Friday, June 09, 2006

First weekly meeting with my Mentor

Mike and I had our first weekly meeting today.

We started off by discussing the outcome of the meeting of Camino developers yesterday. We narrowed down the list even further and came up with a definitive 7 tasks that I should complete by the end of this project. This list has been appended to the Summer of Code 2006 page on the Camino Wiki.

We agreed that integrating tooltips would be easy to achieve and could easily be removed if it was a performance hogger. We also agreed that Tab Expose should not be tackled this summer because it was likely that I would rush it and things would be ugly. We are going to spend this summer thinking about the best way to implement it and hopefully at the end of the summer we will have a concrete idea that I can work on during University next session.

We set my first milestone to be to implement draggable tabs within a single window to be the Friday 23th June 2006. This ties in quite nicely with the evaluation that Mike has to write on the 26th June concerning my progress. Hopefully he will be able to write good things!

We set some tentative milestones beyond that - implement dragging tabs between windows and drag to create new windows by Friday 7th July; implement a scrolling tab-bar by 28th July. Mike pointed out that most of these milestones are going to need user testing, prototyping and feedback to make sure that I am implementing them in a way that users are comfortable with, so some of these milestones will probably slip. That is why it looks like I am finishing 3 weeks early. It's pretty damn certain that I wont!

My immediate goal is to produce a series of annotated sketches to outline in detail exactly how I plan to implement draggable tabs so that Mike and the other Camino developers can offer feedback on my implementation thoughts.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would be very interested in beta testing your work as I am a die-hard Camino user as well as a software engineer (although not cocoa/obj c). My email is tsmango [at] gmail [dot] com. Hope to hear from you.

Desmond Elliott said...

Hi Thomas, thanks for your enthusiasm!

The best way to test my implementations would be to keep an eye on the nightly builds.

I will no doubt make a post when the reviewers have accepted my first patch into the trunk. That would be about the time when my fellow developers have scrutinised my code and we have ironed out the obvious problems.

I am aiming to have something that people can play with in the nightlies by Friday, if I remember correctly.

Better get back to work!