Summer of Camino

On The Move

2007-06-28T08:47:00.001+01:00

This blog focuses on the work I did during the summer of 2006 with Mike Pinkerton and The Mozilla Foundation.

I am on the move to a self-hosted Wordpress blog at http://www.desmondelliott.co.uk/ so why don't you join me there?

Congratulations (2007)

2007-04-12T10:51:00.000+01:00

I will not be working with the Mozilla Foundation this summer but I will be working with OpenMRS.

I would like to wish Jeff Dlouhy a lot of success this summer working on Tabsposé.

I really new to get a new name and address for my blog.

Dear Applicant,

Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your
application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code. Please
check your student home page in the SoC web application at
http://code.google.com/soc/student_home.html to determine which of
your applications was accepted.

Over the next few days, you will be added to a special members only
Google Group
(http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-students-list).
Please take a moment to browse the archive before posting. We prefer
most of the program discussion to take place on the program discussion
list. However, the students list is a private place for communication
about subjects where our student participants prefer to not
communicate the matter more widely. You can find more information
about the program mailing lists here:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/guide-to-program-mailing-lists

Your mentoring organization may also set up similar mailing lists for
you and your cohorts so that they may interact with you on your
project. You should not wait for them; please feel free to contact
your mentor and let them know you are ready to start engaging with
your new project community.

You should also get into the habit of visiting your student home page
on a semi-regular basis, as we will track status, payments, paperwork
and take final surveys from this page.

If you have questions regarding payment, please wait until you see a
message from Leslie Hawthorn detailing what we will need from
you. This will take a few days as we button up the web application and
make sure all the students are properly assigned to the proper groups.

If you cannot take part for some reason, please email us at
gsoc@google.com as soon as possible so that we can allocate your slot
to another student.

Other questions and concerns should be send to gsoc@google.com

Thanks for taking part; we're very excited to see what the Summer will bring!

Congratulations once again,

The Google Summer of Code Progam Administration Team

Football Manager 2007: the worst Mac installer ever

2007-04-11T15:34:00.000+01:00

I love Football Manager (previously Championship Manager) and the lure of a £29.99 -> £19.99 price cut was just too tempting. It is also worth noting that I am studying for my finals so any temptation is taken!

Football Manager is a Mac/PC double release on the same CD which is really nice and now I get to play it on my Intel Mac which is even better! Football Manager 2006 was a drag and drop installation but 2007 is soo spectacular that I have screenshotted the process to preserve its glory.

Hrm... no drag and drop here... oh my!

Okay, so this opens up a Terminal window which launches a Java application... [you may be interested to know that setup.jar is 434.9MB]

Oh my goodness! Why do the buttons look like that?!

What do you mean choose the installation type? Are those Windows installer icons? What is the refund policy....

It sits like this for a minute and I do wonder what it is doing...

Here we go, some kind of visual feedback. I wonder what the change in colour is meant to signify...

It is all over, phew!

I hope that we all consider this a masterclass in how not to write an installer for a Macintosh application. I would love to know why the person / people who wrote this installer considered it suitable for release.

Are there any other Macintosh application installer nightmares that we should know about?

Summer of Code 07 is on! (go go go)

2007-03-17T22:03:00.000+01:00

Google Summer of Code 2007 is on and applications are now being accepted. Mentoring organization applications have been examined and the Open Source Team at Google have published the final list. There are some amazing organizations offering students an opportunity to take part in some fantastic work.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

The first thing that you need to do is take a look at the list of organizations that are involved this year. Perhaps you know the organization that you want to apply for but maybe you don't. If you don't then you could do what I have done and look at the ideas link for every project. You can normally understand quite quickly what that organization works on from the projects that they propose.

coresystems GmbH gives away nothing but upon closer inspection it looks like they are interested in people working on an open source BIOS. And we probably would have totally disregarded them if we didn't click the link.

OpenMoko don't give away much in there name either but they are working on an open source mobile platform which is pretty damn cool.

Sparse is a semantic parser. There are even projects tailored to what might be considered academic pursuits on the Summer of Code Program.

SOME ADVICE

If you are seriously interested in applying for a project and you believe that you are capable of undertaking the workload then you should get in touch with the organization through mailing lists or IRC to gauge the mentoring team's interest in your application.

I think that most project coordinators and mentors would agree. They will like to see an application from a name that they recognise. If you show a real interest then it seems reasonable that they are more likely to show a real interest to.

This is probably one of the best ways to determine whether or not your application will be well received. Whether or not you do actually possess the skill set that the organization are looking for is good to find out before you prepare an application. Some organizations are pretty upfront on their sites about what the expect from students this summer. Maybe those organizations got burned last year with incomplete projects or projects that never really gained momentum.

The best thing about Summer of Code is that if you see an organization who have high demands - in your opinion - and only appear to be interested in the delivery of the final code and don't appear to be interested in the experience then you don't need to apply to them. There are loads of organizations!

Of course, I could have this all wrong... perhaps Google are pressuring organizations to only accept students who are pretty much guaranteed to complete their projects. It is difficult to tell when what happens to your application is not in any way transparent after you have submitted it. And so it makes it difficult to understand things from this side of the fence. It would be interesting to hear more about this from the mentoring organizations.

THE LESSIG METHOD

I delivered a presentation to my University on 7th March which can be found here [link removed due to upload problem, will be live again ASAP]. I did not record it live because I didn't want to use too much technology and have a weird crash -- which is 100% more likely when you are live.

About 30 people attended and I think that everybody enjoyed themselves and found my presentation to be informative. I managed to give away all of the schwag that Google gave to me: t-shirts, blinky pins, lava lamps.

OUR SUMMER OF CODE

I plan to apply for Summer of Code this year with 3 organizations if I have the time. Applying for 3 organizations is pretty ballsy because it demands a lot of effort to write great applications that are tailored. Maybe you don't know how many to apply for or what an application should look like...

If you are considering applying then you can take a look at the application that I submitted for the Mozilla Foundation project that was accepted for last summer. There are loads of organizations that have posted their own guides on what a good application looks like and some of them even show examples of what a good application looked like last year. That is such a great touch from them and it helps people write the best application that they can.

Note the awesome spelling mistake near the start of my application ;-)

I have been asked if I have any advice for people who are applying this year, so here goes:

I repeat, if you are seriously interested in applying for a project and you believe that you are capable of undertaking the workload then you should get in touch with the organization through mailing lists or IRC to gauge the mentoring team's interest in your application
Limit the number of applications that you submit. Quality is much more important than quantity. I imagine that it will be painfully obvious if you copy/paste the body of your application to multiple organizations
Do not over exaggerate your abilities but do not believe that you are not capable of something because you are not a PROGRAMMING ROCK STAR. Summer of Code is a great time to learn new skills as well as use existing skills.
Make sure that the organization that you are applying to work with are suitable for you. Do you like their communication structure / leadership style? Do you think that you could work with the community?
Can you realistically spend 40 hours per week on your project? Most projects have enough depth to require a 40 hours/week commitment, so make sure that you are able to dedicate that amount of time.

I wish everybody the best of luck with their application. You can find me on the Summer of Code IRC channel if you constrict my forename down to one letter and concatenate that with my surname.

If you think that this post might be of interest to others then please let them know about it. I accept comments to my posts but I have moderation enabled to stop spam. I will let through any legitimate comments.

Good luck!

WWDC 2007 Fundraiser

2007-03-05T11:25:00.000+01:00

After consulting with several close friends I have decided to announce that I am looking to raise funds through donations to help ease the cost of attending WWDC this year.

I do not want to make any money through these donations, I just want to try to cover the cost of getting to this conference.

Oh, the expense!

The cost of a WWDC ticket is at least £699 although I might be eligible to apply for a scholarship with Apple. I also need to get to California which is a little bit trickier considering that I am from the UK and quite expensive. What about accomodation? Oh my!

Donations

I shall be accepting donations of any value through PayPal. I am going to start the ball rolling by adding £122.20 to the target. Every 4 weeks I will add 10% of the remaining amount to the target myself to keep things moving along. I don't expect to get a free ride!

If at any stage the target is reached then any excess shall be donated to The Camino Project and The Adium Project split equally.

What is in it for you?

You might wonder what you'll get in return for your donation? I plan to keep a page listing the patrons who have donated so far and any message that they wish to include - should they want public knowledge of their donation to be announced. Oh, and a feel good factor :-)

Company-specific

I am not really interested in having banner adverts on my blog but if you think that your company could fit in then please get in touch with me.

The WWDC t-shirt

What I am offering companies is the ability to sponsor a t-shirt that I will wear for a day at WWDC. I'll be buying Howies blank t-shirts because I love those guys.

You can get your logo on the front and "[Company name] helped to fund my attendance at WWDC 2007" on the back of the t-shirt. Subtle but effective. You can even dictate the colour or anything in particular that you'd like the t-shirt to say.

There is no suggested donation for companies interested in this opportunity. I suggest that you get in touch with me so we can talk about what we think is reasonable.

Why?

Well, they say that you can sell anything on eBay. I know that this is not eBay but if you can sell a million pixels or swap a paper clip for a house then perhaps there might be a few businesses interested in sponsoring a t-shirt to ease the cost of getting to CA; or some generous people who have a few dollars to spare.

