning, especially if your code doesn’t have a dead-simple upgrade experience. Your users, and their users, and even other unrelated software vendors, will thank you for it later.

(And remember: only you can prevent broken browser sniffing! )

 

Camino Blog: Camino is an About.com Best Independent Browser Finalist!

Posted by Camino Blog at February 04, 2010 09:00 PM

 

Mike Pinkerton: DropBox

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at January 30, 2010 06:20 PM

In the spirit of the title of this blog, I wanted to pass along my experience with some software that is really awesome (and free). If you need a way to share data between machines and do some simple syncing, check out Dropbox. It blows iDisk out of the water. With a nuclear bomb. If you've ever been frustrated with iDisk's performance, frequent file copy errors, and just general malaise, try Dropbox right now. It "just works" and it's so easy use.

Yesterday, their servers were down for a bit while I was in the middle of trying to copy some files around. If I was using my iDisk, I would have gotten hangs and failures and dead files. The Finder probably would have locked up and I would have had to Force Quit it. However, Dropbox recovered transparently and when the servers came back up, everything finished copying without a hiccup. Proper error handling. Imagine that. The icons in the Finder are even badged to let you know what's been synced and what hasn't.

Go try it.

 

Jon Hicks: The Handbag has been raised!

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 26, 2010 07:52 PM

How often have you read a snide, bumptious or haughty comment where you feel the only reaction could be a raised handbag, accompanied by the high-pitched mocking call of “oooOOOooooh!”?

If you’re not familiar with the work of Vic and Bob, the chances are that it’s never. Well, hopefully that will soon change, as Hicksdesign has launched a site to fulfill that need you never knew you had to “oooOOooooh!”:

Now whenever you see such a comment, you point them in the right direction: oo00.eu (2 oh’s, 2 zeros and a european union). Obviously, feel free to use it on me if say some deserving! ;)

If you’re still confused, this video might help explain the origins of the raised handbag as a retort, (before going on to become a surreal contest):

Playing catch-up

This little side-project was the perfect opportunity to play with new CSS3 toys and HTML5 tags that I haven’t had time to experiment with yet:

CSS Animations: In any webkit browser (Safari, Omniweb, Chrome), the handbag will actually be raised, waved at you, and then lowered. There is a separate animation for the shadow underneath the bag. It’s a little clunky, but that suits the context.
CSS Media Queries: Just as this blog does, the layout changes when the viewport is reduced smaller than 700px. These style rules also govern layout on mobiles (only tested on iPhone so far though). Not currently supported in Camino or IE, but work in everything else.
HTML5 structural tags: Added footer, header and section, with simple javascript to allow their use in IE. Not forgetting to add display:block to each to compensate for lack of browser default styles.
HTML5 audio: In Opera 10.5 (Win), Chrome and Firefox, you should get the .ogg file, and in Safari, the mp3. It won’t be in time with the animation sadly, but I’m hoping that’s something that will be possible in the future. Thanks to the Webble Millers for providing their oooohs.
Web Fonts: Type goodness is supplied via Typekit, namely the gorgeous slab-serif Adelle. Currently a no-show in Opera, but hopefully once 10.5 final is out, Typekit will update their sniffing.

So depending on which browser you use, you’ll get a slightly different experience, but the same content.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Task Management, or "Why I'm Neurotic And Inches From The Loony Bin"

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at January 26, 2010 12:23 AM

I'm directly over the city of Columbus, Ohio, amidst a large amount of turbulence that would have spilled any drink I had, if only they had come around and brought me something. I'm also very frustrated, and I'll explain why over the course of this blog post, which is about my inability to find a task management system that has a foothold in even the 20th century. This will turn into something that most will skip with "too long, didn't read", but it's as much for my benefit as for yours. Who are we kidding, it's entirely for mine, I don't care about you.

I'm a list person. I need to write things down and capture them outside of my head or they simply won't happen. At one point in my life, I had a really great memory. It's still not so bad, but I can tell it's gotten a little worse as I've gotten older. Regardless, I have to write things down in order to organize them. This is the only way I'm able to execute on anything. It's also the act of writing things down that helps me remember them. I'm one of those people that learns best by taking notes, even if I never look at those notes again. None of this is up for debate, it's been proven time and time again to me through years and years and years of school, followed by work.

As an aside, I can barely read this as I type it because the screen is bouncing so much. Why? Because the plain is bouncing all over the sky, just north of Dayton, Ohio.

I used some task management software through college, but it was in grad school where I was really introduced to the joys electronic planning with my association with some research going on in the Graphics and Visualization Lab at Georgia Tech. They were doing work with the Apple Newton and I was able to procure one for daily use. That day my life changed.

Let me take a step back and introduce you to one of my neurosis and idiosyncrasies. I love office supplies: pens, highlighters, post-its, flags, folders, mechanical pencils, notebooks. If it's in an Office Depot, I love it. I can wander around a Staples for days and not get bored. I love them so much that I can't bear to see them spoiled by, well, using them. What if I mess up and have to scribble something out? What if I use too many and they're all gone? I have to force myself to unwrap post-it notes, let alone write on them. You can see this might make it difficult to organize my life with such supplies because doing so would mean I had to soil them.

Oh look, they turned off the fasten seatbelt sign.

With the Newton, everything was electronic. I could scribble out any mistakes, move things around on the fly, and never ever have to worry about unwrapping my precious stickies. It was as if a weight had been lifted from me. Most importantly, it was portable. Sure, my Mac had a stickies app, but I couldn't lug a PowerMac 6100/66 around to class in order to take down my homework or set up a study group. It was the best of both worlds in that I could write with my own handwriting (yes, it worked perfectly, regardless of what the press said) and I could take it anywhere. Life was good.

Right about the time I started working, Steve Jobs came back to Apple and decided that things had to change. Out went the Newton division and along with it my hopes and dreams. There was a new sheriff in town anyway, one that was taking over the PDA landscape: Palm. Sure you had to write with some arcane squiggles. Sure, it was tiny and you had to squint to see just about everything. But it was supported by everyone and had great desktop integration. That means I could use a desktop app at work and at home, but still be able to access and enter tasks/events on the road. For the most part, I was happy, but there was still something that left me wanting.

Remember that part about how I like to write things down in order to commit them to memory? The Newton allowed that, because I was really writing as if I was writing on paper. Doing any serious data entry on the Palm was a joke, so you just typed everything. In addition, the Mac desktop software was a joke, so I had to do most of it on my spare PeeCee at work and that made it difficult to do things at home. Also around that time, I was looking for something a bit more holistic in my life, something that would help organize not just remembering to do my TPS reports, but also help me make myself a better person.

About this time, I discovered Franklin Covey products. For those unaware, it's a methodology crafted around Stephen Covey's book about some habits and traits shared by highly effective people. He makes a lot of money on seminars and training, but that doesn't mean it's all schlock. There's some good stuff there, and it was the method I was after, not the religion. I was drawn to the "life-planning" aspect of FC, helping me to identify what and who was important to me, to set life-long goals and values, and to think about more than just TPS reports. It helped me evaluate who I was versus who I wanted to be and find a plan to unify the two. The approach of long-term and short-term planning, with frequent reviews, made a lot of sense to me and clicked very nicely. Day-to-day, it was a good system, and as part of a larger whole, it helped me to balance myself (or at least identify where I was out of balance so I could correct it).

There was some desktop software (PC only, of course) and accompanying Palm software (remember, everyone supported it). I used this for a while, but while the system was great, the desktop software was shit. Unadulterated shit. It did about half of the system very well, but the other half barely worked. It's as if the FC developers didn't even understand the system for which they were building software. The poor customer support people on the forums were overrun with complaints and eventually stopped responding. Updates were slow to nonexistent and didn't address the obvious bugs people would routinely complain about. After all this, I started to doubt what I could get out of this system. I made a temporary switch over to LifeBalance because it had a Mac client, but it never really worked right either.

Then one day I decided to take the software out of the equation entirely. If it was the software that was the barrier, the solution seemed obvious. I invested a couple hundred dollars in a nice leather binder, a year's worth of planner pages, all the inserts, pages, goal planners, etc and started my journey down the path people had been traveling for centuries: pen and paper. With pen and paper, I was free to organize myself exactly how I wanted and could adapt the system to my needs. There were no rules to follow because I controlled the horizontal and the vertical. What could go wrong?

I've lived with a paper planner for close to 10 years now and clearly it wasn't a bad solution. It allows me the tactile learning which I require by writing in my own hand, and it's portable. There are some problems though, which should be obvious. Remember my neurosis about not wanting to mess up? Yeah, well, I still have that. Crossing things out still makes me bleed internally. It's distracting, and always seems to happen right after a 3-day weekend when I write everything off by a day. In order to use the system properly, I need to write goals and assign them tasks. That means opening up my package of goal sheets and scribbling on them. This too makes me bleed internally because I know that once I put pen to virgin paper, the magic is gone. What if I write things in the wrong order? What if I make any number of mistakes? It's too much, and so I don't do it. There's also the problem that my paper-based system isn't on the Interwebs anywhere. If I don't have my planner, I can't capture anything. I generally have my planner, but not always. The last annoyance is the cost. The pretty pages aren't cheap, and you have to keep buying them year in and year out. At $65 a year (that's just for the yearly pages, there may be other pages I need to get too), you can see how much money I've spent in the last decade on this stuff. I could argue that being this organized has allowed me to be in the position I'm in and the system has clearly paid for itself in that regard, but it's still a bitter pill to have to swallow every year.

