03.27.08
Posted in Camino at 11:39 pm by Smokey
You might have noticed that Camino 1.6 Beta 4 has just made an appearance, only two days after 1.6 Beta 3. In what seems to be a unpleasant case of history repeating itself, there was a fairly commonly-hit crash in 1.6 Beta 3, so we decided this morning to release a Beta 4 to make the beta experience as pleasant as possible.
I don’t remember much about the Camino 1.0 betas (it seems like ages ago!), so they were probably mostly “major crash”-free. Many of you will recall, though, that Camino 1.5’s sole beta was particularly plagued by a random crash, and while we did urge everyone to move to a new build, we didn’t release a new beta (which, in hindsight, we should have done). More recently, Camino 1.6 Beta 1 had not even officially been released when we replaced it with Beta 2 due to a just-fixed Core crash. Thanks to software update, it’s much easier to release a new version and ensure everyone gets notified and upgraded in a timely fashion, though we don’t want to do so too often and induce “update fatigue” among our users.
Yesterday a user reported a crash when clicking on a <select> during pageload, and although I couldn’t reproduce the crash and hadn’t seen it in my testing and use of Beta 3, his crash log was plausible. However, Stuart Morgan was finally able to reproduce the crash on one of his Macs, and he worked up a fix right away. When early reports indicated that a large number of users could be hitting this crash, we decided earlier today that we should release a Beta 4 to fix that crash (and another, much less common, crash that Stuart had also fixed on Wednesday). As far as we can tell, the Beta 4 release has gone a bit better (no crashes in Talkback yet!)—knock on wood—and it seems that I managed not to flub any of the website changes this time around, too. 
Thanks go again to Stuart Morgan for the bug-fixing, Mark Mentovai for the build-wrangling, and Mozilla Corp’s Nick Thomas for getting us in Bouncer right away.
Special thanks to everyone who reported this crash, either in Bugzilla, the forum, or in via Talkback (for those using PPC Macs), and we apologize to everyone for the inconvenience. (And I hope this is the last release I write about before Camino 1.6 ✈ itself!)
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03.25.08
Posted in Camino, Life at 9:21 pm by Smokey
This afternoon, we released Camino 1.6 Beta 3. If you’re using Camino 1.6 Alpha 1 or newer, please let software update notify you of the new release or or choose from the menu. If you’re not using Camino (why not? 
), you can visit our preview site for more information. The automatic updates are now using Stuart’s new script, which allows us greater flexibility and which will facilitate a completely localized update experience for users of Camino 1.6 Multilingual.
There’s not a “by the numbers” this time around, but it feels like the release went pretty smoothly. So far (knock on wood). Sam was pretty busy all day with today’s Firefox 2.0.0.13 release, so most of the final “releasing” work was in my lap again. This is the third release I’ve pushed live (I think), so the work is starting to feel like a routine (Sam’s Release Checklist and the incremental improvements we’ve made to our website code and the process really help). It only took me about twenty minutes to make all the changes and another to five fix the various typos. Other than the bizarre issue where the Camino Blog post isn’t showing up on either Camino Planet or Planet Mozilla, it looks like the final releasing work went off without a hitch.
Since the period between Camino 1.6 Beta 2 and Beta 3 was a little extended, I had forgotten some of the great features that are new to anyone using Camino 1.6 Beta 2. Here are some of the highlights:
- Right after Beta 2, we landed Bryan Atwood’s patch that allows Camino to store and access login information for multiple accounts at the same site. That means Camino’s Keychain implementation, which predated the modern Keychain APIs, finally is all grown up. Thanks again to Bryan for all of his hard work on this feature.
- We now support passing feeds to certain web-based feed readers. Though I wrote about this feature in February, it wasn’t until Stuart’s patch that landed Monday that the feed handlers were automatically activated for everyone to use.
- There were dozens of user interface improvements and a couple of big web compatibility fixes, but the change you’ll notice most—or perhaps not notice at all, which is a bit by design—are the new icons for a number of our main toolbar items. They feature subtle polish to make them fit in much better on Mac OS X 10.5 while not looking completely out-of-place on 10.3 or 10.4 and maintaining the distinctive Camino look we all love. It wasn’t an easy task, but I think the new icons succeeded. As an added bonus, many of the icons that did not previously have specially tuned 24×24 pixel versions now do, so they look even sharper at small sizes.
As always, thanks to Mark Mentovai and Stuart Morgan for doing most of the dirty work related to today’s release, and I hope everyone enjoys Camino 1.6 Beta 3!
Edit: It turns out that the Planet problem, like every other problem I noticed this afternoon, was due to my inability to change all the required numbers correctly after copying and pasting. 
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03.24.08
Posted in Camino at 1:36 am by Smokey
With two holidays this week, everyone was a little busy, but we continued working on the final pieces for Camino 1.6 Beta 3 and a couple of other non-✈ projects.