I sincerely look forward to meeting anybody who donates to this cause at WWDC or in and around San Francisco in June, or anybody else who cannot donate but will be at WWDC this summer.

You can find the PayPal donate link at the side of the page. This link will be active from Monday 5th March 2007 until Friday 2nd June 2007.

Cognitive friction

2007-03-03T21:56:00.000+01:00

The integration of technology into our daily lives is accelerating at an alarming pace. There are people with bionic arms that attach to their previously defunct nervous system; you can engage in a video telephone call with anybody in the world using Skype and a webcam; you have an unbelievable wealth of knowledge at your fingertips with the internet.

Internet

The internet was supposed to be an amazing breakthrough in technology that would allow people from all over the world to communicate with each other from the comfort of their desks. Google lets you search for anything and Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that has become an indispensible part of our everyday life. There is less of a chance of a Big Brother regime where history is being rewritten by the government but Orwell couldn't have imagined the Internet when he wrote 1984.

The Internet, and technology as a whole has a huge problem - it is not accessible. If you do not have good hearing, good motor skills, good eyesight, or are able to grasp new concepts quickly then the internet is totally useless.

I have good hearing, good motor skills, good eyesight, and I can grasp new technology fairly quickly so I hope that my postulations do not sound pretentious or ill-informed.

Text-to-speech

Text-to-speech technology is still rather primitive but it does work [note that this is the full video and not the crummy news piece that mocked the work that MS have completed]. It might be useful for text documents but what about reading an article on Wikipedia? There are roughly 100 words surrounding the content of the page that you don't care about and the TTS software is going to have to parse those each time.

The pointing device

The mouse is probably the worst device for people who have recently lost motor control skills - stroke sufferers being a good example; or those who have poor motor skills due to an ongoing disability. This YouTube video is a clip from 1984 demonstrating what it was like to use a mouse for the first time

Fitt's Law dictates that people with acceptable motor skills still take several iterative attempts to reach their destination on a computer dekstop. When will touch-screen technology become common place enough that using a this pointing device with two buttons can be replaced?

What does that mean?

What about people who have difficulties with picking up new ideas? The internet moves at such a whirlwind pace that when they have mastered one user interface paradigm it is already too late.

The BBC

Who is designing websites for people who want the information presented to them in a clear manner? I read the BBC News website every day. The BBC is a publicly funded TV service in the UK. As such, they have the moral obligation to present their content to every group.

The BBC tries to do its best but it is still difficult to find the Accessibility information. Their webpage is extremely cluttered with hyperlnks everywhere. It is intimidating for anybody who looks at it for the firs time. I suspect that I use reflexive memory to browse their site. I just know where the links are. If you struggled to use a mouse or had poor sight then trying to navigate to the news for your local area then you would be better off listening to the BBC News channel.

If you were not able to mentally parse all of the information available on that page with ease then it would be a nightmare for you. Why don't the BBC offer a simple webpage with News, Sport, and Weather sections?

One click hyper links that clearly present the information on the page for people to see. Why is it difficult to find any information about the accessible services provided by the BBC? You can provide me with news content on my mobile phone but you cannot improve accessible access to your content?

Mac OS X

What about Mac OS X? I recently purchased a new iMac and when I popped in the installation disc I made a phone call and heard the system talking to me to let me know that I could setup the Installer to speak the text back to me. That was a good start but it needs to be much more.

There is a fantastic Systems Preferences Pane where you can turn on text-to-speech or change the size of fonts in the system. If you relied on these system services could you configure them by yourself? Where is the value in having a computer with accessibility options if you cannot configure them independently?

Cognitive friction

All of these issues can be grouped together into something that I've started calling cognitive friction. I imagine that I'm not the first person to coin the term but it is about time the people started to use it.

Do you have microwave that is easy to use? I know that when I had a microwave the options were Low Defrost Medium High Very High. So what? What does those mean relative to the 800W that I need. Look at your TV remote. What the bloody hell do half of those buttons mean? Come on! I've never touched some of the buttons on my TV remote due to fear.

Technology has a lot of answer for in the 21st century. Instead of making everything better why aren't we making existing products easier to use?

The iTunes Store

2007-03-02T11:04:00.000+01:00

I made the decision to move from buying CDs to buying my music online through the iTunes Store or Bleep at the beginning of the year.

The iTunes Store sells Kind of Blue for £9.99. A 6 track album should only cost £4.74 but one of the tracks is 'Album Only' which punishes me for wanting to purchase the whole record. Does this not encourage me to illegally download this CD? I want good value for my purchases just like the next person.

I decided to buy the CD from Fopp for £5. I thought that music on the Store was at a fixed price and that Apple didn't want to have tiered pricing for albums?

The iTunes Store left me feeling kind of blue but the old-fashioned record store washed my blues away.

Google Summer of Code 2007

2007-02-19T01:24:00.000+01:00

Google Summer of Code 2007 is on!

I will be giving a presentation about my experience last year and trying my best at a Q&A session for my peers about Summer of Code in a few weeks time. I'm hoping that what I present will be useful information to those who attend and I plan to put my slides online alongside the audio so that others can have access to this hopefully useful resource.

I'll also make a post about how I went about writing an application last year. I think that most people will want to know the secret to writing a good application. It'll be a shame when I tell them that the secret is hard work.

The time line for SoC 2007 looks great - I love the fact that there is a grace period which will allow for students to get up to speed with their mentoring organization. Good work, Google!

How Secure is a Secure Erase in Disk Utility?

2007-02-15T20:40:00.000+01:00

I've been reading about the Secure Erase options in Disk Utility. The 7-pass erase and the 35-pass erase in particular.

This article gives an overview of the differences between the 7-erase pass and the 35-erase pass. I've decided to ignore the write zeros to disk option since it should be clear to most people that is pretty ineffective in real data scrubbing.

The 7-pass erase is based on the DoD 5220.22-M specification which demands 3 passes conforms to scrubbing data at a military standard. The Google Cache for the document describing this specification is available if you search for 5200.28-STD.

The 35-pass erase is a totally different beast. The implementation is based on research at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The method uses information about how data is originally written to a magnetic disk in order to provide the best possible scrubbing of data. The author of this report notes that nothing short of using an extremely powerful magnet can guarantee the probable removal of data - and he cites a powerful navy magnet that actually warped the disk platters as a suitable magnet.

You might wonder why I am blogging about this? Well I found it to be interesting and I always wanted to know more about the implementation that Apple's Disk Utility uses and maybe now you can know more too.

Adium

2007-02-15T17:32:00.000+01:00

I have recently volunteered to work with the Adium project. I wanted to work on another project and the release of Adium 1.0 propelled them onto my radar. They seem to have a great project structure and I'm hoping that things work out really well with them in the future!

At the moment I am working on the documentation for building Adium from scratch because we all need to grab the source and build a piece of software before we can contribute any code to a project!

The way that the Camino Wiki is used was an inspiration for me to set up a Scratchpad on the Adium Deveopment Wiki so that there could be a place for everybody to work on a not-quite-so-live copy of the documentation to improve it.

Who knows where things will go from here?

PS I am still working on Camino. My time is squashed at the moment because I am writing my undergraduate dissertation and the things that I need to work on for the tabbed browsing will require me sitting down for more than 5 minutes at a time.

The Worldwide Developers Conference 2007

2007-02-07T09:46:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, Apple announced the dates of the Apple technical and social event of the year - WWDC. June 11 - June 15 looks good on paper because I don't graduate until 26th June so it will not interfere with the big day.

Apple has not posted any information about student scholarships yet. I am worried that as a final year student I may not be eligible for a scholarship even thought I will still be a fully matriculated student until I graduate.

Worst case scenario is that I need to pay for the £699 WWDC ticket alongside a LHR - SFO return ticket - currently £568 - with no cost for accomodation because I have a friend who lives in Newark who is willing to let me sleep on their couch.

If I knew that Apple offered scholarships to graduating students then I guess I'd pay for the flights now but if they don't then I cannot really afford to attend WWDC which is disappointing.

I wonder if there are any open-source donate to a good cause shenanagins that I could pull off here... I doubt that I would because it would tarnish my e-character!

Does anybody know of any respectable avenues that I can explore to help reduce the cost of attending WWDC this year?

Holidays

2006-12-24T16:25:00.000+01:00

I was told by a friend who is currently on an exchange in the USA that you cannot call is Christmas and that it should be called the Holidays... so happy holidays!

I've been much busier than I expected to be since finishing my SoC placement which has have an affect on work on the follow up bugs.

At the moment, I am working on Need a way to access all tabs quickly from the tab bar and Current tab can get "pushed" offscreen by the tab scroll buttons coming up.

After that, I will probably work on Tab scrolling should be animated which will be a 10.4+ only patch since writing custom classes for what NSAnimation does is not what I want to spend my time on! This should not be that much of a problem since all of the scrollable tab stuff is 1.2+ targetted.

I am starting work on a couple of my own open source projects for Mac OS X. A pretty little (pseudo) random password generator for the Dashboard and a substitute for StuffIt for zipping / taring files in the GUI environment. For two reasons: 1 is to get more experience writing Mac software - and more importantly, from the ground up; the other is that I'd like to have something to show to Apple when I apply for a scholarship to attend WWDC 2007.