So come this New Years, I thought to myself I would try to find a solution that was up to the standards of the 21st century in which I'm a citizen. There are a few requirements to head back into the digital domain. First off, it has to run on a Mac (duh, but this means no iPhone-only solutions) and have a way to access it from my iPhone via something other than the built-in calendar app. Second, I must be able to have first-class viewing/editing from both home and work machines without resorting to lugging around a laptop or requiring the use of my iPhone at one or the other. As I split my time about equally working at home and the office, I need something that syncs between both sets of work machines. I do not want to have to have a separate laptop open at all times that I must carry to work in order to access my life. This much is firm. Finally, it's gotta cost less than the paper planner pages I already use, though this isn't really a problem.

Scanning the Mac desktop landscape, there are really only two players: Things and OmniFocus, and thankfully each comes with a 14-day trial. I downloaded both and played around with them, as well as took the temperature of their online communities in the forums (support is important). Here's the gist of what I came away with.

Things is a beautiful application. It's a lot like an iApp in that it doesn't have complicated inspectors for everything, nor is it cluttered with buttons and UI thingamabobs that probably serve some purpose if only I could figure out what it was supposed to be. A lot of time was spent on the visual design, as well as the work flow, and it shows. It's a very good example of a well-designed, user-centric application. The ability to put multiple tags on items harkens back to the planner software I used in college that's long gone the way of the dodo. It's very flexible and comes with lots of awards for both it and its iPhone app.

There are some downsides, however. Multi-machine sync is something you have to hack with Dropbox and seems easy to mess up if I forget to quit the app before I go to work or come back home. The developers have promised it for forever, but it's still not here (they're a pretty small shop). Being a small shop, new features and bug fix releases are few and far between. Now, I run a rag-tag open-source project with limited to no resources so I understand what they're going through, except my app is free. We don't get paid. I don't make real dollars (or euros) on every user, money they could theoretically use to hire some more developers. I've also seen complaints that the software doesn't scale particularly well (performance of single-file database, no nested projects, etc) and If I'm going to invest in a system, I'm not going to invest in another one in 6mo because it can't keep up with me. That would be unfortunate, and it gives me pause.

So I decided to check out the 800-pound gorilla, OmniFocus. If Things is simple and clean like Camino, OF is like Opera. Sure, you can do tons and tons with it, but, um, do I really want to? The inspector dialog for editing tasks is daunting. I feel a large learning curve coming on, and I'm not sure I want that, as I'll get to below. OF does a great job of multi-machine sync without any hackery and that's a huge benefit for me. Clearly OmniGroup is supportive of this software, they make good and solid products, and they have the resources to continue developing it for a long time to come. It seems we have the requirements met, thus I popped over to their forums where I found them full of happy users and OmniGroup employees answering questions and providing support. Upon further reading, however, I found something I wasn't actually expecting. The forums are chock full of Getting Things Done (GTD) zealots whose beliefs about how the software should be used are clear.

GTD, for those who don't know, is a different system for managing your life. There's nothing wrong with it, I have nothing against people who use it. However, I don't really care to follow GTD (I have my own system, thanks), and it seems that OF was built specifically for GTD. If you want a feature or behavior that's not part of core GTD, don't even bother asking about it, as you'll be met with stiff resistance from the community who will not so gently point out that you're doing it all wrong. I don't need this stress in my life, nor do I want to set out using software in a manner at odds with its design philosophies. Down that road lies madness, and I'd rather avoid it altogether. OF may be awesome, but I just don't want to use it.

Then someone at work suggested a cloud-based solution such as Remember The Milk. I hadn't even though about a web-based alternative, but the benefits were suddenly obvious. Multi-machine sync was entirely a non-issue, and I always have a web browser open for Gmail. After some searching around, I found Toodledo which, astoundingly, was free (let me say that again, free!) for just about all of its functionality. Not only that, it did more than just about every other cloud-based task manager (who, again, demanded yearly payments). It followed GTD, but didn't force anything down your throat and even had several non-GTD features that appealed to me (tags, priorities, etc). It also has a 3rd party API so there are multiple iPhone apps to choose from. Being able to open any laptop in my house, or any computer I come across and see my tasks is liberating, even in just the one night I've been playing with it (laptop batteries kept dying). Perfection, right? What could be wrong now?

For starters, the web site's UI is ugly and mildly confusing. Yes, it's powerful, but it takes a lot of getting used to and navigating to get what I want. There's also a bigger problem. In theory sending any of my daily work tasks up to a 3rd party server is bad bad bad. In practice, I work on an open source project and the majority of my tasks are for things in my home life. However, now I'm concerned about any strategy that isn't pen and paper since every multi-machine sync solution requires a third-party server. That said, my binder could get stolen on a trip, and it's clearly not encrypted, so it could leak just as much. The only truly safe solution would be to use a single work laptop with disk encryption and lug it everywhere, which violates requirement number two. This has my stomach in knots, enough so that I'm thinking about going back to Things and manually copying around folders.

One thing that I'm still searching for is a solution for calendaring. Tasks are just one aspect of organization. I still have to get to my appointments on time. It would be nice to have one program to be able to check calendar and tasks, especially on the iPhone where context switching is expensive. There's a phone app called Pocket Informant that duplicates/replaces the calendaring functionality of the built-in calendar app. It sync with Google Calendar as well as Toodledo. In that respect, it's perfect. However, it's really really complicated and clunky. It also doesn't support Toodledo's tags, and in a day of using it it's already corrupted itself once. That's fine, i just reset and did a re-sync (this is really why life in the cloud is awesome) and it's fixed, but makes me hesitant to spend the money on the software. Toodledo has its own iPhone app, but it lacks calendar, so I'd have to get the built-in calendar to behave with calDav, something it only wants to do begrudgingly. For example, I got it to see my work calendar, but only the first calendar. I guess when I get off the plane I'll try some hacks I've found to get it to see others. These are things I don't have to do with PI.

Congratulations if you made it this far. You're one of probably four (one of them is my beautiful wife, I love her dearly and have no clue why she puts up with me; that leaves you and two others). Where am I in all this task nonsense? I'm still not sure, though I don't have my binder with me this week on travel. I guess I'll have to find make something work, sink or swim.

Update from somewhere over Nevada: I decided to play some more with Things while I had my laptop and some time to kill. I went and entered all the tasks and projects that I had put into Toodledo just to ensure that Things could fit my workflow and something surprised me. It was so much easier using Things than the clunky Toodledo web UI that I'm almost ready to plop down my credit card. I'll be stuck with the poor sync hackery, but it might almost be worth it. I want to live in the cloud, I want to believe that there is no need for desktop software and that everything can be done on the web, but I don't think I can in this instance. At least the calendar side can mostly be online.

 

Jon Hicks: Guide to the Internet (2000)

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 22, 2010 06:54 PM

Leigh picked up a little gem from an antiques and curios shop in Burford, titled “The Internet A to Z”. This little tome was published in the year of our Lord 2000 (so possibly written in 1999), and it was interesting to see what difference 10 years makes.

In particular, there were 2 very relevant entries:

Opera

…and then iCab…

…ouch!

 

Jon Hicks: Designer, not a construction worker

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 21, 2010 03:31 AM

“I want my sites to look Safari in Safari, and IE6 in IE6. I most definitely do not want my sites to look like IE6 in Safari”

Sam Brown

Comment on this

 

Jon Hicks: Why you can never work 'full time'

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 20, 2010 03:58 AM

“Someone asked me the other day what percentage of my day was spent doing what. Yesterday it was approximately one third general admin type stuff, one third client liaison type stuff and one third designing type stuff. If we ignore the fact that there isn’t really such a thing as a typical day – that is a pretty much a typical day.”

Ben Terrett (Interesting Mini CEO Half Thoughts)

When I started working freelance, I worked out my rates and estimated earnings based on a ‘typical’ eight hour day. What I didn’t really comprehend at the time was the fallacy of an eight hour day of solid work. There are so many factors that eat into that supposed ‘billable time’.

• Admin. The obvious one. I hire a bookkeeper and an accountant to look after this side, but you still need to do a certain amount of admin yourself. Becoming a Limited Company brought with it more forms than I could ever imagine.
• Illness. Your choice of lifestyle and diet can affect this, but even the fittest get the flu.
• Hardware/software failures. Kernel panics, hard drive failures, crashy software.
• Meetings. Not so much with clients (which are billable), but with accountants, bookkeepers, solicitors, financial advisors…
• Enquiries. This has been a big problem for me, as before I worked for Opera, the level of enquiries was such that I could spend half of most days simply replying to them.
• Phone calls. The ones unrelated to active projects. “I’ve lost my login details…” or “Can you just send me…”.
• Lack of motivation. It sounds lame, but you will get days where no matter how hard you try, you can’t produce anything. Usually a sign of needing a break.
• Power cuts, or lack of internets (something I see happen a lot with Twitter friends cut off by poor service from their ISP).
• Children!. We love them, but every working parent surely dreads the call from school or nursery, asking them to collect their poorly child.

No doubt there are many more.

The problem with setting such an unrealistic expectation is two-fold. The first is that you often feel like a failure for not achieving those core hours (sometimes you do far, far more of course, but that doesn’t always help the guilt!). Secondly, it leads to underestimating project times, where your belief of how much you can achieve is sadly mistaken.

There’s no easy way around this, it’s just one of the things I’ve got used to. Correction – still getting used to. I’m better than I was, but I still get this wrong.

 

Jon Hicks: Dream Report: Look at the Hygiene!

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 16, 2010 04:20 PM

There’s not a lot left of last night’s dream, but here’s what there is:

I was at a carvery, that looked like the kind of cafe you get inside a department store, but the layout was a little odd. After picking up a plate you then had to go around taking your vegetables off other people’s plates. Bizarrely, no one minded about this, but every table I went to I heard diners exclaim “Look at the hygiene! It’s so hygienic!”.

