11.10.08

Camino 2008 Week 39-Week 45

Posted in Camino at 10:48 pm by Smokey

You may have noticed a decrease in the number of Camino updates coming from this source over the past, uh, couple of months. Alas, I have found myself quite busy with the rest of life (or with things like releasing Camino when less busy), so if you’ve assumed nothing has been happening in the world of Camino development, I’m back for the moment to inform you that you’re sadly mistaken.

• Since the last regular weekly update, we’ve released Camino 1.6.4 (which added Catalan to the list of localizations) and shipped the first early preview of Camino 2. We’ve also been hard at work getting fixes ready for Camino 1.6.5, the next security and stability release on the agenda.
• Stuart Morgan landed the “Recently Closed Tabs” sub-menu before 2.0a1, worked on a fix for a case of buggy dragging in the bookmarks manager, and has been performing a large share of review and super-review work in recent months. He’s also chased down bugs and regressions in interactions with Gecko and has helped with work on some of the Mac Gecko topcrashers, including the crash that makes users of Mac OS X 10.4 weep.
• Sean Murphy has been hard at work on a feature I very much would like to write about, but I haven’t had very good luck reporting early on features that haven’t landed , and I really don’t want to “jinx” this one. In addition to his work on the unnamed feature, Sean has fixed several follow-up issues from the keyboard loop landing, revised his patch to fix font name issues in the Fonts preferences, and reviewed several other patches.
• While dodging buses and surviving mid-terms, Jeff Dlouhy has been dusting off some of his old patches to bring further polish to the new Tab Overview (née Tabsposé) feature.
• Christopher Henderson has continued attacking any and all bugs relating to the location bar. In the past week he’s been working on site icon sizing and blurriness issues. His “use UTF-8 display for URLs everywhere” patch is waiting for superreview, and he has a patch up for review that fixes an edge-case issue with displaying the autocomplete window. Christopher has also picked up Håkan Waara’s work on supporting middle-click in the Bookmark Bar and is shepherding it through the review process again, and he is implementing our “down arrow to show autocomplete” heuristic in search fields in order to provide a keyboard shortcut for showing search field menus. (In the middle of all this, Christopher also had a fortnight of vacation where IP-over-ovine-transport provided the best available connectivity.)
• Chris Lawson has worked on bugs in a number of areas, including adding more sanity to the code that syncs preferences states when opening or changing preference panes, to our feed-handling, and to our special collections code. He has also made fixes to our Dock menu code and is working on some polish for selections and searches in the bookmarks manager. The other half of our “dynamic Chris duo” has also been coordinating with Bryan Atwood on the long-delayed whitelist for Flashblock.
• In addition to my usual QA and triage work, most of my efforts over the last couple of months have been focused on our releases, though I did go through a spell where I finished a number of long-suffering tasks related to our website content. I’ve also helped dig in to a handful of “interesting” Gecko bugs that have crossed my plate, and I snuck in one of my trademark “wow, I can’t believe I can fix this with two lines of Cocoa!” fixes for a bug that proved a constant annoyance in my work. Recently I’ve spent time working to make some of the Gecko strings accessible to our localizers for Camino 2, which brings us a step closer to being able to ship a fully-localized application.

I know I’ve left out a number of things here and there, but that list captures a good chunk of the work from the last month and a half. We’ve also had some visits from long-time friends and former developers we hadn’t seen in a while, and that always brings positive energy to the team. On the horizon are Camino 1.6.5 and Camino 2.0b1, the former soon and the latter after a bit, and hopefully soon I’ll be able to write about landing the latest round of Sean’s hard work instead of tip-toeing around it.

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