The Computer Science Drinking Game

2006-12-02T20:43:00.000+01:00

This is off-topic, so please accept my apologies for those of you expecting an update on the work I have been doing on Camino recently. For those of you interested, the answer is not nearly enough! The great quality of the photo was brought to you by a Nokia 6233. Pro-tip: don't get one.

This was posted on the walls of the computing labs earlier this semester and it made me laugh. I reckon that initially, my coding standards would suffer, however, over time they would improve substantially.

This would be the correct approach to use for Summer of Code next year.

Bug 355490 Need a way to access all tabs quickly from the tab bar

2006-10-29T00:47:00.000+01:00

When adding the scrollable tab bar to Camino, we also removed the pop-up menu that lets people who use lots of tabs access them quickly. I submitted a patch today that brings back the pop-up menu and it also shows the current state of the visible / not visible tabs.

There has been some discussion about whether or not this should be an extra button on the tab bar. I think it will work really well because people switching from Firefox / genuine switchers from Windows (IE7) will be used to having a visible button to let them do this. The exact sizes of the buttons are subject to change :)

As usual, a screenshot to demonstrate :)

Internet Explorer 7 vs Camino 1.2+ showdown

2006-10-19T11:31:00.000+01:00

I really wanted to do this comparison using video clips of the OS to show the differences and similarities side-by-side. I couldn't easily find a piece of software for Windows XP that would perform the same function as iShowU does for OS X.

The Internet informed everybody that Internet Explorer 7 was released today. I took some time to check out the changes that Microsoft had made with respect to tabbed browsing.

I really like the New Tab button at the right of the right most visible tab. It is a nice touch and it makes the benefits of tabs more obvious to new users.

When you scroll, you actually change the currently visible tab. I'm not sure what I think about this because is it always the case that you necessarily want to change the currently visible tab?

When you have the left most visible tab as the first tab that you opened, the scroll button is removed from the bar. When you have the right-most visible tab as the last tab you opened, the right scroll bar is visible... a little bit peculiar.

The tab list is quite nice. It uses highlighting to draw attention to which tabs are currently visible in the tab bar. I am currently working on bringing this back to Camino using separators to subtly denote which tabs are currently visible.

There is no click and hold scrolling of tabs - come on guys! The scrolling of tabs is not animated. This is something that people have been pushing for since the start in Camino.

The Quick Tabs button is very nice. It does exactly what I'd like to see Camino do but using Expose similar to Shiira. Also, it felt a little sluggish with 16 tabs on using Quick Tabs. I'm on a Core Duo 1.83 with 1.25GB RAM so I wouldn't expect that to be an issue. I wonder if they do it buy taking a snapshot of each page on the fly and arrange them into a matrix of images. That seems to be the way that Shiira does it considering the initial lag experienced when switching to Tab Expose. It's probably how I'd try to do it in Camino until Stuart told me that I was being a retard ;-)

I have to hand it to them that their product looks extremely polished compared to my summer work. It'd be quite interesting to speak with the people at Microsoft responsible for implementing this, I wonder if they read Blogger...

Hello, hey, hi

2006-10-13T22:20:00.000+01:00

It has been almost 2 calendar months since my project with Google/Mozilla finished. I have continued to work on Camino since the end of August.

The scrolling tab bar patch landed on the trunk of the Camino code on 5th October 2006. As a result there have been at least a dozen follow up bugs - some of them are actually bugs, some of them are feature requests, some of them confuse me.

I have no idea when the scrolling tab bar will make it into a public release of Camino - there are words like 'branch', 'Gecko 1.9', '1.2', '1.5', and '2.0' flying around and I don't understand any of it. Your guess is as good as my guess. If you are keen to try out the new tab bar, then this should allow you to.

Clicking on that link comes with the following health warning taken from here:

We make nightly builds for testing only. We write code and post the results right away so people like you can join our testing process and report bugs. You will find bugs, and lots of them. Mozilla might crash on startup. It might delete all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames. Don't bother downloading nightly builds if you're unwilling to put up with problems.

The Summer of Code was a fantastic way to spend my summer. I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in being a software engineer because the experience I gained was really valuable. It has made me want to develop software when I graduate next summer.

The hardest thing about Summer of Code is getting a slot. There are thousands and thousands of people who apply for 600 slots. I spent ages on my application and made a great impression!

The first 4 lines of my dazzling application

I did spent about 2 weeks writing my application. Making sure that I made the most of my limited to Java experience but didn't lie about it; drawing attention to my previous team experience; trying to convince Mozilla that they should choose me out of 100 hopefuls. I bugged the hell out of #camino to make sure that my application might be something that Mike would be interested in working on.

All of that work to make my application great, to open with the benefits to the Molizza Community - bloody hell. This no doubt made it clear to the selectors for Mozilla that I was a student of the highest calibre.

Everybody who knows me will know that the real reason I took part in SoC was so I could get the t-shirt. It is awesome and presented below in 2 snapshots

The t-shirt itself

A rather handsome man modelling the t-shirt

I tried to convince Mike to take a photograph of himslef wearing his t-shirt - he got two, apparently! He hasn't e-mailed me yet so I guess he decided it was a totally naff idea.

There is an opportunity to visit the Google offices in London where Chris DiBona shall be hosting an afternoon for SoC students. While this could be a great networking opportunity, I am not sure if I can afford to go, or whether I have the time. It looks like it will be a 5 hour train journey to London and a 7 hour train journey back to Edinburgh.

A brief roundup

2006-08-21T17:37:00.000+01:00

Mike and I met for the last time today as Mentor and student.

Mike believes my acheievements this summer are fantastic and that what I was trying to do - coming from a background of no programming experience on Objective-C and Cocoa - was not easy at all.

Mike said that, at best case, I might have been able to get a little bit further with the project. We spoke about the need to buy Stuart a beer to say thanks for all the hard work he put into reviewing my code.

Mike told me that even if I didn't get as much done as I would have liked to, there were students who did *much* less than I did.

I told Mike that I'd be staying on to continue the ever-waging war against the bug list in Camino. I also let him know that when I destroyed my laptop I almost gave up.

I normally transcribe our IRC conversations into prose, but I want to keep this bit as it was:

15:31 <@pinkerton> there's a lot of documentable work here, and a lot of growth and progress, and it's obvious that you learned even more than that just from the experience.
15:31 <@pinkerton> so i'd say it was a successful summer.

I'm looking forward to speaking to Mike, as a friend, in the future :)

I will be posting a longer and much more boring review of my summer experience so you'll probably want to avoid that when I post it next week ;)

T-1: An overview as requested

2006-08-20T21:18:00.000+01:00

Mike requested that I detail my achievements this summer.

I can (arguably) write Objective-C code.

I am becoming increasingly familiar with the Mozilla code review system.

I have designed and nearly implemented a new method for allowing people who use Camino to use a scrolling tab bar.

I have made headway into solving the dragging tabs issue.

I am now being included on newly filed tab related bugs, I think this means that the triagers think I might know some things about how tabs work in Camino.

I have become involved in the Mozilla community through the mailing list, IRC channels and MozillaZine forums.

I engaged in conversation with developers on different projects (Adium and PSMTabBarControl) to see how or if we could work together.

I produced a set of implemenation sketches based on feedback from the community and things that I'd been thinking about.

I submitted 13 work in progress patches on Bug 319777

I destroyed my laptop and lost a week's worth of work as a result.

I submitted 2 work in progress patches on Bug 160720

I started gathering some feedback from people as to how the second iteration of the new tab overflow management interface should look. This is part of my determination to continue my work after the deadline in order to see some of my code make it into Camino.

Things that I've achieved that are important to me, personally:

I am now more able to deal with project related stress. This will be very useful when it comes to writing my dissertation.

I now understand the value of backing up your home directory. This will also be very useful when it comes to writing my dissertation, and also as a good lesson to learn in general.

I am able to take criticism of my work and look at it as constructively as I possibly can. Stuart has spent most of the last 2 months reviewing my code submissions and even though he is strict and insists on doing things his way, he seems to be right and is always willing to discuss why and most importantly, he isn't rude about it.

I am able to work with a group of people who are in a different time zone, have different interests in the Camino project, have different opinions about which direction things should be moving in.

I now know that the first time you try something it's probably not going to be right and that things will probably never be right the first time round but that is no reason to be disheartened.

Things that I wish I had achieved:

I had managed to get a single positive review of my code, and in return, a super-review from Mike.

I had managed to make more progress on the tab dragging aspect of my project

I had managed to get some real usability feedback of my work from a larger group of people than Smokey and Stuart

Penultimate Meeting

2006-08-18T17:33:00.000+01:00

After 3 weeks without having a formal meeting Mike and I met today to discuss what the end-game was for the project.

I showed Mike the image the I sneaked out yesterday showing the overflow menu coming back. He said that he thought it looked cluttered and that right-click on either of the scroll buttons would work. He liked the idea of using dividers to split up the menu list showing which tabs are overflowing on either side.

Mike was pleased to see that I've made some progress on dragging tabs and he is keen to see the work that I have been doing between submitting WIP1 and WIP2 of 160720. There are some cute problems associated with |shouldDragFrom| so I'll need to get some pencil and paper out to sort it.

I've got to plough through lots of work this weekend but Mike believes that there should be a middle-ground compromise of reaching the immediate deadline and thinking about my work over the longer term of getting the code into Camino.