- Despite the best efforts of the week’s nasty Mozilla infrastructure failure to foil us, Stuart Morgan posted our existing 2008 Summer of Code project ideas. If you have any other ideas, be sure to let us know post-haste. The student application period begins Monday and lasts throughout the week, and we hope to receive another good crop of applicants again this year.
- Stuart and I continued working on getting the last minor annoyances worked out of the new software update appcast script, and it handles everything we’ve thrown at it so far. 1.6b3 will be the first real-world exercise of the script, and I don’t expect any problems.
- Stuart, Sean Murphy, Markus Magnuson, and I have all been working on patches or reviews for bugs.
- Stuart in particular has been attacking what’s left of the 1.6 bug-list, bringing old patches up to speed and writing new ones. He fixed the long-standing bug where a
<select> would get focus after being clicked on (instead of when being clicked on), finished Nick Kreeger’s patch to get window.blur working properly, fixed the odd-looking “loading” site icon, and, much to my relief, wrote the patch that makes our new web-based feed handler support active on first launch of Camino.
- Sean continued his work on preventing dataloss with corrupt
WebSearchEngines.plist files, on sorting out the localized vs. canonical font name “mess” on the trunk, and on investigating a new feature we’re tentatively planning for Camino 2.0.
- This week I landed both Markus’s patch to eliminate the last strings that were duplicated between the preference panes and the main application and also my patch to fix the display of ftp directory listings on the trunk. I also worked on patches for a few Core bugs, including more work on default font preferences and on the problem of the Mozilla Corp-centric nature of the shared
toolkit/content/license.html file (aka about:license) and the lack of “one license to rule them all.” (I also filed two Firefox bugs about brokenness that had annoyed me over the past week every time I had to test something in Firefox. That served as a good reminder that if you see something broken, don’t assume that someone else has filed the bug already; if you can reproduce a bug cleanly and reliably, you should always file it yourself—after searching, of course.)
I think that’s all for this week. Hopefully next week’s update will include “Camino 1.6 Beta 3 released.”
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03.23.08
Posted in Open Source, Software at 8:54 pm by Smokey
Last Monday NeoOffice.org (aka Patrick and Ed, with bits of help from the rest of us) released the latest NeoOffice milestone, 2.2.3. Although this version is still using the OpenOffice.org 2.2 codebase, 2.2.3 is packed full of new Mac goodies you won’t find in other open source office suites for the Mac.
We’ve long been “spoiled” on the Mac by having things “just work”—often through the hard work of Apple engineers designing APIs and “for free” features of standard objects, but also through the hard work of application developers themselves. When porting an application from another platform, many of these things that “just work” in born-on-the-Mac apps don’t work. Because of our high standards as Mac users, it’s hard to build a good Mac app, and even harder to build a good Mac version of a cross-platform app.
NeoOffice began its life as an application that was hard to call even Mac-like (in comparison to OpenOffice.org, which only ran under X11, it was a gem; in comparison to Microsoft Office X, not so much), and development tackled the important tasks of stability and functionality (printing! native fonts!) first, gradually adding more characteristics of a standard Mac application and culminating in the “fully Aqua” NeoOffice 2.1 release last April. Of course there’s always more to do—another non-Mac-like bit to polish, another new Apple feature to include—and over the last year more standard Mac features were added (though at a slower pace, as feature size increased).
With NeoOffice 2.2.3, Ed added support for Mac OS X 10.5’s grammar checker to the existing support for the Mac OS X spell-checker (the support is fully pluggable, if anyone knows of any other grammar-checking backends). Patrick finally got the pop-up file hierarchy working in document titlebars (one of those “you don’t miss it until you go to use it and it’s not there” features). The lack of application menus when no documents were open became a thing of the past; your File menu and recent documents are always a click away now. The team ripped out OpenOffice.org’s arcane and crippled scanner support and replaced it with native Image Capture support for importing images from scanners and cameras. Our dedicated team of icon artists replaced a few dozen more ugly platform-generic icons with new Akua versions, bringing NeoOffice that much closer to the 7K+ figure required for a complete icon set.
By far the largest feature in 2.2.3, however, is support for embedded video playback. QuickTime is one of those ubiquitous Mac technologies that everyone expects to “just work” in every program; it’s in your web browser, your jukebox, and your presentations (don’t ask me why; maybe you want to spin around a model of a molecule or fly through a room in your building design?). Now it’s in your open source office suite, too, playing any non-protected QuickTime-supported format on Mac OS X 10.4 and above (and spinning your molecule models until your battery runs out), just like all of those other Mac apps you love.
What’s to come in the future? The OpenOffice.org 3.0 codebase, that much is for sure. Beyond that, we’ll have to see what other tricks Patrick and Ed have up their sleeves (Ed likes to tease everyone with screenshots of his machinations), but the OOo 3.0 upgrade will be huge in itself, thanks to the work of Sun’s OpenOffice.org and Novell’s ooo-build engineers.
One final note: if you’re a NeoOffice user who will be near Milan in late May, FreeSMUG.org will be hosting a NeoOffice event with Patrick and Ed. See the NeoWiki for more information.
