12.01.07
What we’re up to
One of the things that we keep trying to do as a project (and not succeeding very well, it seems) is to be more proactive in letting people know what we’re working on for Camino. From time to time, people (such as this commenter) wonder if anyone is even working on Camino any more. This confusion is definitely a bad thing, and it’s one of the things I hoped to help address when I started writing here (unfortunately, writing is hard 
).
First off, I’d like to assure anyone who’s wondering, yes, we are hard at work on Camino (and I’m not sure how the gentleman at TUAW has missed Camino 1.1a2, Camino 1.1b, Camino 1.0.4, Camino 1.5, Camino 1.0.5, Camino 1.5.1, Camino 1.0.6, Camino 1.5.2, and Camino 1.5.3, all released in the past year).
As an all-volunteer team, though, we don’t have the same time we can devote to Camino as the full-time (development, build, quality assurance) teams of other Mac browsers. We have day jobs or are students, so Camino is a free-time labor of love. Most of us, I think, prefer to spend our limited Camino time triaging or fixing bugs rather than writing about Camino, so while we’re making progress, people who aren’t using nightly builds or visiting the forum on a regular basis often don’t know what we’re up to between releases.
Once again I’ll try to address our “what are the Camino developers doing” “problem” by making a concerted effort to provide semi-regular updates on Camino development.
Hereafter a quick summary of recent activities:
- While Mozilla Corp may build releases and run quality assurance tests on them during the holidays, we’re a little less insane. However, for the last two weeks, we have been working on Camino 1.5.4, coming next week. I’ve been landing patches, Stuart Morgan backported a few patches, and Mark Mentovai spun the release candidate build.
- Jeff Dlouhy has been working on tab dragging and has a new demo of dragging with some animation. Jeff’s also been doing some graphics work for us while our regular designers are snowed under with paying work.
- Sean Murphy has been working for some time on making adding and editing search engines for the toolbar search field more Mac-like than this, and in the past week he posted new patches for editing engines and for supporting the OpenSearch format for automatically adding new search engines.
- Bryan Atwood, who brought us Flashblock in Camino 1.5, has been hard at work at making Camino support multiple accounts per site when storing passwords in the Keychain. The feature seems on-track to make Camino 1.6.
- Stuart has been busy; in addition to his work on 1.5.4, he has been fighting bugs rendering trunk nightlies unusable and reviewing patches for new features. He has also been hard at work implementing software update for Camino and fixing bugs in the update framework we’re using.
- In addition to my work on 1.5.4 and general bug triage, I’ve been spending some time working on implementing small applications to enable users of web-based feed readers to use Camino’s feed UI just like users of desktop readers currently can. In mostly-Camino-related activity, I’ve also been working on an almost-ready update to Troubleshoot Camino that fixes a few bugs; more on that soon.
- Some of you might have noticed that Apple released a major new OS version about a month ago, so Stuart, Jeff, Mark, Ian Leue, and Samuel Sidler have been tag-teaming changes related to Mac OS X 10.5. You’ll notice the new status bar in 1.5.4, and hopefully you’ll notice some annoying 10.5-related bugs have disappeared. We’re aware the tabs and the bookmark bar still look a little out-of-place on 10.5, and we are working on those, but there are a number of aesthetic and practical considerations we have to balance, so we’re not rushing those changes.
- Finally, you may have noticed that we’re now accepting donations. Sam had also been working with the Mozilla Foundation coordinating our end of this project, and of course setting up the new page on our website.
Truthfully, we’ve been very busy. 
I can’t promise all the new features mentioned above will appear in Camino 1.6, but most of them are on-track to do so. We’re also getting ready to release Camino 1.6a1; it won’t contain any of the features mentioned above, either (except software update, but you won’t notice that until our next milestone release—alpha 2 or beta—is ready), but there are almost six months of changes, including the scrolling tab bar, waiting for you to explore!
That’s it for now, but I do hope to turn this into a semi-regular feature so that it will be easier for everyone to see all the work we are doing on Camino. 