We have set a meeting for Monday at 9AM EDT to have a final mull over the project. I've got to write a summary on my blog this weekend of what I have achieved and learnt this summer, where I have made mistakes and what we can take from this whole experience.

I had some concerns about today's meeting because it has been a long time since we had spoken, but it turns out that I really do just worry about nothing most of the time.

T-4: A sneak preview

2006-08-17T20:22:00.000+01:00

This pop-up menu is only visible when tabs are overflowing, it allows quick access to any tab and also provides a contextual overview of all of your tabs.

Tabs above the first divider are overflowing to the left, tabs after the 2nd divider are overflowing to the right. This is just a little sneak peak because there are still some interesting problems to iron out before I could even dream of showing a video. A massive thanks to James for suggesting the dividers idea in the comments.

The buttons at either side are capable of showing their state - they are greyed out when it is not possible to scroll any further in that direction.

After I properly hack the code relating to selecting a menu item, the tabs will slide to show this tab in the tab bar.

I am much happier with the interface that I am now working on.

I'm off out to the pub to have a birthday beer with my friends.

You can make statistics tell you whatever you want! (Camino almost has the same 'market share' as Safari!)

2006-08-17T10:03:00.000+01:00

This information is based on the previous 1,000 visits to my blog

Safari: 26.5%
Camino: 26.1%
Firefox: 23%
Mozilla: 10.8%
Internet Explorer: 7.8%
OmniWeb: 2.2%
Opera: 1.4%
Galeon: 0.1%

We all know that statistics can be skewed to mean different things.

You could probably say that these show that most people who are reading my blog are reading it using a Macintosh - Safari + Camino + OmniWeb = 54.8%.

You could also say that Gecko based browsers are the most popular - Camino + Firefox + Mozilla = 59.9%.

All that I am going to read into is that there are nearly as many people using Camino as there are using Safari and that makes me smile.

Happy birthday

2006-08-17T00:05:00.000+01:00

I am 23 years old, time to get back to work.

T-5: New proposal for approach to overflow management and tab dragging

2006-08-16T22:24:00.000+01:00

A more solid proposal for how overflow management and tab dragging could work in Camino in the future. I've spent a lot of time this summer working on ideas that were never really well set, but I've done a lot of listening and this almost feels like what people are expecting to see

An overview

When you open up too many tabs to fit in the tab bar then overflow management will change the appearance of the tab bar as shown above. This new tab bar has a set of pop-up menu buttons - one at either side - and a set of scroll buttons - one at either side. This allows people who use tabs heavily to retain their access to the pop-up menu that they are used to, or for casual users to use the scroll buttons like they would in Finder.

The pop-up buttons

The pop-up buttons at either side behave exactly as the single pop-up button currently behaves in Camino, with a few extensions.

When you click on a pop-up button it presents you with a list of tabs that are overflown at that side. This keeps a sense of position in the tab bar over the currently visible tabs. If you click on a tab from the pop-up menu then that tab is made either left-most or right-most in the tab bar - this depends on whether or not you click on a menu item in the left or right pop-up menu respectively.

As a result of selecting the tab at the bottom of this list you have selected to make the first tab left-most. One of the complaints I have received with regards to what I was working on was that it was difficult to tell whether or not you could scroll in a direction anymore because the difference between an active and inactive button is not always obvious.

An attempt to deal with this is to remove the pop-up menu button and scroll button from the tab bar if there are no overflown tabs in that direction. I believe that this goes some way towards eliminating any such confusion.

The scroll buttons

The scroll buttons allow you to slide along the tabs to change the tabs that are currently visible in the tab bar. You can click and hold the mouse on a button and the tabs will continue to slide in that direction until you release the mouse, or, there are no more tabs left to slide.

Dragging tabs

Dragging tabs is something that people have been asking to be able to do for years. The way that is is done in the bookmark bar does not give you much feedback while you are dragging and plans are to make tab dragging more interactive.

To drag a tab you can pull the tab out of the tab bar. This will cause the surrounding tabs to slide to fill in the space that the tab you are dragging is leaving.

If you want to drop the tab within the current set of visible tabs then just drag it back into the tab bar and this places that tab where your mouse pointer is located at. This happens while you are dragging the tab, letting go of the tab finalises the placement. Pressing escape will allow you to change your mind and the tab will go back to where it was before you started the drag.

Dragging to a totally different part of the tab bar

If you want to drag a tab from it's current location to a totally different part of the tab bar then you can hover over a scroll button with a tab image dragging. This will cause the tabs to slide in that direction until you find where you want to put your tab.

When you have found where you want to put your tab, move the mouse pointer away from the scroll button and drag it into the tab bar to place it there. Easy.

One of the problems with dragging is that if you have access to a pop-up menu and a scroll button you might think you can drag and drop into the pop-up menu. That is not possible using Apple's implementation and I've already spent the summer twisting the way that tab view items work so the thought of twisting pop-up menus is daunting. In short, you will not be able to drag a tab into a pop up menu until Apple support that.

Some questions:

Is the UI too clunky having both a pop-up menu button and a scroll button? Would it be better to have a scroll button that allowed access to a pop-up menu using a right-click or a Command-click?
Are there any really obvious defects in this design that I just cannot see because I've spent nearly my whole summer working on it?

I'm sure that you can see that I am pretty good at Photoshop. I know all the best tricks and even managed to make my images look like I did them using pen, pencil, paper and blue-tac. Blogger crashed on me twice while writing this post so I'm a little bit challenged for patience right now.

Hope to receive some really useful feedback so that what I am now working on will be what people expect to see in Camino.

Edit

After some great feedback, I'm looking at this...

When tabs are overflowing there are 2 buttons at either side which show an enabled or disabled state depending on whether or not you can scroll in that direction. There is also a pop-up menu at the far side of the tab bar which contains a list of all the tabs that you have open.

When you click on the pop-up button the tick represents that tab that is currently selcted, as you can see, the tab with title "tab2" is the selected tab.

If you select a tab that is not currently being shown in the tab bar then the tabs slide to show this tab in the tab bar. Perhaps in the middle as has been suggested.

T-6: Almost dragging between windows, propsed detailed plans for new tab overflow interface nearly ready

2006-08-15T17:02:00.000+01:00

I have spent most of the day battle with trying to get a deeper understanding on the NSDragging protocols. When a user drags a tab from one window and into another the tab needs to be simultaneously removed from the source window and added to the destination window.

I could remove the tab from the tab bar when the user drags it out the bar, and then add it into a tab bar when a user drags it into a tab bar, or create a new window if the user releases the mouse button when they let do of the tab when they are not in the tab bar. Somebody just pointed out to me that they would expect this to remove the tab item.

Any thoughts?

T-7: Wedding (Off topic), Dragging, Cheque

2006-08-14T20:16:00.000+01:00

The wedding was quite the event. The bride looked beautiful, I've never thought that brides looked beautiful in photos, but in real life they are stunning. She was so nervous that she had tears rolling down her face. I had to work hard to keep the stiff upper lip.

We had a buffet which was nice because it meant that you got to eat what you wanted instead of what somebody else thought you might. A waiter spilt a bellini all over me as soon as we sat down at the table so I had to go and change into ... jeans and a t-shirt. How shameful! I washed up my suit jacket as best as I could so I could wear it over and still look a little bit smart. The father of the bride told me that it was alright and I still looked smart so that was good enough for me.

People in England can smoke indoors, this was quite a strange thing because we have had a smoking ban for nearly 6 months now. Also, the English don't have ceilidhs (from what I was told), they have discos. I couldn't really get into the disco but I love nothing better than a ceilidh. We got a bottle of wine from the bar and it tasted like acid. We had to mix it with lemonade to make a punch.

I rewrote the tab dragging patch. What I wrote on Friday was total nonsense and this morning's offering was much better. I am writing a custom image for the user to drag, but suspect that this will be an iterative process because I can't see exactly how to get what I want but can easily create a transparent rectangle with borders. The patch now supports dragging to arbitrary places and should support dragging between Camino windows shortly.

I received my midterm paycheque from Google today and cashed it with my bank. I was pleased with the greater level of communication that LH engaged in with us during the issuing of this cheque and might even send her an e-mail to let her know that it is appreciated.

I've asked for a meeting on 28th August to have some post-project chat with the Camino team. It is important to talk about things when a project is over because there are always lessons to be learned.

T-10: Tab dragging WIP demonstration

2006-08-11T16:24:00.000+01:00

Without further ado,

Tab dragging first demonstration (Yay!)

Things worth noticing:

Dragging favicons is still different to dragging tabs
Dragging a tab does not affect the state of the information inside the tab - I have shown this by dragging a tab that contains some text in the Google search field. This works for audio and video too (I love Ze Frank)
Things might look a little bit slow to react. I think that is because I'm still developing on a 700MHz G4 with 384 MB RAM.

Things that I might appreciate feedback on:

When should tabs switch position? As soon as the mouse pointer is hovering over a different tab? When the mouse pointer is more than a certain % across the tab you want to move it to?
How much animation does this need to become a useful tool? Does it need any animation at all?

I have found it quite difficult this week with Mike being away at WWDC, I wish I was at WWDC.

I am going to a wedding this weekend (not mine, don't worry!) so I shall return on Monday and sit infront of my computer until the end of SoC. There might even be some time for sleeping and eating and washing.