I finally saw what everyone was getting excited about. In order to get the meat, you had to queue up to go past an airport security style desk, where you were checked for condiments, through a shower (with your plate of veg) and then put on hospital scrubs before joining the final queue for the meat. After that you simply exited via a little white swinging gate, with a plate of roast beef and soggy but sterilised vegetables.

 

Jon Hicks: My Evernote Workflow

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 15, 2010 04:02 AM

Shared notebooks are one of the many selling points of Evernote. Being able to automatically share content easily (no manual upload), with additional benefit of an RSS feed is genius – it almost becomes a blogging platform. As well notebooks shared with individuals (such as moodboards for clients) I have two public notebooks:

Design Scrapbook – where I keep any inspiration, be they images, PDFs or type samples. When clippings have come from webpages. the original URL is saved too.
Cheese Diaries) – where I take snaps of cheese labels to remember what I ate.

Some notebooks are private, but synced, (such Opera work) and I’ve got used to a system to help ensure confidential information doesn’t appear where it shouldn’t.

Simply, I have a default notebook called ‘Inbox’ where all clippings arrive. Every 3-5 days I go through and tag the content (type, * rating out of 5, colour palette etc) and then drag the clipping into it’s proper notebook.

Often, I’ll combine various images and text by copying and pasting into a single note, to create a kind of simplistic moodboard. To do this, I often have to resize and crop images, but that can be done by right clicking the image, opening it in a graphics editor (Preview does the job quickly) and saving it. When I get back to the note, the image is altered.

 

Jon Hicks: Add to Queue in Boxee

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 14, 2010 09:46 PM

One of my favourite features in the new Boxee Beta is a bookmarklet to add internet videos to a queue to watch in Boxee later. Once you’re logged into boxee.tv, the bookmarklet is found bottom right. Clicking it on a page with supported video type sends it to Boxee with a confirmation message:

(The video in the screenshot was live visuals for Overture by Brian McBride, he of Stars of the Lid fame)

This is even more useful to me than all the various video apps that come with Boxee, is an example of what sets Boxee apart from just using XBMC. However, if you’re using ClicktoFlash, with Youtube set to use H.264 video where possible, it will interfere with the magic, and Boxee can’t find the video. You just need to make sure it’s unchecked if you want to use the bookmarklet:

 

Jon Hicks: The PS3 Hub

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 13, 2010 07:06 PM

Almost a year ago, Matt Carey and I set up a Tumblr blog called “The PS3 Hub”, focussing on using the Playstation 3 as a media centre. We kept coming across handy tit bits and links, and a Tumblr account was the obvious, and easiest, choice. I love Tumblr. It’s fab, not to mention MetaLab who created the Tumblr theme that we use.

Strangely, I seem to have forgotten to link to it from here in all that time. So, here’s the link to PS3 Hub.

P.S – a year later and I’m still glad I went for the PS3 solution. It’s been a brilliant all in one solution. Now if we can just get a bit more codec support and sub-folders in the XMB…

 

Mike Pinkerton: I hate having to repeat myself

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at January 10, 2010 09:31 PM

I know we've had this conversation before, but I would like to request, beg, plead, persuade, demand, buy flowers and chocolate for, whatever it takes. I'm this close to getting down on my hands and knees and taking up religion. I'm bringing this up again because it's serious and I want to continue our relationship.

Please, Food Network. Please stop stretching the non-HD content on Food Network HD. Bobby Flay and Ted Allen are not really fat. Panning across a kitchen should not make me want to vomit from motion sickness. It really takes away from the viewing experience. How can you focus on the food when everything is stretched and warped beyond proportion? I don't like watching your channel when it's a non-HD show, and that means most of them because very few of your productions are. If I (and others) don't want to watch your channel, I'd bet your advertisers will eventually catch on.

Maybe I am in the minority. I wish I could start a Facebook group or whatever the kids these days do. Twelve people might even agree with me. Bravo gets it right, and their cooking shows are getting better and better. Cooking Academy is delightful. If you're not watching it, you really should, even though I think there's only 1 episode left. Maybe catch a marathon.

 

Jon Hicks: Dream Report: Radiohead Puppet Show

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 09, 2010 03:50 AM

(As part of a drive to vary the content on this blog from either Dr Who, Media Centres or Apps, I’m going to start documenting the snippets of dreams that I still remember in the morning).

The first part of the dream was too hazy, but I know it involved a school, and was probably another one of my ‘back being a youth leader on summer camp’ nightmares. It’s starts properly with Glenda the Goodwitch flirting with a centaur in one of the school rooms. I think the Centaur looked a bit like her husband Scott, so that was OK.

Leaving them to do whatever they were going to do, I was suddenly in the car, driving some kids from the camp into town. The town looked decidedly Belgian, like the historic architecture of Bruges, but the car park was a boring modern affair. It then cuts to returning to the car, but the kids have gone and so has my car.

After what felt like half an hour of panicking, I suddenly noticed something happening in one corner of the car park. On closer inspection, it was none other than Thom and Ed from Radiohead, performing a small puppet show set to music from Kid A. It was small but quite spectacular, and was obvious that they’d practiced a lot.

When the show was over, I realised that the chap standing next to me in the ankle length red corduroy coat (!) was in fact Jeremy Keith. He looked up thoughtfully, stroking his chin and exclaiming “Yes, that was really rather excellent”. I knew it was all going to be OK.

Then I woke up.

 

Jon Hicks: Dashnote

Posted by Jon Hicks at January 06, 2010 06:53 PM

Dashnote is a well-thought-out dashboard widget interface for Simplenote, and my favourite of all desktop client/syncing solutions.

Comment on this

 

Mike Pinkerton: Some phone I heard about

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at January 05, 2010 07:23 PM

I've now spent the last few weeks messing around with my Nexus One and I've got a few things to say about it. Note that I am speaking for myself only, not my company of employment.

What's good:

- Fast, though I haven't used an iPhone 3GS. I hear it's fast too.
- Pretty screen. I'm a sucker for those things.
- Nice 5mp camera with flash!
- Voice input on all text fields. I didn't know that, except I watched Gizmodo's liveblog.
- Nice Google Maps, Gmail, and gTalk support, but that's nothing new to the N1.
- Weather app is pretty cool. It has a neat display of high/low temps over time.

What isn't:

- Scrolling feels wrong. It's jerky sometimes. When you get to the start/end, there's no indication that you are there. The iPhone lets you drag just past the end and then it springs back, giving you really great feedback that there's nothing more. When you get to the end on the N1, it just stops and nothing happens when you move your finger. It feels broken. The "app wheel" has this feature, but none of the apps themselves do.

- Managing background applications feels like Windows 3.1. If you install anything useful (Twitter, SportsTap, Facebook, etc etc), you will be installing an app that wants to be online 24/7, and on Android these apps can be as long as the phone has juice. And they will continue to do so until they run the phone out of juice. Don't want them to kill your battery? You have to go to the settings of every single app, individually, and tweak the 5+ different settings (per app) on update frequency, etc. It's also very confusing when certain apps run in the background. I have a SportsTap widget that will update me with sports scores, but it didn't start working until I interacted with its widget. Now it's telling me about things from last night (shouldn't it already have?), and now I don't know if I can stop it until it kills my battery (yes yes, there is a screen for that, but it's buried and non-techies would never ever find it). Yes, it sucks having to switch apps and not be able to run background processes on the iPhone, but if this is the alternative, I'll take the iPhone any day. Thanks Steve.

- Want to know what background app killed your battery? Too bad. Once the battery is drained and you reboot, the helpful screen that tells you what ate the battery gets reset.

- Out of the box with a Google account, you're on Gtalk as long as the phone has power, even if the display is off (you're marked as away). Yes, you can change this, but it's a setting, buried two levels deep in a menu. Where'd that battery go, again?

- If you can't tell, I left my phone on overnight and came back and the battery was drained. What did it? Beats me, the info was lost when the phone rebooted!

- Pressing the hard home button takes you to a fixed screen, not the last screen you were on when you launched the app.

- The hard back button is offset from where the actual sensor is, meaning you have to hit the button 3 or 4 times just right to get it to register and take you back.

- On AT&T, it's EDGE/Wifi only. No 3G for that carrier. Most may not care about that, but if you're on AT&T, you sure would.

- Want to silence your phone w/out unlocking it? There's no hard switch to flick. You have to unlock it and interact with it.

- Want all your music sync'd from iTunes? Bzzzt. You need a 3rd party application to do that, or you can manually copy all your music there. Endless fun for all ages!

- When I hold it in my hand for an extended period of time, my hand really cramps up. I can hold my iPhone for hours with no strain at all. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I mostly feel it in my thumb and across the breadth of my palm.

- No multi-touch to zoom. It seems like the obvious default gesture to zoom in and out, yet the N1 makes you double-tap to zoom. It doesn't feel very "direct manipulation", and after years with an iPhone, feels clunky.

With full disclosure that I'm an Apple fanboi, I'm impressed with the phone, but bothered enough by it that I don't have any reason to switch from my 1st gen iPhone. I'm sure this is a really impressive phone if you're upgrading from a 5 year old RAZR. If my iPhone suddenly up and died, I'd use this, but I would still be grumbly about it.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Because

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at January 02, 2010 04:33 PM

I fast-forwarded (because, face it, nobody actually watches commercials anymore) through a Jim Beam commercial yesterday, on New Years Day. Isn't that an odd time to advertise? I mean, whose New Years resolution is to start drinking bourbon?

My Jersey Shore name is either Bones or Mikey Mortadella, though we're not actually watching it. We are completely hooked on True Blood, and if you've been following my tweets, you know we've now exhausted Season One which is all that's been released on DVD. Anyone work at HBO? I'll trade you a nightly build of Chromium for the second season!

