09.23.07
Posted in Camino at 6:04 pm by Smokey
It’s been a slow month so far in Camino-land, with the arrival of fall, the return of many of our student developers to campus, and all the adjustments those entail. However, it hasn’t been a period completely without progress.
Thursday Masayuki Nakano landed my patch for bug 299222 on the trunk, finally bringing sane font defaults for most langGroups (as Gecko refers to groups of languages and scripts). For years, setting the right fonts as the default font has been hampered by old, crufty font code from Mac OS 8.5 and assorted Carbon font bugs. (In fact, for some langGroups like Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai, we previously had to set the defaults to fonts that contained no glyphs for those languages(!) in order to make pages in those languages display properly. Talk about “hacking around bugs.” 
As you might imagine, this work-around caused no end of confusion for many users.)
With the new graphics (Cairo and Thebes) and text layout code using modern Mac OS X functions, and lots of font-wrangling work by Masayuki and others, it finally is possible to set sane font defaults for these langGroups and to provide default fonts for many languages spoken in India (whose scripts were not rendered properly prior to this). It took only two years and three months, but going forward Gecko-based applications should finally be useable on Mac OS X for users the world over, and I’m proud to have done a small part of the work to enable this great advance.
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09.07.07
Posted in Camino, Life at 2:01 am by Smokey
Jesse today filed his 3000th Mozilla bug today. He’s been busy!
By contrast; I have a long way to go. I filed my 511th bug tonight (I wasn’t paying attention to the fact I was approaching a milestone), just two days shy of three years with Camino.
When Josh filed his 100th bug back in January of 2006, I had filed 148, so in the past year-and-two-thirds, I’ve slightly improved the pace over the first year-and-a-third (if my math skills hold up, that is). I see that I’ve also recently fixed my 100th bug, which blows my mind, given that I’m not a coder. There are few more I need to go fix 
once I get a nice block of time to sit down and work on them….
What’s important is the filing and fixing, not the numbers, but however you choose to look at it, working with bugs helps make Camino a better browser for everyone, and I’m proud to be a part of that effort.
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09.04.07
Posted in Camino at 12:13 am by Smokey
This weekend Bug 390846 - Camino AppleScript Support: Bookmarks landed. This code is phase 2 of Peter’s three-phase project to improve Camino’s AppleScript support this summer. As always when something new lands, I like to spend some time playing with the feature. The funny thing about AppleScript, if you’ve never spent any time with it, is that AppleScript is almost, but not quite, English (see the “Interpolation” section of this John Gruber article for more about this). As a consequence, learning to script a given app or a given feature sometimes requires a bit of trial and error; it’s definitely something you learn.
In spite of what Gruber says about AppleScript, I’ve always been fond of it because it’s really the only computer language I’ve been able to understand enough of in a short enough time to do something useful. I’ve been writing AppleScripts off and on for over a decade to perform small, useful tasks (among them Troubleshoot Camino). For the longest time, I’ve been scripting the same things (the Finder, System Events, Eudora (the old-school version that actually works), some do shell script and folder actions; I have good grasp on the vocabulary and have wrangled the English-likeness monster in those areas.
With Camino’s new AppleScript support, though, I’m back in unexplored territory. After so long, I’d forgotten about the poking around and trying different permutations to get the scripts to do what I wanted them to do. However, it has been a fun exploration, creating bookmarks, invoking them, and learning the limitations of the new dictionary (and triggering some bugs along the way). I don’t yet know what sort of useful things I’ll do with the new bookmark support—invoking the Mouseover DOM Inspector on the current page via AppleScript makes a cool demo, but I can’t figure out why that would be practical—but I am looking forward to trying. It’s a vast new county out there, and now that I’ve remembered to keep trying different combinations of commands and classes, I’m off to explore some more! 
Here are a few sample scripts to get you started:
tell application "Camino"
make new bookmark with properties ¬
{name:"My First AppleScript Bookmark", URL:"http://www.caminobrowser.org/help/", shortcut:"scriptmark",description:"My first Camino bookmark created by AppleScript"} ¬
at end of bookmark bar collection's bookmark items
end tell
tell application "Camino"
set the URL of the current tab of browser window 1 ¬
to (URL of bookmark "Mouseover DOM Inspector" ¬
of bookmark folder "WebDev" of bookmark folder ¬
"Bookmarklets" of bookmark bar collection)
end tell
tell application "Camino"
count bookmark items of bookmark folder "Searches Collection"
end tell
Grab your scripting boots and enjoy!
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