PS I am super scared of submitting my patch to BugZilla because I know that it is hacky and that Stuart will roar at his computer screen when he reads it.

PPS Sorry to the people who read all of my posts for the whiney state of affairs that you have had to put up with recently, it's full steam ahead from now on.

T-11: Stop cheating, Desmond.

2006-08-10T23:18:00.000+01:00

I noticed that the way I was dragging tabs was totally cheating and so I've had to go back to the drawing board to try and do it correctly. I had a massive panic about having to store entire tab view items because that would be a nightmare that I'd rather avoid. I think I can do it using the index of that tab that a user starts their drag from. I'll find out about that tomorrow.

I went out for coffee with some friends this afternoon. One of them asked me if it was weird to be outside with real people. I've not done much of that since I decided that I wanted to make some extra work for myself and poured juice all over my laptop.

A little snippet from IRC that made me laugh:

23:36 < froodian> !seen ardissone|away
23:36 < thebot> ardissone|away was last seen 17 hours, 58 minutes and 43 seconds ago, saying '!seen froodian' in #camino.

T-12: Mostly rambling today

2006-08-09T17:15:00.000+01:00

There was no T-13 because I had a super mega headache and only worked in the afternoon.

As everybody knows it takes at least an hour in the morning to read your e-mails, everything that you check everyday in your favourite RSS reader, and your favourite Web 2.0 site (this one takes too much time). Then all of a sudden it is 10.30am and it is time for coffee. Since you make your coffee from a coffee machine, you like to take some time to really enjoy the experience. After you come down from the shakes of your stronger-than-something-strong-coffee.

Then you start to watch Ze Frank and then it is 11.30 and you've not even opened XCode yet. But it is alright because you've been thinking about the mountain of code that you need to write. You've got loads of ideas about stuff but unfortunately the code base you are working with is soo complicated sometimes you struggle to find where you need to start.

I've been having fun with the NSPasteboard seemingly losing the tabs that I place in it while I am dragging them. This didn't happen 2 days ago so I must have done something stupid between then and now. I've also had some fun playing with NSAnimation and NSTimer classes, but these ventures have not been very successful. It's hard to learn how things work without toying with them to understand them, but I've not really got much time left for understanding.

And so the daily grind continues.

T-14; WWDC

2006-08-07T13:01:00.000+01:00

14 days to go and still soo much work to do.

WWDC is happening today. I hope they release new Mac Minis, I've been waiting for Revision 2 to buy one.

I had a great conversation with Stuart Morgan last night about scrolling tabs. Dragging tags is nearly there, I just have some peculiar problems. Dragging tabs doesn't work with overflowing tabs yet because the mere thought of dragging from a NSMenu into the tab bar makes me wince.

I'm preparing an e-mail to send to Jon Hicks to get his thoughts.

I'll be posting a video demonstrating draggable tabs within the next 48 hours.

Re: Disaster

2006-08-03T14:19:00.000+01:00

I have been quoted £719 to repair my MacBook.

£432 for a new logic board
£90 for 2 new 256MB sticks of RAM
£75 for a new top
£62 for a new Airport Card
£60 for delivery.

I didn't even catch whether or not this price includes VAT or not, eek.

The lesson to be learnt here is do not drink anything near your laptop. But that was pretty obvious anyway.

I have almost got tab-scrolling back to where it was and tab-dragging is nearly back to where it should be too. I'm just having a bit of a mental block when it comes to dealing with resizing the window programmatically.

Nearly all of the tab-dragging code has been re-done and it now makes much more sense. I've taken Stuart Morgan's comments onboard and implemented them. However, as a result, I've touched many more files than I had before.

I promised #camino that I'd submit tab-dragging tomorrow evening so I had better get back to XCode.

Paris!

2006-08-01T13:55:00.000+01:00

This will be the only post that I make that is unrelated to GSoC.

I have spent the last 4 days in Paris on my summer holiday.

I visited the Notre Dame Cathedral and was overwhelmed by the unbelievable architecture in the building. It was quite a spiritual experience, complete with a singing choir.

I visited Musee de Louvre and found their diverse collection of art fascinating. The Mona Lisa is not tiny, contrary to what many people say; the Venus de Milo was impressive, as was the whole collection of French sculpture; the Egyptian collection was fantastic, there was even a mummy! I could have spent days in the museum...

I went to the top of La Tour Eiffel and was almost sick when I looked down and saw high up that I was. There was no queue and I walked to the 2nd floor, which I regretted about half-way up! I also visited the Trocadero and took some photographs.

I met a friend and we had some coffee, sushi, and a bottle of Petit Chablis. The wine in France was fantastic and very well priced!

I didn't see L'Arc de Triomphe, which was disappointing.

I ate frogs legs, which have the same texture as chicken; fresh crepes which were amazing; far too many pain au chocolat; and drank lots of wine.

I will certainly go back to Paris - time and time again.

Disaster.

2006-07-26T10:49:00.000+01:00

I spilled a full bottle of Lucozade over my MacBook and it immediately shutdown. I had no backup of my work. I had not committed my work on tab dragging to BugZilla.

I only have an iMac G4 700Mhz with 384MB RAM to code on until this has been fixed. I may aswell be coding on a BBC Computer.

End of 2nd month assessment

2006-07-19T09:22:00.000+01:00

Shortly after my first end of month assessment I submitted my first patch to BugZilla. On reflection is was a disaster and the code was nowhere near it needed to be. At that time I was naive enough to think my patch would see r+ approval by the end of that week. I am still working on this patch and iterating it. I am currently on my 4th formal submission and things are getting closer to being feature complete. There are still some huge problems with the design of the code but I am working with the close reviews of Stuart Morgan, Nick Kreeger, and Bruce Davidso to improve things.

I posted a video to show the people of the world exactly what Camino was getting for it's money. It sparked quite a lot of discussion between people on IRC and people in the Comments. A lot of this discussion was negative and certainly detrimental to the progress that I have been trying to make. I had to block out most of the 'community' for a couple of weeks because I was hearing was that what I was doing was a massive mistake and that people did not want it. I guess these problems were me own doing since I had been very keen to hear what people thought about things, I just struggled to deal with all the negativity.

(This feels like something I would post to LiveJournal, if I had an account)

Pink and I agreed that it was time to get some work done on the 2nd milestone - dragging tabs to re-arrange them in the tab bar. Progress on dragging tabs has been terrible in comparison to progress on the scrolling-tab bar. I tried working on scrolling tabs in the morning and dragging tabs in the afternoon which was a complete disaster.

I also probably made a mountain out of a molehill with respect to receiving my pay cheques from Google. I received my first cheque the other day. The cheque was dated 20th June 2006 and the date it was sent (dated on the parcel) was 12th July. It arrived on 17th July. I don't know what the cheque did between 20th June and the 12th July, I just hope it doesn't take that long for the 2nd cheque to arrive. I don't really feel it is a good idea for me to talk negatively about the hand that feeds so I'll cut short this part of the assessment.

I finally have a Safari Bookshelf Account. We are able to take out 10 books at a time, sadly nearly all of the books that I have any interest in taking out are books that I have already had to buy to learn Objective-C and Cocoa. I'm sure that with nearly 4,000 books to choose from there will be other things that interest me. It is actually quite nice of O'Reilly to give us this for free, so a big thanks to Chris DiBona at Google who seems to have spent quite a while negotiating it for us.

I showed off a new work in progress demonstration much to the delight of Pink. It felt good to get some more code out of the door and into the BugZilla torture chamber. I only need to add 3 more features to make tab-scrolling feature complete but they are by far the most difficult things to do.

I am very concerned about the progress that I have been making on draggable tabs. I need to stop working on scrolling tabs during the day and really focus my efforts of draggable tabs. I only have one more month to reach the targets of this project and I honestly cannot see it happening at the moment. Considering how long it has taken me to get my scrolling tabs patch through BugZilla to a stage where people think it might be a couple more iterations away from R+ which is fantastic to hear, but also leaves me really concerned that draggable tabs will not land on time and I will fail to reach the goals of my project.

I need to pull myself together and start working harder. There would be nothing worse than to have come this far and not acheive what I set out to do.

(I will probably re-read this later on today and re-word some things or cut complete sections / add new sections)

An unproductive day, 8 weeks GSoC tomorrow, 10,000 readers

2006-07-18T21:23:00.000+01:00

Today was really unproductive. I spent the morning flustering over figuring out how to make sure that my NSButton objects on the tab bar actually responded to mouseDown and mouseUp events so that I can enable 2 much needed features. Double-click will allow users to scroll a full tab bar width of tabs at a time, and click-and-hold-down-on-button will continue to scroll through the tabs until the user lets go of the mouse or the final tab is reached.

I also tried to implement Stuart Morgan's recommendation to refactor |layoutTabs| which is sorely needed as it is over 200 lines long but I struggled get my head around how to get it done. I have decided to sleep on it and hopefully tomorrow things will make sense.

As of tomorrow I will have been a Google Summer of Code Student for 8 weeks. I really need to start getting a move on or I will not finish my project on time. I will write an evaluation of the last month tomorrow so that I can take a look back on my progress.

On a slightly more positive note, more than 10,000 different people (based on a cookie that the counter uses to keep a track of who has visited) have read my blog since I started the counter on Friday 30th June.

