07.30.09
Posted in Links, Software at 9:43 pm by Smokey
Brent Simmons, author of renowned feed reader NetNewsWire, periodically writes about software development issues as they pertain to end-users. He debunks common end-user myths and misconceptions about software development (“it’s like one line of code to add this”) and provides guidance to users about making good feature requests and bug reports (and why developers will ask you lots of questions along the way). Since I periodically want to refer back to these posts (and refer others to them) and Google is not nearly as omniscient as one might expect 
when entering "Brent Simmons" "software development for end users", I’ve decided that here is as good a place as any to collect them for my reference.
(Thanks to Brent for doing all the hard work of writing these articles, and apologies for appropriating your name for the title of this anthology.)
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07.26.09
Posted in Camino at 11:31 pm by Smokey
It’s been a busy past couple of weeks around here, with lots of exciting changes.
- Stuart Morgan has kept busy with reviews and super-reviews, but he’s also hard at work on the next piece of Breakpad data reporting. He has a patch ready to use Mac OS X folder icons in Bookmarks and History on 10.5, and he also landed a change to get us full symbols from all of our bundled frameworks.
- Sean Murphy’s main focus continues to be our forthcoming safe browsing feature, and he is working on a patch for the last major piece of UI left for that. In addition, his patch to do all the complex gymnastics required for our Cocoa font UI to communicate with Gecko and its font objects has landed, which means our Chinese, Japanese, and Korean users can finally change fonts using the same font UI as every other Camino user (and as every user of every other native Mac application). This means that the ghost of bug 175651 has finally been exorcised (and, in fact, that the “Advanced” sheet is non-functional; it will be removed soon). Thanks to Sean for all of his work on this bug and also to everyone who helped test or supplied pointers along the way.
- Christopher Henderson continues to work on changes to the zoom UI and UTF-8 support in URL in bookmarks. In addition, his patch for menu item validation for our safe browsing feature landed Friday.
- The first several patches for Summer of Code hacker Dan Weber’s autocomplete rewrite landed over the past two weeks, and he is now the proud owner of nearly a dozen bugs for regressions or follow-ups (Dan also earned his hyatt merit badge on his very first patch). As of today’s Camino 2.1a1pre nightlies, location bar autocomplete searches both URL and name/title for both bookmarks and history items, and the autocomplete window looks a little more like the late ‘00s than the early ‘00s. (While Dan’s blog is supposed to be appearing on Camino Planet, Planet is not happy with his feed for some reason, so be sure to visit or subscribe separately to get all the latest location bar and autocomplete news.)
- Philippe Wittenbergh has been busy updating a number of graphic elements in Camino. He and I have been tweaking the CSS rules for the various error pages as well as updating the icons that appear on them to correct some long-standing issues. In addition, Philippe has been polishing a set of tab images that are under consideration as part of a 10.5-focused touch-up of the tab and bookmark bars.
- At the beginning of the reporting period, with some last-minute help from mento’s insomnia, I branched
mozilla/camino so that we had a place to land Dan’s changes without affecting the upcoming Camino 2 release. In addition to work with Philippe on the error page icons, I’ve started prototyping improved text for the safe browsing overlay, fixed some minor website bugs, readied an upgrade to the latest version of Flashblock, and started work on the latest ad-blocking omnibug.
I’m very excited that we finally have our main font preferences working properly for our East Asian users; that general problem has bugged me since I became involved with Camino development years ago, and I’m happy to have played a very small role in migrating Gecko to the correct Cocoa font names (which in turn paved the way for Sean to fix the problem in Camino once and for all). It’s also good to see Dan’s work landing, after all the design work and the review process the changes have gone through, and I’m looking forward to more polish in the coming weeks!
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07.18.09
Posted in Camino at 7:58 pm by Smokey
It’s been over a year since the last entry in the Camino Tips series. To compensate for my lack of time, today I’m highlighting two fantastic screencasts of Camino tips from Giles Turnbull over at Cult of Mac.
The first screencast introduces part of Camino’s bookmark shortcuts feature: How To Use Camino’s Bookmark Shortcuts To Save Time Online
Screencast number two is largely a plug for my own Combine Windows toolbar script; Turnbull explains how to install the script and how he uses Combine Windows to tidy up his browser windows: How To: Add A Combine Windows Script to Camino
Hope you find these tips useful, and thanks to Giles Turnbull at Cult of Mac for producing them!
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07.15.09
Posted in Software at 10:36 pm by Smokey
Warning: this is a little bit of a rant.
Sometimes I wonder if WordPress plugins [sic] exist to make practitioners of the Apple School of Release Notes™ look good. Most of the time I’m lucky if I can find any indication of what might have changed in a plugin, despite the WordPress plugin upgrade UI leading me to believe this information is only a click away (right inside my own WordPress install, even).
