12.17.07

Camino: 2007 Week 50

Posted in Camino, Software at 1:24 am by Smokey

If everyone is busy getting ready for the holidays, you sure couldn’t tell from the activity in Camino-land this week; my head was spinning!

• Edit: Sam reminded me that we released Camino 1.6 Alpha 1 on Tuesday of Week 50. You can check out the first preview of what we’ve been up to by downloading it from our preview site. (Note to self: never write these summaries suffering from a Sunday evening headache.)
• Architecture was the theme of the week, as Stuart Morgan and Mark Mentovai jointly tackled a number of major changes to our preference panes. Driven both by a desire to eliminate some old code and also by our stated goal of “getting Gecko out of the UI” to make Camino more friendly for new developers, they re-arranged the preference panes in ways I can’t even begin to describe, tackled strange compiler and linker issues across multiple Mac OS X versions, and ended up with something much better than we had after the preferences rewrite leading up to Camino 0.8. (I got in on the cleanup fun just a bit, when I converted one of the last three old NeXTSTEP-style property lists to a modern XML property list.)
• As you know, Camino lead Mike Pinkerton has also been the lead on two of Google’s Mac projects for the six months or so and hasn’t had time for much more than code review and general leadership. All this week he had been leaving little clues in our irc channel that he was working on something, and on Friday he unveiled Camino’s new Find bar. It’s in nightlies now and will be in Camino 1.6b1, with a bit of polish. Everyone’s going to have to find a new “most requested” feature now.
• In addition to the preferences architecture work, Mark added better support for the Mac OS X 10.5 Quarantine system (Camino should be on par with Safari now), began setting the “Where from” metadata on downloads, and started fixing some long-standing bugs with our keyboard shortcuts in alerts and sheets. He also wrote a few more patches we’ll surely see land next week and did some code reviews.
• Stuart checked in his tab architecture rewrite patch this week, wrote a patch to fix a new crash bug involving the “Trash” button in the Downloads window, fixed a handful of other bugs, and did some reviews, as usual.
• Jeff Dlouhy continued to work on tab drag-and-drop (he posted another video, this time of a fun bug) and perform yeoman service as our graphic artist.
• Just as this “goes to press,” our Swedish localizer, Markus Magnuson, has started posting his first patches for Camino bugs. It’s always exciting to have a new developer around (or a familiar face from the Camino community start posting patches), and Markus is no exception. Welcome to the developer side! (His first patch was quite small and it has already been reviewed and committed to our code repository.)

The past few weeks, we’ve been fixing about 12 bugs per “week” (defined as the seven days between Camino team meetings); we’ve already exceeded that number this week and might hit 20! If the holiday season has everyone busy, they forgot to tell us (that, or we’re all working on Camino to try to avoid the holiday madness)!

Permalink