Cheque!, hammered by Blogs of Note, Monday

2006-07-17T13:10:00.000+01:00

My first cheque arrived today so I am off to the bank to cash this baby. It has been a long time since I had some income so this feels good! I would post a photo of it but somebody would use it to steal my identity or something crazy.

As you can see below, being listed on the Blogger.com Blogs of Note page sharply increased the number of visitors to my blog. I average about 100 - 200 per day except when I haven't posted anything because I am a lazy bugger.

I have spent this morning iterating WIP4 and will spend the rest of the day working on trying to make M1 feature complete alongside discussing my logic, or lack of logic with the reviewers.

Orlando Salcedo has linked to my blog, as has Alex King - thanks guys!

Edit: I forgot to include this earlier so I decided to include it now when I noticed that the title of this post was incorrect. I recently turned on Comment Moderation and I've had to reject about a dozen comments so far. I rejected a comment that was actually a valid comment so here it is in all its glory:

Yeah Oh Unbelievable Really
But Little Open Great
Silly Ugly Cool Kill Sad.

decode the secret message and the truth will be revealed

I based my opinion of the final sentence, but after I actually decoded the message it seems like it was a valid comment. Senor Cheeseburger should have been allowed to express his thoughts, it is a shame he made it look like spam!

Comment moderation, YouTube?!

2006-07-14T12:18:00.000+01:00

I have decided to turn on comment moderation due to the number of people leaving spam comments. I hope that this will stop the comments from being filled with posts that do not contribute anything.

In other news, Justin Williams of MacZealots fame has a rather charming comment in a link to my latest WIP demonstration on his blog:

Google's Summer of Code is certainly paying off for the Camino project.

Thanks Justin, that makes me smile :)

And rather bizarrely, the WIP3 demonstration has been YouTubed...

WIP4 demonstration

2006-07-13T15:10:00.000+01:00

It is over 24 hours late, but I wasn't slacking, honest. While I was recording the Quicktime movie I noticed some bugs, then I noticed some more and some more and I ended up working on the code until 1am. Then after a good sleep I figured out how to make full keyboard access work and all is good.

Allow me to talk you through this new demo [24MB, Qucktime H.264. If you have any problems viewing this in your browser please try downloading it to your desktop and watching it.]

I used Boinx Mousepose 2 to put a spotlight around the mouse pointer to make things easier to follow. The action is not always where the spotlight is though! Also, the mouse pointer drags behind the mouse from time to time, I think this is a problem with iShowU.
After selecting the Bookmark Manager I open up lots of tabs so that overflow is activated. At this point you should try to notice that the scroll left button is disabled, the scroll right button is enabled.
You can scroll to the left and right to show the tabs in the tab bar changing appropriately
You can change the currently active tab using the keyboard (command+option+-> or command+option+<-) and the tab bar behaves itself.
A hyperlink is selected to open in a new tab and as new tabs are not set to open in the background the tab bar slides to have this new tab as the right-most tab.
Resizing the window doesn't break anything anymore.
Now I open a 2nd window and cause it to overflow just to show that things work in my than one window - at the end you can see that the status of the 2 seperate tab bars really are different but the status of the icons.

Status of M1: WIP patch 4 is ready to be submitted for the displeasure of the reviewers.

Current Bugs (that I have noticed):

Double clicking on a disabled scroll button creates a new tab.
There are some hilarious drawing issues, from time to time, that don't make sense.
There is probably a lovely memory leak because after I've been playing for a while it takes up to 10 seconds to close Camino.
Full keyboard access current allows a user to go from tab 0 to tab n -1 back to tab 0 if they continue in that direction, I need to fix this, it is insane.

Features that need to be added:

Users should be able to double-click to jump a tab-bar width number of tabs in either direction.
Animated sliding!

Are the lack of these features blocking this patch from being super-reviewed? Only Pink knows. If I can get some feedback on my latest patch and iron out the bugs in it then maybe he might think about a SR+

Welcome Blogger.com readers!

2006-07-11T20:56:00.000+01:00

It has been drawn to my attention that I have been listed on the blogger.com Blogs of Note ticker - awesome! I decided to put together a little post so that people can get a quick overview of what this blog is about.

I am a Google Summer of Code student working with Mozilla on their Camino browser. I blog my thoughts, ideas, and the progress (or lack of) on my project. These links might be of interest to you if you fancy getting a quick aquaintance with my blog:

If I had not taken the advice of a close friend, I might have put up with AdSense adverts in the sidebar and then maybe I could have had some free as in beer money! But she was right, it was not ethically sound and nobody looks at adverts anyway!

M1 draws nearer, WIP4 tomorrow

2006-07-11T17:22:00.000+01:00

The aim of M1, as stated in the summary for the bug that I am working on was

When a tab in the overflow menu is active, highlight the overflow menu (or scroll the tab bar).

I really do not like the overflow menus in Safari, or Camino. They do not feel like a nice and clean way to deal with the problem. It turns out that there isn't actually a nice and clean way to deal with the problem and that I will probably have to allow people to use overflow menus as a control-click option. Or that the whole ticker-style implementation might need to be dropped and I'll have to have double overflow menus which simply bring the active tab and the tabs around it into the tab bar. (In retrospect, that would have been a thousand times easier to implement, but it is not nearly as pretty). However, I stand by my decision to implement it as a ticker bar because the point of M2 is to allow users to drag tabs to reposition them and the mere thought of having users drag things out of menus makes my head hurt.

It turns out that the people developing Firefox 2 are also working on a ticker-bar for their tabs. Is this a case of great minds think alike or that fools differ?

Jasper Hauser proposed that things should look like this. Things do kind of look like that, I have removed the double headed arrows and replaced them with some shoddily ripped direction arrows as you are used to seeing in all OS X scrollbars. Hopefully when Jasper is less busy he can provide us with some really nice icons.

The following features / benefits will be available to users:

When a user has more tabs than what can currently fit into the tab bar, two arrows will appear at their side of the bar that indicate their state (disabled if a user cannot scroll in that direction)
Clicking on either of these arrows allows a user to scroll along their tabs in that direction, it this is possible.
If a user expands the window and there are more tabs to right then these tabs shall be shown first; if the user has expanded the window and there are no more tabs to the right then start showing more tabs to the left.
If a user shrinks the window and then the active tab will always stay visible in the tab bar - at the right most of the tab bar is the shrinking causes it to not be in the tab bar.
If a user has scrolled away from the active tab to the left and use full keyboard access to change the currently active tab then the tab bar will scroll back to show the active tab left-most. If they are scrolled away to the right then and FKA commands issued to Camino will cause the active tab to be the right-most.
Newly created tabs that are not set to load in the background will always grab the attention and shift the tab bar so that the right-most tab is the newly created tab. *

I plan to post another video tomorrow showing each of these features because some of them are easier to have an opinion on based on actually seeing them.

Simon Fraser has continuously voiced his opposition to a scrolling tab bar because he believes it to be bad for positional memory. Although he appears to have softened up ever so slightly if I animate the scrolling. Having the tabs visually move is not a requirement for WIP4, and is more of a polishing exercise that will be part of WIP5. I think that Pink might be happy enough to SR+ WIP4 after it has been R+ (which might take a few iterations)

The are only 3 bugs - in terms of what I have tried to achieve:

Click-and-hold does not continue to scroll along the tabs in the appropriate direction.
If the active tab is to the left then there is no divider drawn between the left scroll button and the first tab (I know what it causing this, but am flummoxed as to how to fix it)
I forgot the third one.

For WIP5 I plan to include animated scrolling of the tabs, and perhaps double-clicking on the arrow will shift the tabs along by # of visible tabs at a time - a la Dashboard - for the people who have lots of tabs open to get places faster.

Hopefully some real user testing after being SR+d will point out the subtle problems and performance issues.

* This makes me wonder whether or not opening links in a new tab should create that tab to the immediate right of the currently active tab or not. But that is a conversation for another day!

Dragging tabs, lack of sleep, concurrent projects

2006-07-06T17:08:00.000+01:00

Progress on achieving M2 has been slow this week. My lack of sleep is destroying my ability to concentrate. I manage about 4 hours per night and those are normally interrupted hours. I've touched all of the files that I believe I need to to implement tab dragging and I've started writing the code for it but I just cannot get into the swing of things.

I've been trying to work on overflowing tabs in the morning and dragging tabs in the afternoons and this is just not working out. I'm going to change to working 2 days/week on overflowing tabs and 3 days/week on dragging tabs.

I need to have some more work completed soon so I can continue to show people videos of what I have been doing! I feel like I'm spending a lot of time fine tuning overflowing tabs and the differences are not all that noticable to the user.

I've got a job interview tomorrow for the Edinburgh International Film Festival!

Google are looking into where my first pay cheque is, and I think that Pink has submitted my midterm evaluation. It will probably say exactly the same as every school report did "Has some potential, must try harder" - we all know the feeling.

Mighty Mouse, MooBook, Mentor Survey!

2006-07-04T09:22:00.000+01:00

I bought a Mighty Mouse! (I feel the need to exclaim because it sounds ever so grand) because every new desktop Mac seems to ship with one so it made sense to also program in full mouse control of the scrolling tabs at some point. £35 is one heck of an expensive mouse.