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03.19.08
Posted in Camino at 12:58 am by Smokey
In case you’re wondering why your favorite planet has been light on Camino news lately, it’s probably my fault. I’ve been busier than normal in the non-Mozilla parts of my life. However, we’ve not been standing completely still over in Camino-land, so here’s a quick overview of what we’ve been doing the last few weeks.
- First, the 2008 Google Summer of Code is coming up, and we’ve been thinking about project ideas we’d like to see student developers work on with us (we’ll have our existing ideas added to the Mozilla page soon). If you have any ideas you think would make good summer projects for Camino (keeping in mind the “summer” time-frame), or if you’re interested in applying to the SoC to work on Camino, please feel free to contact us on irc or leave a comment here.
- Samuel Sidler spearheaded the drive to update our main toolbar icons to fit in better on 10.5, and the first fruits of that labor are now in the nightly builds (well, have been for about two weeks now). I think the new icons do a good job of maintaining the Camino identity across three major OS versions, fitting in better on Mac OS X 10.5 where we need stronger, harder lines, while managing not to look terribly out-of-place on the unified toolbar of Mac OS X 10.4 and on the “faded pinstripes” of Mac OS X 10.3.9. (For those of you not lucky enough to have Camino in your Dock, you can take a look at our screenshots.) Special thanks go to Philippe Wittenbergh who helped us solve the color and filesize conundrum with the new icons.
- Sam has continued working on refining the infrastructure for our website, with a little bit of help from me. He and I have also been working on deploying the new, improved software update script that Stuart Morgan wrote; the new script allows us more customization and even the possibility of a completely localized update experience.
- Speaking of localization, our cohort of localizers are hard at work on localizing what will become Camino 1.6. Stefano Biagioni Wrobleski, our pt-BR localization lead, has offered to mentor new teams just getting started, so if Camino is not available in your language, now is a great time to join the caminol10n team. In addition, Sam and I, in collaboration with caminol10n lead Marcello Testi and German localizer Tobias Stohr, have been working on a policy for localization of our new set of default bookmarks.
- Jeff Dlouhy, Sean Murphy, Markus Magnuson, and I have all been working on patches or reviews for smaller bugs.
That’s it for now; more next week…I hope.
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03.03.08
Posted in Camino at 2:42 am by Smokey
This week we reached one of the last major milestones on the way to ✈, the localization freeze. Our hard-working team of translators are now at work at bringing you what-will-be-Camino-1.6 in over a dozen languages. (Also, if your language doesn’t currently ship in Camino 1.5.5 Multilingual, now is a great time to stop by caminol10n and learn how to bring Camino to your language!)
- Stuart Morgan worked hard this week on getting the last localization-sensitive bugs reviewed and landed. He fixed bugs related to OpenSearch support, the Keychain, software update, and spell-checking. If you’re on Mac OS X 10.5, you can now sanely switch which dictionary the spell-checker uses (unfortunately, Apple provided no way to implement this before 10.5, so everyone else still must use this method), and all users can look forward to selectively enabling or disabling spell-checking for any given text field. In addition to reviewing Camino patches, this week Stuart also reviewed some patches to Core code that affects Camino.
- Sean Murphy finished his work on OpenSearch follow-up bugs this week, reviewed some of Stuart’s new code, and started work on his next major project: fixing the tab chain throughout the entire browser window.
- Markus Magnuson posted his patch to replace most of our “Cancel” buttons with names that are more descriptive of the button’s function, e.g. “Don’t Quit” instead of simply “Cancel.” Stuart and I reviewed the patch on Friday evening and Stuart committed it that night, bringing the localization freeze into effect.
- Samuel Sidler and I both spent time this week investigating why caminobrowser.org has been experiencing periods of slow responsiveness and apparent high resource usage recently.
- I spent most of this week on QA activities, triaging unconfirmed bugs, chasing down regression ranges, and other things of that nature, though I also landed a new
.nib to fix tabbing in the Pop-up Exceptions List on 10.5. I spent most of my Camino time over the weekend working on getting Mochitest running with Camino and trying to avoid the latest uncivil unrest.
We’re down to only a few bugs blocking Camino 1.6 Beta 3, so continue to expect it “soon.”
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03.02.08
Posted in Life at 11:02 pm by Smokey
Today, after over 30 years as one of Gwinnett’s premiere fine-dining restaurants, Little Gardens closed its doors as a restaurant. For as long as I can remember, trips down US 29 from Lawrenceville to Lilburn were marked by the unassuming Little Gardens sign poking out from the forest (and later, as development encroached, by sights of the lawn’s magnolias and the columned mansion itself).
For all those years of passing by, however, it was not until “relatively” recently that I had ever dined there. I first dined at the restaurant the night of my senior prom, and the last was for my grandparents’ 65 wedding anniversary last April. In between those days, I experienced this fading tradition for retirement celebrations, birthdays, anniversaries, and other special occasions. Like many from this area, Little Gardens has written itself on my life….
So as an era draws to a close, with a tinge of sadness I say thanks for the memories of a lost time, and adieu….
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