One of my resolutions is to blog more this year. Hopefully I'll have enough to say about both Camino and Chrome/Chromium such that I'll need more than 140 characters.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 in Review

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at January 01, 2010 01:05 AM

Sitting at this end of the calendar, 2009 seems like quite a long year; I’m exhausted, and I hope 2010 will be less of a marathon. 2009 was, however, still a good year for Camino, and that is what my annual look back is all about.

1. First and foremost, we released Camino 2, a significant new release with lots of great new features like Tab Overview, phishing and malware protection, drag-and-drop rearranging of tabs, Growl support, and new AppleScript features. As with all community projects, it took longer than anticipated, but based on the very positive reaction, it was well worth the wait.
   • Stuart Morgan fixed the most bugs, while Sean Murphy wrote three major new features; Jeff Dlouhy, Christopher Henderson, and Ilya Sherman also contributed major features to Camino 2.
   • Our localization teams stayed busy, so the Multilingual edition of Camino 2.0.x currently ships with 15 languages.
2. In conjunction with the Camino 2 release, we rolled out a redesign of caminobrowser.org. Thanks to our friends at Clearleft for the design work, Samuel Sidler for implementing the redesign, and Philippe Wittenbergh for helping to polish the rough edges afterwards.
3. While our focus was on Camino 2, we continued to release security and stability updates for Camino 1.6 throughout the year, and beginning in the summer we started landing code for what will become Camino 2.1.
4. Dan Weber was our Google Summer of Code student in 2009, working on enhancing the location bar. Over the course of the summer, Dan implemented a new look for the autocomplete window as well as extending autocompletion to include URLs and titles of both bookmarks and history items (fixing a couple of the oldest remaining Camino bugs in the process). Check out a nightly build to see his work in action.
5. Our hard-working localization teams added two new languages this year, Slovenian and Turkish, and revived two translations, Chinese (Simplified) and Danish that have been missing for several major releases. Sadly, a few languages didn’t make the jump to Camino 2, so if Camino is not currently available in your language, drop by the caminol10n project website, join the mailing list, and learn how you can help!

I think that about wraps up the high points of the year, in a little briefer fashion than years past. Thanks to everyone who was a part of the Camino community in 2009—developers, testers, localizers, and users—for a great year! We’re always looking for new contributors, so if you’d like to help make Camino even better, there are many ways you can help out in the coming year. In the meantime, enjoy Camino 2, Happy New Year, and welcome to 2010!

 

Smokey Ardisson: Reminder: Year 2010 Bug Contest

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at December 31, 2009 05:24 AM

This is a rather late reminder of the “pool” for the 2010 installment of the annual “we break our site for your browser when the new year rolls around” broken browser-sniffing contest (2010 Gecko browsers will be available in about 28 hours from now).

As I noted in January, the “three-peat” is Yahoo!’s to lose, although there was some talk last January of Yahoo! actually doing away with their date checking.

Get your picks in now for both the site/company that will break and the reporter of the Tech Evangelism bug who notices said site/company. (For the record, my picks are Yahoo! and Philippe Wittenbergh.) No actual prizes will be awarded, but both winners will be recognized in a future entry in this journal.

And remember: only you can prevent bad browser-sniffing!

 

Jon Hicks: Loo Copywriting

Posted by Jon Hicks at December 30, 2009 03:09 PM

While travelling this Christmas, I came upon some copywriting in a loo that I took umbridge with:

10-15 seconds and 80% less energy? Rather than 2 seconds and 0% energy? It’s really that last sarcastic last line that got to me though. It’s like the signs you get in hotels, claiming that they don’t want to wash your towels every day because they’re very concerned about the ‘environment’. ‘Well now’, I DID use my jeans, so that taught them! Fools!

Since when did we become Americans and start calling the toilet a ‘bathroom’? And surely ‘as nature intended’ would be actually be a large bush?

 

Nate Weaver (Wevah): Better late…

Posted by Nate Weaver (Wevah) at December 24, 2009 05:09 AM

 

Jon Hicks: Opera 10.5 pre-alpha next week

Posted by Jon Hicks at December 17, 2009 10:55 PM

Things have been a bit quieter around here lately, and here’s why. Everyone at Opera has been gearing up to release a sneaky peek of Opera 10.5 before Christmas comes! This isn’t even at an Alpha stage but it will show off, not necessarily new features (there are some though), but some rather big improvements in various areas. One of which has already been hinted at in the post on Choose Opera – speed.

Can’t say anymore yet, but it will out on Tuesday 22nd December so you’ll soon be able to play with it, and find out.

 

Jon Hicks: And Mary and Joseph had…

Posted by Jon Hicks at December 15, 2009 03:05 AM

…a giant woodlouse by the look of it! Quality clip art used on the programme cover of my daughter’s school Christmas play.

 

Jon Hicks: Boxee Box

Posted by Jon Hicks at December 13, 2009 04:08 AM

I’m more than just a few days late with this one, but I couldn’t let this pass without a mention! On Monday, Boxee unveiled their Boxee Box, a collaboration with D-Link to provide their own hardware solution. My initial reaction was that it looked like an award, and something that wouldn’t fit snugly into existing setups:

However, once I saw just how small it is…

…I changed my mind somewhat. In fact, the shape has very quickly grown on me, and in short, I really want one, despite already running Boxee via an Apple TV. (the restrictive supported formats, and size of, the PS3 are starting to get to me).

It’ll be interesting to see if it get’s a UK release and what the cost will be. I seem to recall the US price being $200, which should translate into roughly £120. That would be a price point that would beat the recently released WD TV Live into a cocked hat. A substantially better interface experience, and built in Wifi and SD card slot to boot.

I’m also rather interested in another new small solution that I recently discovered. Namely, the Acer Aspire Revo – a little nettop wonder that looks ideal as a Boxee Box:

If you go for the Linux version of these, they can be had for around £170, a complete bargain. It doesn’t have the industrial design finesse of a Jonathan Ive designed product, but I actually rather like it for that.

It’s funny, 3 years ago, I wouldn’t have considered a non-Apple solution for watching media on TV, but that’s changed a lot these days.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2009 Fall Catch-Up

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at December 08, 2009 06:40 AM

Looking back, it appears that the last regular Camino update was in early August, nearly four months ago! As you’ve no doubt noticed, Camino work did proceed, and if for some reason you hadn’t noticed, I’ll let you know that we shipped three security and stability updates (Camino 1.6.9, 1.6.10, and 2.0.1), one milestone (Camino 2.0 Beta 4), and one major release (Camino 2) since the last update. We also launched a new website redesign, brought the total number of languages in the multilingual edition of Camino 2.0.1 to 15 with the return of Polish, and have attempted to keep up with all the comments (overwhelmingly positive; thank you!) and bug reports we’ve gotten since the release of Camino 2—all the while battling illnesses and holidays. Herewith a brief update on the smaller details of the past week or so.

• Stuart Morgan handled the major Camino code changes for 2.0.1. He got Mac OS X 10.6 and the Help menu talking again in non-English localizations, and he hooked up support for collecting emails in the Camino Crash Reporter (once email addresses are available for authorized users of crash-stats, we’ll be able to contact you for more information about your crashes when we need your help).
• Christopher Henderson wrote a patch to make the about:config context menu start working, which is handy now that we officially acknowledge that about:config exists. He has also been working on some history-related changes and on implementing some missing bits in CocoaPromptService that the about:config context menu wants to use.
• Chris Lawson gave Christopher’s patch a review, and he also began working through our backlog of unconfirmed bugs, following up on those that haven’t seen activity for a while.
• Samuel Sidler and Philippe Wittenbergh have been polishing some of the slightly-rough edges of the new website design and doing their usual parts to help with bug triage.
• With the release work for 2.0.1 out of the way, I’ve also joined in on the website polishing and bug triaging. Mostly, though, I feel like the sprint to 2.0 and then 2.0.1 is finally done, so I can take a moment and breathe.

That’s it for now; we’re slowly getting back in gear for the road to Camino 2.1, but the number of exciting changes will probably be light until after the new year.

 

Caminol10n: Current release: Camino 2.0.1

Posted by Caminol10n at December 06, 2009 12:26 AM

The most recent Camino release is version 2.0.1 (Universal Binary, for Intel, PowerPC, needs Mac OS X 10.4 or higher). Camino 2.0.1 multilingual contains: Chinese (Simplified), Danish, Dutch, English (US), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. Camino 2.0 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 2.0.1 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at December 04, 2009 09:00 PM

 

Caminol10n: Camino 2.0.1 l10n status

Posted by Caminol10n at November 29, 2009 10:18 PM

Release notes can be found at Bug 530177 (not finalized, but can be worked on). See the full article for the usual status matrix. There is an additional string to translate in Frameworks/Breakpad.framework/Versions/A/Resources/crash_report_sender.app/Contents/Resources/[lang].lproj/Localizable.strings: Bug 529989 comment #3.

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.

read more

 

Jon Hicks: Netmag article on Icon Design

Posted by Jon Hicks at November 25, 2009 04:27 PM

This month’s .net magazine (#196 December) features my article ‘Design the perfect icon’. focussing on icon design for websites, rather than for software. It expands on the talk I gave at @media earlier this year Icons for Interaction

This is my first really big magazine article that I’ve written, and found 5500 words much harder than I thought, and probably won’t be writing another one in a hurry! However, I’m really pleased with result, and it’s given me an idea of how much harder it would be to write a book.

 

Camino Blog: Help make a great Mac browser!

Posted by Camino Blog at November 22, 2009 11:15 PM

 

Camino Blog: Update on Camino 2 crashes

Posted by Camino Blog at November 22, 2009 11:15 PM

 

Mike Pinkerton: Camino 2.0 Released!