My MacBook moos at me.

The progress of my interim evaluation. Google have set the deadline for tomorrow which is a little silly seeing as every Mentor who lives in the USA will have been celebrating Independence Day weekend.

Finally, we are meant to get in touch with Google if we have not received our first paycheck by tomorrow and considering that I have not even received a tracking e-mail for it yet, it is not likely to magically appear. I need to eat!

An assortment of thoughts

2006-07-03T10:09:00.000+01:00

I 'installed' a StatCounter on the blog template on Friday to keep track of how many people are reading and where they are coming from. You will pick up a cookie as a result and the nice people at StatCounter assure me that this is used to determine if you are a returning visitor and to determine how long your visit lasts.

I stalked Mike on Wikipedia last night and found out that people call him Pink and that he likes cats.

Before the tab scrolling patch goes into the trunk it needs the following done - click and hold needs to scroll until the end of the tabs in that direction; opening new tabs needs to shift the tabs so that the most recently opened tab is the right-most tab; the buttons at either side need to indicate state. Furthermore, animated movement will be a requirement, but for the first submission to trunk.

This week I will be working in the mornings on the tab-scrolling patch and in the afternoons on the tab-dragging patch.

Finally, Daring Fireball, MacUser, Digg, Giles Turnbull (again, thanks!), and John Hicks linked to my blog so a massive thanks to them for paying attention.

Bug fixing is fun (not)

2006-06-28T17:02:00.000+01:00

Bugs that still exist in the code:

Newly created tabs that are selected do not cause the tab bar to scroll along to make it the right-most tab.
If a tab is currently selected and is to the immediate right/left of the tab bar then there is no divider.
The current implementation does not obey the Full Keyboard Access rules that are currently in place <- a massive headache!

It took me longer than I expected to fix some of these bugs today. I will need to try and rattle through these tomorrow morning so I can get onto the tab-dragging code before Friday. After I have fixed these final bugs - and it has already been suggested that the first one might require an additional patch to fix, and I've not even thought about the third, but it is related to the first - I will post another video of the behaviour and perhaps a Universal Build that people can play with over the weekend.

Rant, apology

2006-06-28T14:02:00.000+01:00

I ranted at somebody who has been a great help to me so far. I didn't mean to rant directly at him, I should have posted my concerns to my blog and made them more general instead of them sounding like me shouting at one person in particular.

Sorry!

Visual representation of M1

2006-06-26T23:09:00.000+01:00

Since tomorrow is a 20% day I have decided to post a short movie this evening. The hope is that by the time I return on Wednesday morning there will be some reasonable feedback based on what you see.

I used iShowU to create this Quicktime movie. It cost me $20 and I'm pretty happy with it so far. No, I didn't get iShowU for free and I am not being forced to promote it.

So, without further ado, a tab-scrolling Camino demonstration! (4.6MB)

Bugs that still exist in the code:

Newly created tabs that are selected do not cause the tab bar to scroll along to make it the right-most tab.
The current scroll buttons do no indicate whether or not it is possible to scroll further in that direction.
Resizing the window while scrolled away from the left-most tab causes re-draw problems.
If a tab is currently selected and is to the immediate right/left of the tab bar then there is no divider.
Upon closing a tab that is right-most in the tab bar the tabs are not resized correctly. This is a regression from the first patch submission to the second patch submission.

The only open bug that causes me any concern is the first one. Bruce has suggested that it might take a further patch to fix that problem.

Some open problems that I'd appreciate feedback on:

If a user has 100 tabs open, how can we make it easy for them to scroll to the tab that they want to get to?
How should a user be able to determine how many tabs they have in the active window?
How animated should the scrolling transition in the tab bar be?

I have no idea how many people read this blog daily, so I hope that it is not too much of a bandwidth hit for the host!

Progress on Milestone 1

2006-06-26T20:34:00.000+01:00

Spent today attempting to bug fix, make some good progress and only have 4 'bugs / features' of my code to iron out:

1. Newly created tabs do not cause the tab bar to scroll to make it the right-most tab.
2. The current icons do not indicate whether or not you can scroll any futher in that direction.
3. The left-most visible tab index is not being changed when you resize the window.
4. If a tab is currently selected and it is to the immediate left or right of the tab bar then there is not divider drawn.

My code is currently undergoing it's second review by Bruce Davidson and Nick Kreeger. They are firm but fair and their feedback is really constructive. I need to watch my indentation and the way I set out my if { ... } else { ... } statements, watch how I name variables, and watch my comments.

Since tomorrow is my 20% day - true Google style, without the massive Google paycheck - I plan to have these problems ironed out by the end of Wednesday. I also plan to post the small video that I promised earlier on Wednesday evening.

Ian rightly pointed out that my patch will never make it into the trunk by the weekend - I will make a post when it eventually gets in there.

First patch submited, bug fixing continues

2006-06-26T11:53:00.000+01:00

I submitted my first patch on Friday. The code doesn't quite work, but as Mike predicated the review process has been pretty valuable. I've been fixing the nits and picks in the patch this morning and plan to spend this afternoon ironing out the redraw bugs that are plaguing the code.

I'm hoping that by Wednesday I can have this patch ready for a final submission and hopefully it will be r+ and in the trunk by the weekend for those of you who use the nightly builds to play with.

When I iron out these bugs I will be posting a small Quicktime Movie file of what a scrolling tab bar looks like - this is for those of you not wanting to use nightly builds but are still interested in seeing the progress.

TinderWidget

2006-06-22T16:30:00.000+01:00

Nick Kreeger, one of the Camino developers, has written one of the most superb little Widgets I've ever used!

If you write code for Camino and you don't have this then go get it.

My end of month assessment

2006-06-21T21:59:00.000+01:00

This is probably going to be a long post, this is a warning.

I decided to write this because Mike has to submit an evaluation of me on the 30th June, but I do not have to submit an evaluation of him until 5th September and I thought he might like to know more about how I've been doing. This is my evaluation of my first month as a Summer of Code student.

Exactly 4 weeks ago today I was informed by Google that I had been accepted to the Summer of Code Program. I was pretty excited upon hearing the news. I had spent about 2 weeks meticulously preparing my proposal and chatting with the Camino developers on their IRC channel to hone my proposal to something that either Mike or Mark would be interested in. I was in the middle of my junior honours exam diet at the time which put even more pressure on writing a good proposal.

After celebrating with a few beers and a few friends I started on my proposed schedule. I almost immediately consulted the community to see if they could suggest anything additional to my proposal. There were probably about 100 comments between the mailing-list and the MozillaZine forum - some of them posed interesting questions, some of them were not quite as interesting...

One of the most important things for me to do during this project was to be as transparent as possible with the community. When Aaron and Hakan came to the WWW Conference in Edinburgh and we met up for a beer I remeber Aaron saying to me "If you think you want to do something that will benefit the community, then go for it!" I'm not sure if that was before or after a few beers :)

During this time I purchased a copy of Cocoa Programming for OS X (an essential text-book for people who want to learn Cocoa, as recommended by Hakan), a copy of the Objective-C Pocket Reference, Cocoa in a Nutshell, and The C Programming Language. I religiously read and work through 2 chapters of Cocoa Programming for OS X every weekday. I also take time to make notes and build daft applications to help me experiment.

At the end of the community consultation the Camino developers, and some assorted lurkers joined in our IRC conversation to discuss everything that people had suggested. We chatted for about 90 minutes and to be honest we cut out most of the suggestions as OFFTOPIC, or WONTFIX. A wiki page was created as as result and I now use that as a central location to keep focused, on topic information about my project available.

Mike and I begun to meet every Friday to discuss my progress, my concerns, his thoughts, his concerns. This was one of the first things that we agreed should happen so that we don't get to the end of the summer and I've done nothing.

I have grown to hate XCode with a passion - it drains life from me. It breaks all the time and sometimes it doesn't pay any attention to anything I try to tell it to do. I had the same experience with Eclipse. Give me vim and some command line tools any day of the week!

I had a bit of a rocky time during my first implementation week due to my exam results trickling out day by day and causing me some severe stress and lack of sleep. Thankfully Mike didn't roar at me for this but took the time to let me know that if I didn't let him know about these things then there wasn't much he could do to help me.

This week has been much more productive, I posted some images earlier on showing my progress and I am planning to have something in BugZilla by Thursday night, Friday night at the latest.

As I wrote this post I recieved an e-mail from LH at Google informing all SoC students:

... if your mentor does not feel you've made
sufficient progress on your project, you will be dropped from the
program and no further payments will be issued to you.

I'm hoping that this is not going to be a problem, but I will be working double-time to make sure that I get my patches submitted to BugZilla before 26th June. I'm not going to ask Mike directly about what he is going to write because as it says on the Student FAQ:

Mentors evaluations of students will be reviewed by Google's program administrators, but won't be released to students unless requested by the mentoring organization's administrator(s). Students reviews of mentors will be shared with Google's program administrators and with the mentoring organization's administrator(s), but not with the student's mentor unless requested by the student. In the case where the mentoring organization's administrator and the mentor are one and the same, the student evaluation will be shared with the mentor. In some cases, Google's program administrators may need to share the results of the evaluations with the student and/or the mentor to arbitrate when payment should not be made; should this need arise, all parties will be notified in advance.