As an example, here is the upgrade notice for WordPress shepherd/developer Matt Mullenweg & Automattic’s signature plugin, the Akismet spam catcher.
The upgrade notice inside my WordPress install includes a link entitled “View version 2.2.5 Details” for the upgrade to Akismet 2.2.5, which sounds like it would provide details such as changes in this version:
Clicking on the aforementioned “Details” link shows this screen, where I find “useful” information like the latest version number, date last updated, number of downloads, and author and plugin webpages (as well as the oh-so-helpful installation instructions, should I not want to let WordPress install the upgrade automatically):
If I click on the “WordPress.org Plugin Page” link, I’m presented with the WordPress.org page for Akismet; surely that will tell me what’s new or changed in Akismet 2.25, right? Nope, this page looks suspiciously like the “Details” page I just left:
Finally, I click on the “Plugin homepage” link and arrive at Akismet.com. From there, I see options like “Download”, “FAQ”, “Development”, and “Blog”, and, since this is not my first go-round with an Akismet upgrade, I know that only “Blog” might contain information about this new version. Indeed, I’m in luck; New plugin version 2.2.5, currently the first post on blog.akismet.com, has some details.
Four clicks after I began (and four domains later), I have what it seemed like the very first click promised me (in fairness, I could have saved a click by going directly to the “Plugin homepage” instead of visiting the “WordPress.org Plugin Page” link, but I also saved a number of clicks by remembering that “Download”, “FAQ”, and “Development” wouldn’t contain information about changes in releases).
Frankly, this sucks. But guess what? It doesn’t have to suck; according to this Weblog Tools Collection post from nearly a month ago, WordPress supports a standard method of including a “Changelog” tab in both the WordPress.org page (the third screenshot above) and the WordPress “Details” view (the second screenshot) for plugins with upgrades available.
The fact that this great feature is available for WordPress plugins but hallmark plugins like Akismet (2.2.5 was released on July 13, nearly three weeks after the posts about the “Changelog” feature) aren’t using it sucks even more. To add to the irony, the WordPress.com page for Akismet lists “mdawaffe” as an Akismet author, and the Weblog Tools Collection post credits “mdawaffe” as one of the key contributors (implementors?) of the new “Changelog” feature on the WordPress end! 
Please, Matt, Automattic, and Akismet, take up the mantle in this area; implement the Changelog in Akismet upgrades and lead by example, as a hallmark plugin should. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Smokey Ardisson
voracious consumer of release notes
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07.13.09
Posted in Camino at 12:11 am by Smokey
- While continuing to keep reviews moving, Stuart Morgan also developed a patch to use new Mac OS X 10.5 functions to take bookmark folder icons from the OS and a patch to future-proof our software update feed generation script. In addition, he landed his patch to allow the multi-touch “pinch” gesture to trigger the zoom function.
- Sean Murphy kept busy on both the forthcoming safe browsing feature and on our dreaded CJK font UI bug. The notification bar that appears when clicking through a phishing or malware warning landed last week, bringing the safe browsing UI one step closer to completion. With some extensive testing help from Philippe Wittenbergh, Sean also produced a patch for the Fonts tab of the Appearance preference pane that behaves exactly as it needs to, properly supporting localized font names and translating back and forth between Cocoa and Gecko font names where required.
- Christopher Henderson continued working on UTF-8 URL support in the Bookmarks Manager (and updated the associated patch for location bar autocomplete as well). In addition, he posted a patch for review for the new zoom menu items configuration.
- Summer of Code hacker Dan Weber currently has four patches awaiting review or super-review. Autocompleting from bookmark URLs and the new appearance for the autocomplete window should pass super-review soon. Over the past two weeks, Dan also wrote patches to enable proper autocompletion of redirected URLs and to “partition off” the icons on the right side of the location bar.
- I checked in a localization-related fix and some code cleanup and also put together and landed the latest ad-blocking update during this reporting period. I also undertook a number of tasks to prepare for the upcoming branching and spent some time testing both of Sean’s patches.
That’s about it for this update; we stayed pretty busy, although it may not seem that way from the list above. We’re continuing to push towards Camino 2.0 Beta 4 and the subsequent Camino 2.0 release.
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07.05.09
Posted in Life, Travel at 10:26 pm by Smokey
Ingrid & Martin, banquet hall at Ekebergrestauranten, Oslo, July 5, 2008
One of the longest and most enjoyable days of my life, from the Oslo heat wave to the rumbles of Thor to the Norwegian speeches and the cake and dancing long into the night. Congratulations again, Martin and Ingrid; I’m thinking of you fondly again on this day.
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