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at November 19, 2009 12:15 AM

I am very proud to announce today's release of Camino 2.0, available for download from our website. This release represents the culmination of over a year of hard work by our developers, testers, and localizers and easily surpasses the high quality bar we have set in past releases.

I want to stress that this is a product of our community, including our users, who provided valuable bug reports and feedback along the way. I am constantly impressed with the community's enthusiasm for the project and the care and thought put into every feature. They should be proud of this product and their contributions to it. I think it says a lot about the community that an open source project can have such high quality and attention to detail. Remember, none of these folks are getting paid. This is solely a labor of love.

I won't spend a lot of time listing features, since you can easily see them on the website, but many of the changes are under the hood. We're using a much more up to date version of Gecko (though not the latest for various reasons), and that will improve web page rendering and compatibility significantly from previous versions. If you find no other reason to upgrade, do it for the new Gecko.

Give it a spin, I'm sure you'll enjoy it!

 

Smokey Ardisson: ☢ alert

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at November 19, 2009 12:05 AM

If you’re reading this, it means that yet another major version of Camino is now in the wild. Today we released Camino 2 (codenamed ☢, because our first choice of “kittens” didn’t have a Unicode glyph) after over a year in development. There are a number of major architectural changes under the hood that should make your overall browsing experience much better, and on top of that we’ve added a number of exciting new features. It has, once again, been a long(er-than-expected) journey, but we’re very proud of all the work we’ve put into Camino 2 and are pleased to offer you a new stable release.

The road to Camino 2 began in April of 2008 when we wrapped up work on Camino 1.6, although we had been performing architectural maintenance and related work to keep up with Gecko 1.9 changes since late 2007 (and some of the changes in Gecko itself were made all the way back in 2005, after the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH was cut on August 12, 2005). Over the last year and a half, we’ve fixed more than 450 “bugs” (problems or new features), and 16 different people contributed patches for this release (Stuart Morgan again led the way with 119 fixes). Sean Murphy implemented three major features this release (tab dragging, phishing and malware protection, and rewritten Full Keyboard Access support in the browser window), and Christopher Henderson and Ilya Sherman showed up to implement full content zoom and Growl notifications for downloads, respectively, and stuck around to fix over four dozen other bugs between them. Big thanks also to the one-third of that list of patch contributors who aren’t regular Camino developers; every little fix helps make Camino a better browser.

In some ways Camino 2 isn’t the revolutionary release we hoped it would be when we wrapped up Camino 1.6, but it’s still a vast improvement over Camino 1.6 and a triumph for an all-volunteer, all-free-time development team in today’s world of corporate-sponsored browsers.

Thanks to our hard-working localization teams, Camino 2 is available today in US English and 13 other languages, with Polish expected to join that list as soon as our Polish localizer’s Mac is repaired. Sadly, we had a few languages that shipped in Camino 1.6 disappear on us, so if your language is missing, please stop by the caminol10n mailing list and see how you can help bring these localizations back. (As I mentioned earlier this year, the work doesn’t require much specialized computer/software knowledge; you and a friend can bring Camino to thousands of users in your language! For Camino 2, new contributors successfully revived the Danish localization, which was in Camino 1.0 but disappeared from Camino 1.5.)

This year I again went to bed the night before release while fearless webmaster Samuel Sidler stayed up putting the finishing touches on the home page, the Features page, and implementing the new website design from the folks at Clearleft. One of these years both Sam and I are going to get a full night’s sleep before a major release, but this was not to be that year. Aside from a few things here and there, it seems like the website and webserver bits went more smoothly this release than with 1.6.

What’s next? Those of us who have been working on the website and release details for the past month or so are going to take a little rest. Parts of the development team, which wrapped up development with a late-October push, are already starting to work on new features for Camino 2.1. Nightly builds already include Dan Weber’s 2009 Summer of Code work on location bar autocomplete, and we have some early plans for other features in Camino 2.1 (we’re always looking for contributors, so if you’re interested in helping make a great Mac browser, stop by the Contribute page or find us on irc).

In the meantime, enjoy Camino 2.0 and let us know what you think!

 

Camino Blog: Camino 2.0 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at November 18, 2009 10:00 PM

 

Caminol10n: Camino 2.0 is here!

Posted by Caminol10n at November 18, 2009 01:39 AM

I'd like all the people active on this website and on the CaminoL10n mailing-list to raise a glass and toast to Camino 2!
You can find all the release details at http://caminobrowser.org but here I want to praise the CaminoL10n contributors, who did a terrific job in handling this major release.

read more

 

Smokey Ardisson: Mac OS X 10.6.2, your fonts, and launching Camino 2

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at November 17, 2009 05:34 AM

Many of you might have noticed that, after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.2, Camino 2.0b4, Camino 2.0rc1, or Camino 2.0.1pre/2.1a1pre nightly builds have started crashing on launch or shortly after launch, perhaps as the first page was loading. (Some of you may have noticed these crashes ever since Mac OS X 10.6 arrived, but the font changes in Mac OS X 10.6.2 seem to have made the crashes much more widespread.) You might even be one of the people who have submitted one of these crash reports.

I have some good news and some bad news about these crashes. The good news is that we’ve been looking at the problem for a while now, and Mozilla’s font gurus, John Daggett and Jonathan Kew have a couple of theories about the cause of the crashes (probably Mac OS X font cache corruption, yay! ). In addition, we generally know how individuals can “fix” the cause of the crashes on their own Macs.

The bad news is that the individual “fix” so effective that we aren’t currently in contact with anyone who is still experiencing this problem, and reversing the “fix” doesn’t cause the crash to reappear. This makes it much more difficult to determine what exactly is wrong and to find the best way to fix the Mozilla code to make whatever the underlying problem is not crash Camino, now or in the future, for everyone.

If you’re currently experiencing this crash, we could use your help. There are questions in need of some answers, and we’ll probably be able to generate some test builds (to log additional information and eventually to test proposed fixes) soon. Please comment in bug 514114 if you’re seeing this crash. (If you can’t get Camino to launch in order to check about:crashes for your crash ids, you can open the Camino inside the Breakpad folder inside the Library folder in your users’s Home folder and look for files with names in the format of CrashID=bp-0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108.dmp; paste the bp-0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108 part into the search field on crash-stats to find your report.)

Finally, if you just want to make the problem go away and can’t help us track down the cause of the crash, you should open Font Book, check for and resolve any duplicate fonts (in the Edit menu), and validate all of your fonts, removing any ones that Font Book flags as having problems (in the File menu). You may also need to restart your Mac after removing duplicate and corrupted fonts.

Thanks for your help investigating this crash; we hope we’ll soon be able to make Camino stop crashing for everyone who is, or will be, experiencing this problem on Mac OS X 10.6.

Update (2009-11-17): John came up with a patch that should fix the crash, and it was reviewed and approved this evening. The fix should appear in tomorrow’s (2009-11-18) Camino 2.0.1pre, 2.1a1pre, and Firefox 3.0.16pre nightly builds.

 

Nate Weaver (Wevah): Paparazzi! and Flash capture

Posted by Nate Weaver (Wevah) at November 14, 2009 12:44 AM

 

Smokey Ardisson: Crash Reporting Redux

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at November 09, 2009 06:58 AM

As we move ever-closer to the release of Camino 2, I wanted to revisit the subject of crash reporting. A few years ago, I wrote about crash reporting and how to help fight crashes with Talkback, our decrepit crash-reporting system from the early years of this century. I realized a few months ago that if you started using Camino around or after the release of Camino 1.0, there’s a good chance you’ve never seen Talkback, since part of its decrepit nature was its PPC-only binary, and Camino 1.0 coincided with the beginning of the transition to Intel-based Macs. Now that Camino 2 includes modern crash reporting based on Google Breakpad (tip o’ the hat to mento for bootstrapping modern open-source crash reporting), users with Intel Macs may be experiencing Camino crash reporting for the first time, so it’s a good time to revisit what you should do to help us find and fix crashing bugs.

Like Talkback before it, the Breakpad-based Camino Crash Reporter collects data about your crash and, when you agree, sends the data to Mozilla servers, where we (the Camino team) get to see the information in aggregate (and non-personal information in individual crash incidents).

How crash reporting works in Camino 2

If Camino crashes, the Camino Crash Reporter pops up and asks you to add a comment and then to report the crash:

When you restart Camino, you can visit about:crashes to find the report ID for the crash you just experienced and even see the processed report.

The about:crashes page contains a list of report IDs for crash reports you’ve submitted successfully to Mozilla’s crash collection servers. If you click on the report ID, you can see the processed report for your crash. Not all reports are processed immediately, so you may see a “processing” screen at first:

Once processing is complete, you can see the full report for your incident on crash-stats:

How you can improve the chances of your crash being fixed (and how to improve your crash report)

We hope that you’ll never have to use the new crash reporting in Camino 2, but if you do, following these simple steps will make your report as useful as possible and improve the chances of the crash you experienced getting fixed.

When you experience a crash, the most important thing you can do is to allow the Camino Crash Reporter to submit your report to us. If we don’t know a crash is happening, there is a zero percent chance that we will be able to fix it (if you’re happy seeing the same crash over and over, then don’t feel the need to submit a crash report ). Many times we’re able to discover and fix crashes just from the aggregate data generated from users submitting crash reports to us.

Second, when you submit your report, please add a comment! We know that crashing is frustrating and disrupting, and it is tempting to just press Submit (or even Cancel) and get back to what you were doing. However, while the computer-generated data that is submitted in the crash report tells us “what” is happening, it often is insufficient to allow us to fix the problem, and comments can help bridge that gap. When you add a comment, please be reasonably descriptive when telling us what actions you might have performed just before Camino crashed. As you can see in the sample crash above, I listed a number of specific steps that I performed just before Camino crashed.

In addition to providing a comment, if you are comfortable providing the URL you were viewing when Camino crashed (and you know, or can look up in History, what that URL was), include it in your comment, too. While Camino attempts to collect the URL you were on when Camino crashed, the URL is not displayed with your crash report for privacy reasons and is not readily available to anyone. As I mentioned several years ago, a good comment and a URL can be the difference between a frustrating crash and a fix. Unfortunately, only a few reports out of every hundred currently include a comment, so there are many opportunities to understand and fix crashes that are currently being lost.

Finally, if you experience what you think might be the same crash, over and over—either whenever you visit a certain site you crash, or performing the same series of actions on a variety of sites leads to a crash—please file a bug. While aggregate crash data can help us discover crashes, especially those that don’t otherwise seem to have a pattern, this data is no substitute for a bug report from someone who is actually seeing the crash frequently. Sometimes specific crashes can still get lost in aggregate data, and filing a bug report on a crash that’s plaguing you can bring it to our attention.

When you file your bug report, please be sure to include the report IDs of incidents of this crash. To get the report ID, type about:crashes in Camino’s location bar and press Return. Camino will display a list of crash reports you have submitted and their corresponding report IDs (a long string of letters and numbers). Copy the crash report ID corresponding to the crash you are reporting and paste the ID into your bug report, adding bp- to the beginning of the pasted string. For example, a crash report id of 0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108 should become bp-0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108 in your bug report, and Bugzilla will then link that string to your crash report. (Please do not paste entire crash reports into the “Comments” field of the bug report.) Then, please be willing to answer questions and perform some tests as we work to understand and fix the crash you’ve reported in the bug.

Finally, when filing a bug or making a comment in a crash report, please don’t berate us. We know you’re upset that Camino crashed on you, and we’re just as upset, but yelling at us doesn’t help. Also, since at least one-third of crashes we see are caused by third-party software (for example, browser plug-ins, third-party hacks, or even fragile parts of Mac OS X itself), you might be yelling at the wrong party anyway.

In summary:

1. Any crash report you submit is better than no report at all, so please always allow Camino Crash Reporter to do its job.
2. The more information you provide in your crash report (comment or URL), the more useful your report is to the developers.
3. For crashes you can reproduce or see over and over, reports filed with Camino Crash Reporter are no substitute for an actual bug report (with crash report IDs).
4. Please be polite and civil in your comments and bug reports; we’re all working towards the same goal here (Camino not crashing on you).

All of which is a long way of saying “you could be the key to fixing the crash that is annoying you.”

Please enjoy Camino 2 (due out “real soon now”), and don’t fear the Camino Crash Reporter; it’s only trying to help.

 

Jon Hicks: Icons of the screen icon - Wired UK

Posted by Jon Hicks at November 06, 2009 04:16 PM

I got a wee mention in Decembers’ UK Edition of WIRED magazine, in a section called ‘Icons of the Screen Icon’. Nice!

 

Jon Hicks: The Kraken Media Kit

Posted by Jon Hicks at November 04, 2009 04:41 AM

TheDieline.com (a packaging blog you really should subscribe to) have lustworthy photos of the special media kit sent to promote Kraken black spiced rum.

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Jon Hicks: Using Evernote as a Design Scrapbook

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 31, 2009 03:18 AM

I’ve used iPhoto, Littlesnapper, a combination of Leap and Dropbox, but of late, I’ve reverted to using Evernote as my collection point for design scraps.

The Desktop > Web > iPhone ecosystem is lovely. I have my design collection everywhere I go (also possible with the dropbox method I used to use, but there’s no way of tagging on the iPhone). The desktop client collects images and websites (as PDFs), and the iPhone client collects snapshots of sketches, camera photos and images saved from mobile Safari. Then the two ‘collectors’ get synced together to become one big collection:

Some more reasons why Evernote has struck a chord with me are:

• I’m not restricted to single images, I can add PDFs, group images together (as a note), and add text notes.
• I love the widescreen layout (above) where I can view thumbnails, followed a large preview of the selected item on the right – no need for anymore clicks or different screens to view it
• Importing content is so easy. The context menu in Safari offers ‘Add Image to Evernote’ and ‘Add Page to Evernote as PDF’. The latter gives me a complete web page (not a print stylesheet version), and any links are still active (not so with a PNG). The former works so nicely compared to some apps that get confused by links around images (cough, Littlesnapper).
• I’ve been experimenting with using a shared notebook to show moodboards/collected reference, and collaborate with clients, and this has so far gone OK. Would be even better if it was possible to layout images in a less linear way, and resize them, but that’s pushing the remit of Evernote.
• I find that I can often remember text within an image (especially as I often save a lot of found typography). Evernote’s OCR technology means I can find these images very quickly, and is often faster than tagging:

I do tag as well, usually marking content type, dominant colours and sometimes a possible project reference and a star rating. I’ve also started using it for things like a Cheese Diary, where I take a snap of the the cheese label, to store it for later reference:

There are still some negative points about Evernote:

• My main bugbear from last year still stands: Evernote makes it really easy to get all sorts of content in, but it still makes it tricky to get it out again in it’s original form. In particular multiple images can’t be exported easily – at least not without an Evernote branded border. It’s my data Evernote, not yours, and I resent the enforced advertising, especially with premium account. The ‘best’ way to do this is to export as HTML, and then fish out the images from the various ‘resources’ folders. Or drag and drop them individually.
• You can’t select multiple items and add new tags. The only way currently is to drag them to an existing tag in the sidebar, which isn’t intuitive, or easy (depending on how many tags you have).
• I would love to be able to restrict my view on the iPhone to a particular notebook.

Still, I love and use it despite these niggles, mainly because a lot of the things that niggled me last year (like thumbnails of images with loads of whitespace) have been fixed. Evernote development is ongoing and always improving, and I feel it’s a system I can put my trust in.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Danish is coming (Turkish, too)

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at October 29, 2009 06:17 AM

Taking another break from working on tasks for the Camino 2 release, I wanted to write a little bit about our amazing team of localizers tonight. As if someone was reading my mind, Christopher Henderson showed us this tweet he came across tonight.

Camino 2 is likely going to ship in English and 13 other languages (attentive readers will note that this is down by two from the number of languages in Camino 1.6.10, but still three more than shipped in the initial Camino 1.6 release), all translated by our volunteer localizers from the caminol10n project. New to Camino 2 will be Danish (which last appeared in the Camino 1.0 series) and Turkish, making its debut as a Camino localization.

The story of Danish in Camino 2 is particularly worth telling. At the end of September, about two weeks after we released Camino 2.0 Beta 4, Danish Camino user Allan Nyholm Nielsen posted a message in the Camino discussion forum asking why Camino 1.6 was localized in Swedish and Norwegian but not Danish, and whether Camino 2 would include a Danish translation. A member of the Camino development team replied that our localizations are all produced by volunteers and that while there had been a Danish localization in Camino 1.0.x and some work had been done for Camino 1.5, the leader of that team disappeared and the translation for 1.5 was never finished. We also pointed Allan to the caminol10n project (and to another Danish Camino user on the forum, David Munch, who could possibly help) and urged him to think about reviving the Danish translation.

The very next day, Allan had posted to the caminol10n mailing list (and back in the Camino discussion forum) stating that he had signed up and had gotten started. Two weeks after that, Allan posted a message stating that he had essentially completed the translation of Camino 2 into Danish, and, after a week of polishing the translation, he reported he had the complete translation ready.

In three weeks, we went from having no Danish translation and only an interested user who had never done any Mac OS X application localization to having a complete, peer-reviewed Danish localization for Camino 2.0! Congratulations to Allan and David on this achievement.

If you would like to see Camino in your language, you too can make it a reality. While not every language has a localization of an older version of Camino available to jump-start the process (there are a dozen languages that have shipped in past Camino versions that will not be in Camino 2.0, however), and while some teams take longer to complete a translation than others, you can still get started today and perhaps be ready to include your language in Camino 2.0.1 or 2.0.2. There are a few, relatively simple, specialized tools to learn, but for the most part all you need to know is English and your own language. There might even be other speakers of your language already interested in helping, and the existing Camino translators are knowledgeable and can help you get started with the tools.

The Danish experience is not an isolated case, either; during the Camino 1.6.x series, we added three new languages, and one of them was complete in a matter of weeks (one took a month or so, and the third we learned about only when it was already complete).

If your language is already included in Camino, be sure to thank the members of your language’s translation team and ask them if there is any way you can help; existing teams are usually looking for new members, too, to help spread the workload.

Finally, it is with sadness that I report that Catalan, Czech, Polish, and Portuguese (pt-BR) will be missing from Camino 2.0, so if you are a Camino user who speaks one of those languages, now is the time for you to get involved. Register with the caminol10n project, join the mailing list, and bring your language back to Camino.

 

Smokey Ardisson: The Big 2

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at October 27, 2009 07:34 AM

Just a very brief post here tonight, to come up for air and to mark an occasion; I have a large backlog of things to write about in the near future, and also a lot more work to do.

I realized tonight that in the year that I have been handling the “build” side of Camino’s build and release process (at first sharing duties with the illustrious Mark Mentovai, and then on my own), I’ve produced builds for a bunch of releases: five Camino 2 milestones and five Camino 1.6.x security and stability releases (with at least one respin in the mix). However, I had never been responsible for the build process for a major release, for the new version that’s all shiny, the culmination of the entire team’s hard work, and the build that’s tested and reviewed by the world. Since 2006 (and Camino 1.0), Mark had always handled that. Tonight, though, I felt the weight of tagging on my shoulders.

Which is a long, rambling, nostalgic way of saying that we now have a Camino 2 release candidate (note to the press and other interested parties: release candidate; Camino 2 is not out yet) for our community to hammer on, with special thanks to Stuart Morgan for fixing a dozen or so of our blockers and wanted/pseudo-blockers in the past two weeks and to Mark for the ninetieth-minute superreview on the very last patch.

I’ll have more to say about Camino 2 in the coming days, and the release will be here before you know it, but for now I’m just going to mark this milestone, point everyone to the usual places, take off my build engineer’s cap, and go to sleep.

 

Jon Hicks: Lettering - a set on Flickr

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 26, 2009 09:58 PM

A tasty Flickr set of found typography – focussing on British/London Underground/Transport styles., which of course is right up my street.

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Jon Hicks: How to be a Creative Sponge 2

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 24, 2009 03:15 PM

This week I had the great pleasure of speaking at the 3rd Web Developer Conference in Bristol, along with Elliot Jay Stocks, Sarah Parmenter and Dan Donald.

It was only a one-day conference, but I had a whale of time, meeting new folks like Elliot Kember (who shone on the 2 panels he attended), Oliver Ker and the legendary Jon Tan, with whom I’ve had emails and chat but never met in person. I also got to catch up with Ben Hostler, the creative director of Bristol-based agency Beef, who I haven’t seen since I was at Middle School with him… 24 years ago!

The talk I gave was an update of one I gave at @media 2007, ‘How to be a Creative Sponge’. Back then, Flickr was really the only option for sharing design collections online, but a lot has changed since then. We’re now spoilt for choice, but I explained my current system of choice – Evernote. Like Fireworks, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it in the past, but earlier criticisms have been fixed in recent updates. In particular, I’m finding that I can ofter remember text in an image that I’ve saved, so the OCR technology in Evernote makes it easy for me to find items I’ve collected. I would even say it was more effective than a tag.

Download the slides as PDF (27.8mb). I don’t tend to write presenters notes, so I’ve added these afterwards to try and help it make sense. All links mentioned in my talk are available on Delicious under the sponge tag.

I came away with a really good feeling about Bristol – it has a great developer/designer community, in a city that feels friendly and very un-intimidating.

I also came away with a realisation that there is a whole book’s worth of material in ‘Malarkey’s Prank Calls’. Everyone I met seemed to have at least one experience of that delight to share ;)

 

Jon Hicks: Hicks' Halloween Challenge

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 22, 2009 07:03 PM

Create a spooky Speed Dial background (1200×600 pixels and save it as JPG or PNG), and I’ll pick my favourite for a special Halloween edition of Opera! See this post on My Opera for details of how to enter!

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Jon Hicks: Whitelines + Behance Dot Grid Book

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 19, 2009 01:44 AM

In Squared I mentioned that I’d ordered both a Whitelines pad, and the Behance Dot Grid book to try out. After trying them both for a few days, I thought I’d just post a few words about them.

First of all, the Dot Grid Book. The packaging was sublime (see my photoset on Flickr), and the book itself has a rubberised card cover, wiro-bound, with good strong stock inside. The rubbery cover freaked some people out that I showed it to, and has the habit of collecting fluff!

There’s no show-through using black ink (maybe just the very, very slightest hint, but not enough to be a problem). The dots work quite well, and provide a lot of freedom. It’s also US letter sized, which is a change from A4. The only downsides are the that the wiro-bound spine gets snarled up (I’ve heard this from others, and experienced it already) and they felt the need to slap their logo on every page, which is a shame. Overall, a good idea, but really rather expensive for what it is (don’t faint -£14!). The more costly and elite a notebook is, the less I feel like using it. Too much pressure! I’ll enjoy using it, but I probably won’t be back for another one.

I found I preferred the Whitelines layout the most. The grid lines are still there, but the use of negative-space whitelines is just enough to draw by, without being too noticeable. The tinting drops out when copying, and every page is logo free! The binding was very good, but the only drawback was the weight of the paper. It’s fairly light compared the Dot Grid Book, and you definitely get show-through. On the A4 perfect bound pad that I bought that’s not a huge problem. It’s not nearly as expensive as the Grid Book, and feels OK to leave one side blank.

Looking over their product lines, my ideal Whitelines notebook doesn’t exist yet. I need one with a heavier no-show-through-paper, perfect bound with similar dimensions as my Moleskine sketchbook (21 × 13.2 × 2 cm). If by any chance the Swedish gods of negative space are listening -any chance of it?

 

Jon Hicks: Marshall Alexander - Paper Engineer

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 18, 2009 12:08 AM

Marshall Alexander creates wonderful one-piece paper toys, available as free PDF downloads for you to make, including the Max figure (right) having a wild rumpus!

Growing up in the seventies and eighties, my personal work is heavily inspired by retro design, videogames, movies, bright plastic toys and TV cartoons. Most of this work can be downloaded for free from my site. So get your knives and glue out, download some of the models and start building. Enjoy!

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Jon Hicks: Holey Moley! Culture Vulture Interview

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 17, 2009 11:59 PM

Culture Vulture, who instigated the Moleskine Project I participated in a few months ago, have published a short interview with me. I get asked a question I’ve been waiting for -“What’s your favourite building?”

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Jon Hicks: Squared

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 13, 2009 09:14 PM

My name is Jon Hicks, and I’m a stationery fetishist. I’m sure many of you are too. I love the design, feel, and most of all, smell of it. Some of my earliest and happiest memories are of walking into WHSmiths and smelling the pencils and paper, looking at the pads and notebooks (and being allowed to buy a new one!). Even in an age when my work is solely screen-based, I still lust after the senses-satisfying joy of new stationery.

Just recently, I’ve started using graph paper pads again, particularly for sketching interface wireframes. I’ve tried plain paper, but I’m one of those people that can’t draw a freehand straight line to save their life. Then the wonkiness of the line just becomes a distraction.

I’d been using a Paperchase notebook, which had a very faint dotted line squared paper, but it was only a few sheets amongst a variety of other types. It was ideal, but Paperchase don’t make a pad or notebook of just this type anymore, so after fruitless local searching and googling, I asked for Twitter feedback on a suitable alternative. The response was fantastic, and here are the three best options.

The Original Designers Workbook (Available from the Design Museum Shop, although mostly out of stock at the moment) fits the criteria, as subtle graph paper pad:

Here’s a sample of it’s grid:

The most-suggested option by far was the Behance dot grid book (available in the UK from Strawberry and Cream):

Best of all though looks like the Swedish Whitelines series, as suggested by David Hughes (available from Foyles in London, Amazon and Papernation in the UK).

Rather than use the traditional lined approach, it uses the negative space, creating a less destructive white lined grid:

I should also mention the lovely Konigi Wireframe Pad, which also looked ideal, but sadly is US delivery only. Yes, I can always get someone in the US to send it on for me, but on principle I prefer not to. They offer a great range of free PDF templates that you print off, but that’s not a economical solution in the long term. Fine for the odd sheet here and there. Also, Inkjet prints just don’t have that lustfulness about them in the way new stationery does.

So, I’ve ordered both the Behance Dot book and a Whitelines notebook to try them both out!

 

Smokey Ardisson: Happy Tabs Day

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at October 08, 2009 08:25 PM

Today’s Camino 2 nightly builds enable tabs by default; that is, ⌘-clicking a link now opens that link in a new tab rather than a new window. After all, we’ve been adding all sorts of new tab-related features since Camino 1.0 (and especially over the past few releases)—more tabs per window, better overflow tab management, the ability to redirect links that want to open new windows into new tabs (“single-window mode”), better AppleScript access to tabs, a scrolling tab bar, the ability to rearrange tabs by drag and drop, and tab overview (“Tabsposé”)—so with all this development focus, it was high time that tabbed browsing became the default browsing mode in Camino.¹

Moreover, as many other browsers have adopted tabbed browsing as the default mode of operation, users expect it to “just work” and potential switchers are sometimes confused by the fact that they have to open Preferences to allow ⌘-clicks to create new tabs. Users who prefer that ⌘-click open links in new windows are no doubt going to be a bit disappointed, but we believe this change benefits the majority of our users and potential users. If you’re strictly a window user, please give the new setting a try for a little bit; your may find your feelings have changed as tabbed browsing has become more powerful (I can still remember years ago swearing I’d never use tabs, but here I am [ab]using them). However, if tabs still aren’t for you, it’s easy to disable this setting by opening the Tabs pane of Camino’s Preferences and unchecking “Links opened with ⌘-click.”

As a brief house-keeping note, you may have noticed a lack of regular Camino development updates here over the past couple of months; August was an extraordinarily busy month for me, and September was occupied by the release process for Camino 2.0 Beta 4 and Camino 1.6.10. Fear not, however; Camino development has continued to make great progress, and we’re in the final stretch to Camino 2! I can’t promise when I’ll be able to return to regular posting of updates, but rest assured we are working steadily—and in the meantime, join us in having a Happy Tabs Day!

        

¹ Amazingly, Camino isn’t the last Mac browser to default to ⌘-click opening links in new tabs; of the long-standing Mac browsers, both iCab and SeaMonkey still default to ⌘-click opening new windows. ↩

 

Jon Hicks: New Dr Who Logo

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 06, 2009 02:22 PM

I never liked the 2005-2009 Doctor Who logo. It looked too much like ‘Farscape’ to my eyes, but this, this I like. A lot. Somehow, it feels very retro, as if it’s the logo that could’ve been at some point in it’s early past. In particular, I’m a big fan of the way it works as a ‘DW’ Tardis logomark:

It’s absolutely the right time to do this. New production team, companion, and of course, Doctor.

 

Caminol10n: ¿Algún voluntario para traducir las notas de la versión de Camino 2.0?

Posted by Caminol10n at October 05, 2009 11:13 PM

He terminado de traducir la interfaz de usuario de Camino 2 y la he enviado a varios revisores. Smokey Ardisson me ha comentado que las ReleaseNotes todavía no están listas para traducirse a otros idiomas. Yo no voy a poder trabajar en ellas desde el día 13 al 30 de octubre. ¿Hay algún voluntario que se anime a hacer la traducción al español si no estuviesen listas antes del día 13 y Marcello las necesitase antes de final de mes? Si alguien se anima, yo puedo enviarle una memoria de traducción de todas las ReleaseNotes que se han traducido desde Camino 1.2.

 

Jon Hicks: Shaping the City

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 05, 2009 03:30 AM

If you’ve got 4 minutes spare, treat yourself to this video of printmaker Paul Catherall explaining how he produced the beautiful linocut prints that were commissioned by Transport for London under the title “A new view of London”.

The posters are available in the London Transport Museum Shop.

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Jon Hicks: Neil Poulton Speakers

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 02, 2009 08:24 PM

I don’t want this to turn into one of those ‘product blogs’ (you know “check out this cutter for making Helvetica letters out of potatoes”) but I wanted to share these mighty fine Lacie USB Speakers. There’s something very pleasing about their boldness and stark simplicity.

These aren’t the first speakers Neil Poulton has designed for Lacie though, they’re very much the lovechild of his previous firewire speakers, shaped like an ocean liner funnel:

What was special about these was that they didn’t need a power supply, unlike the new USB ones – they took all the power they needed from the firewire connection.

Update – now that proper details have emerged these do indeed run from USB or mains power, so yay! Thanks commenters!

 

Jon Hicks: A big-assed post about Fireworks

Posted by Jon Hicks at October 01, 2009 05:06 AM

This is a post about Fireworks. Not about Photoshop, Illustrator and which is ‘best’. This is about a frustrated love hate relationship.

I love Fireworks.

It’s been my tool of choice for a rather long time. In the previous year of working for Opera, I’ve used it more than any other app. Whether I’ve been working on interactive wireframes, UI mockups, icons or final production artwork, Fireworks is the one that I go to.

When people ask why I don’t use Illustrator or Photoshop I sometimes find it hard to articulate precisely why. Illustrator is undoubtedly best for print/high-res illustrations and logos, while Photoshop is the first choice for manipulating photos, especially for print. Each have some tools from the other, but neither is intended for creating screen graphics with vector and bitmap tools in the way that Fireworks is.

It loves pixels. Photoshop and Illustrator only ‘do’ pixels when they’re coerced, and by golly do they take persuasion sometimes. For example, in Illustrator, why does a 1 pixel stroke on a pixel perfect box, placed on pixel perfect co-ordinates have sub-pixels on the top edge? Why do I have to make the stroke 0.9px instead of 1px just to get a crisp 1px edge?

This is surely the most basic of things to get right? Photoshop can do vectors and some of what Fireworks can – it just makes it harder to do it.

What’s so great about Fireworks…

Pixel-snapping vector tools aside, it’s most useful feature (that still isn’t present in anything else I’ve tried) is multiple Pages and States. Why have 45 separate files for a set of icons, when I can have one file that will export to 45 individual files? Let’s say all these icons have the same background, like a typical OS X toolbar button, and you notice a glitch. To update all those files would be tedious, but because it’s in Fireworks on a shared layer (or Master Page) one update is all that is needed. Master Pages in particular come in handy with site designs, as each page can be a different size and canvas colour.

Here’s a sample working file of Opera Unite icons:

It contains five different pages (one for each pixel resolution) and 10 icons per page, each on a different ‘state’. 50 icons, one file, one export. I’ve attempted replicating this functionality with layers, layer comps and multiple artboards, but they don’t come close.

Every time I’ve worked on wireframes and mockups, I’ve felt blessed that I’ve got symbols. Anyone that’s used Flash will know what a symbol library is, but for those that haven’t, think of them like this: Reusable content. Take the example of a form button in a site design. I can create a button symbol, specify how that graphic can be resized (with 9 slice guides), and place it anywhere in my document. Again, updating and editing is a do-once, update every instance affair.

It’s not all roses though.

I also hate Fireworks.

With a growing passion. With each update we get more tools and features that I care nothing for – Adobe Air, Bridge and Flex integration and CSS export. Worst of all it’s become remarkably unstable, particularly under Snow Leopard. It crashes, even when you don’t look at it funny.

I use it because it’s the best there is, but there are a lot of holes that need filling for me:

• Auto-activating fonts. Whether this is down to Adobe or the developers of Font Managers I’m not sure. To get a newly activated font to show up, you need to restart Fireworks
• Export to Illustrator. Yes, this option exists, but it ignores gradients, transparency effects, and just about everything but the paths themselves. When I know that the artwork will be needed beyond screen use, I work in Illustrator from the outset, but there isn’t always that fore-warning.
• Placing items outside the canvas. A pasteboard area to place surplus artwork would make life a lot easier, and stop the ‘resizing the canvas cuts overlapping artwork’ pain.
• It’s taken to CS4 to get palettes that scroll with a scrollwheel, and even now, they don’t ALL do it
• In CS4, when using the ‘application frame’ you need to click inside the active document before commands like zoom work, otherwise it does nothing.

I really could go on, but there are also more general problems with the Adobe Creative suite:

• Expensive – not two ways about it, it costs a few bob, and it often feels like better performance/bug fixes have to be paid for. I upgraded to CS3, solely to have a suite that worked properly on an Intel Mac. It now feels like those CS2 days are here again with Snow Leopard.
• Bloated in feel: both with sluggish performance and barrel loads of features you never use. This can of course be entirely psychological.
• Keyboard shortcuts deviate from the OS X standard, and from each other. Command-H should always Hide the application, Command-1 should always show the the document at 100%.
• Installation: To reinstall CS4 recently took an hour, during which it also wants to take a big smelly dump in your Applications folder: Adobe Media Player, Adobe Drive, Adobe Bridge, Version Cue… STOP! Also – why make me close all my browsers?
• Licensing/activation process. I know this is an anti-piracy measure, but it actually makes a cracked version more appealing.
• Updating: Do I need to say anything here? It’s a dark land far, far away from the ease of Sparkle, where even the updater needs to update itself.
• Then there are those glitches with artefacts which have been creeping into Fireworks of late too. Blobs of pixels that aren’t really there, but show up because the screen hasn’t been redrawn correctly. Cumulative wasted hours trying to get rid of artwork that is a phantom.

Compare these gripes with an app like Opacity. It downloads quickly, you open it and it asks you if you want to place it inside the Applications folder – done! That’s installation. As for updating, it self-updates and lets you know what’s been changed. The least amount of friction, and you’re left with the feeling of being in control of what you’ve installed.

Now, at this point, I need to confess that I’m the worlds worst beta tester. I’ve been on Fireworks beta programmes before, but haven’t had much time to give feedback or bug reports. So it’s a bit rich of me to be whining on my blog when this is all feedback that should’ve been submitted.

The problem is, after submitting the 20th crash report of the day, I’ve lost faith that anyone ever sees them or acts upon them. Overall, it feels like Fireworks is at the point of no return – no hope of it ever being fixed or improved, only that it will get more bloated, buggy, non-native and expensive. A stable version will no doubt come, but we will have to pay for it in the form of CS5. Maybe it’s not the Fireworks team that’s the problem here, maybe it’s higher up at Adobe? Maybe it’s just my setup? I can’t tell.

The bottom line is: Fireworks was my favourite, cherished tool, and it’s unreliability and issues mean my daily workflow is badly disrupted.

So, my thoughts turn to competitors. I’m not the only one, others are fed up with Fireworks and are looking for something to use instead. John Gruber, using the analogy of Filemaker’s Bento app, hits the nail on the head:

Adobe shouldn’t scrap its existing software any more than FileMaker Inc. should scrap FileMaker. But where’s Adobe’s “Bento” for bitmap and vector image editing for the Mac? The Bentos in this space are coming from indie developers with apps like Acorn, Pixelmator, Lineform, and Opacity.”

For such a long time, there haven’t been any alternatives. Various apps have been born that compete with other Adobe Suite apps, like Lineform and VectorDesigner with Illustrator, and Pixelmator and Acorn with Photoshop. Nothing for Fireworks, and yet the need for screen graphics is surely growing daily? Not only with websites, but desktop software and mobile apps.

In the meantime, Twitter clients have become ten a penny and Omnigraffle has matured to become a truly great tool for multi-page wireframes.

Recently however, three potential alternative apps have surfaced: Drawit, Acorn 2 and Opacity. I’m going to be putting these apps through their paces, to see if they can be potential alternatives. That’s for another time though, as this post has gone on long enough!

However, initial trials are showing Opacity as the most thoroughly feature-filled contender, but with Acorn sporting undoubtedly the most thoughtful interface. Acorn also has the advantage in that it’s developer, Gus Mueller, is actively seeking feedback on how it can be more of a Fireworks competitor. Drawit also has a pleasing UI, but with some issues on rendering.

I’ll report back on these when I can!

 

Caminol10n: Current release: Camino 1.6.10

Posted by Caminol10n at September 29, 2009 10:53 PM

The most recent Camino release is version 1.6.10 (Universal Binary, for Intel, PowerPC, needs Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher).
Camino 1.6.10 multilingual contains: Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazillian), Norwegian, Russian, Slovenian, 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 1.6.10 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at September 29, 2009 09:00 PM

 

Jon Hicks: League Gothic

Posted by Jon Hicks at September 23, 2009 02:06 PM

The League of Moveable Type release the gorgeous open source font League Gothic, reminiscent of designers standard Trade Gothic. One for Jason in particular?

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