Mike has never said to me that I need to work harder, so I reckon that as long as I reach my first milestone I stand a good chance of being kept on.

As a result of this e-mail from LH, the importance of me getting my patches submitted to BugZilla by the weekend have just increased ten-fold.

I suppose I should talk about the Google side of things now. I have still not received my first $500 pay cheque. It looked like we would be getting O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf accounts but nothing has come of that. Oh, I got a free leather notebook from Google...

Things that I need to do ASAP:

Submit my proof of enrollment to Google
Submit my academic transcript to Google
Fill in the abstract for my project
Get my patches into BugZilla by Friday
Buy some new trainers

Some implementation images (at last I hear Mike say!)

2006-06-21T18:30:00.000+01:00

Less tabs than the width of the tab bar

More tabs than the width of the tab bar

This is what happens when you resize Camino

You will be using the buttons at either side to direct the tab bar to the tab you want to be at. I plan to implement scroll all the way if you double-click a scroll button.

When you resize the Camino window these scroll buttons appear and disappear automatically.

Obviously we will need somebody like Jasper to make this look as beautiful as we all expect from OS X applications.

I need to get back to work on making the tab bar scroll in a more elegant manner because it is really ugly at the moment! I have until Friday to get his done because my Mentor needs to start filing a report that is due on 30th June.

Just wanted to share these screenshots with everybody :)

Edit: I made some implementation changes based on feedback from Camino developers.

AppKiDo

2006-06-21T11:47:00.000+01:00

This is an essential tool for any Cocoa developer and since I use it all the time I thought that I should link to the site.

Battling with a MacBook, and Safari vs Camino

2006-06-20T22:22:00.000+01:00

It took a few hours to get this MacBook to build Camino in a similar fashion to what I was used to on my iBook. I decided to write a little guide so that others can do the same. You can find that guide here.

It took me 48 minutes to compile from scratch which is exciting considering it took 1 hour 59 minutes on my iBook.

On the topic of Safari vs Camino, compare the following screenshots of the Blogger Create Post tool as viewed in Safari and Camino respectively.

Distractions, distractions

2006-06-19T11:44:00.000+01:00

Apple sent me a MacBook today which was very nice of them.

Spain are playing Tunisia in the FIFA World Cup Finals today and I'd really like to watch the match.

I have lots of work to do today in order to reach my first milestone.

Sigh.

Weekly Meeting 16/6

2006-06-16T21:30:00.000+01:00

Mike and I met for the second time today. These weekly meetings are great because they make sure that we always speak to each other at least once a week.

I've had a bit of a slow week because I had other things on my mind. Mike reminded me that if things are troubling me, or I think they might be affecting my work that I need to let him know right away so that my milestones can be adjusted appropriately. He let me know that he can't do anything to help me if I don't keep in touch with him.

It was great to hear Mike saying these things because I've heard it all at University but I've never really believed it. But he seems to be genuinely determined to help me achieve my goals this summer. It's good to feel like somebody really is looking out for you. I hope my dissertation supervisor is like this next year.

We spoke about whether or not I should implement the scrolling tab bar overflow in a similar fashion to Dashboard. I'll be looking into this on Sunday.

Mike told me that it'd be in my interest to get a patch submitted by next Friday so I can actually go through the Camino review process. We also spoke about how much help I could get from the community without being a chancer and how I could use the community to my advantage.

Mike is off to California next week so we will be 8 hours apart. He told me that he'd be checking his e-mails all day every day so we can make sure I reach my first milestone.

Implementation sketches complete

2006-06-11T19:56:00.000+01:00

I have completed my implementation sketches for my project. My scanner was an absolute pain in the arse and kept on scanning things in at a skew angle, or at 1200x1200 DPI (for no apparent reason).

Tabs will be able to be re-ordered through drag / drop within the same window.

Tabs can be dragged out of a window to create a new window, or to a different existing window and the second image

Tab overflow will be extended to include 2 clickable arrows (one at either side of the tab bar) when the user has more tabs than the size of the tab bar.

I would really appreciate any feedback to the Comments as soon as possible.

What should be the new name for this blog?

2006-06-10T19:16:00.000+01:00

I have been informed by several Mozilla related blog aggregators that my blog must only contain Mozilla related content in order to be aggregated. I cannot guarantee that in the future I will not write about personal stuff in this blog, so I think I will change it from desmondelliott.blogspot.com to something else.

What should I call it? It needs to have some kind of relation to either me, or to my project, or preferably to both.

Suggestions in the comments please :)

First weekly meeting with my Mentor

2006-06-09T23:51:00.000+01:00

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.

The end of a busy week

2006-06-09T10:16:00.000+01:00

You know that you have had a busy week when you have not been flooding your blog with posts.

I have had some problems with my new domain and hosting. The company who I purchased the domain from will not allow me to change the nameservers so I had to change the DNS entries instead. They still have not got back to me to tell me why I cannot do this.

I have been working on bug 235863 this week. It has been a nice step into Objective-C and Cocoa. I have nearly finished my patch for it but have a few peculiar problems. Jasper Hausen has been working on a new icon for this and hopefully I can submit this for review by the end of the weekend.

The Camino developers met yesterday to discuss the the feedback received from the community over the last 2 weeks. Obviously every piece of technology that I wanted to use during the meeting broke - the MozillaZine Forums and the Camino Wiki.

There is a new page on the Camino Wiki and it will be a nice central location for everybody to pay attention to the details and not the blurb that I post here. At the moment registration is disabled on the wiki.

One of the Summer of Code Mentors from Adium dropped in on our discussion because Kent Sutherland is working on integrating PSMTabBarControl with Adium. There is a chance that between Adium and Camino we might try to present a uniform tab-implementation in an attempt to try to allow users of both the same experience. These ideas are still in their infancy, but there is certainly no harm in keeping in contact with the people at Adium.

I have my first weekly meeting with Mike today. I think this week we plan to roughly set out milestones for my progress and to discuss things that I have been doing so far. I hope I've been doing the right kind of things so far. Perhaps not enough coding, but I am working on remedying it.

The FIFA World Cup starts today, I am still not sure who I will support since Scotland failed to qualify. I am torn between the Czech Republic and the United States of America. I have thought about choosing a team based on how much I like their away strip, but that is a little bit vain!

Taking a look at the market

2006-06-05T09:17:00.000+01:00

Over the weekend I took some time to read through some of Apple's fiscal reports to see what could be inferred about Camino's potential user base. Since OS X 10.0 arrived in 2001 Apple have sold 17,024,000 Macintosh units. You can find this information here and here.

The Camino trunk is already OS X 10.3 or newer only. Since OS X 10.3 was released October 2003 that means that Camino is only able to target 7,824,000 users (who have a compatible system out of the box). (It was pointed out to me that support OS X 10.2 was becoming impossible because many of the bugs were OS-related and there is not much we can do about that. There is a bugzilla entry that relates to this here)

It is relatively obvious that many users upgrade their Operating System, but we cannot infer anything about the number of people who are upgrading to a sytem that Camino is compatible with.

As things stand it would be great if we were able to have 1% of our easily reachable user base using Camino (78,240). It's pretty difficult to find any statistics about how the current user base of Camino so hopefully by the end of the summer we will have a system in place to help us keep track.

A new domain coming next week.

2006-06-02T15:20:00.000+01:00

I purchased a new domain for myself yesterday and hopefully will have everything ready to go on Monday. I will probably host my blog there and everything else related to my project.

The reason for this is that I'd like to be able to see how many people are reading about my work
and without adding an ugly counter to this Blogger page I couldn't see how to do it.

Will spend tomorrow comparing Webalizer and AWStats to see which one I will prefer to use.

The last entry in this blog will announce the URL of my new domain.

PSMTabBarControl

2006-06-02T15:14:00.000+01:00

John Pannell from Positive Spin Media got in touch with me at the beginning of the week to let me know about his Safari-style tabs implementation and wondered if I would be interested in working with him over the summer. It appears that Adium are shifting to use this as their codebase for tabs, so perhaps there might be some future in his implementation.

He has allowed me to paste his e-mail here for all to see, any thoughts about his proposal would be appreciated.

Date: Sun, 28 May 2006 21:32:43 -0600 [29/05/06 04:32:43 AM BST]
From: John Pannell
To: d.elliott@sms.ed.ac.uk
Subject: Summer of Code: Tabs

Hi Desmond-

I was cruising my referrer logs when I found a number of hits stemming from your Camino forum entry regarding your SoC tabs project. Just wanted to drop you a line and FYI you to a tabs implementation I've been working on...

http://www.positivespinmedia.com/dev/PSMTabBarControl.html

Many of the features outlined in your proposal are in place, and the control is BSD-licensed, so you can gain some inspiration for your efforts. The control is designed to be hooked up to an NSTabView... not knowing the internals of Camino's implementation, I can't say if this will be of help to you or not

Coincidentally, another SoC'er is working with the Adium project to improve PSMTabBarControl. The Adium people have chosen this as a possible future direction for their tabs, as their existing tab code is apparently a little crufty and confusing. The student's name is Kent Sutherland, more info on his site...

http://www.ksuther.com/chax/

If PSMTabBarControl integrates well into Camino's architecture, perhaps we could join forces to really polish things out. Many of the requests I'm seeing on your forum entry are more Camino architecture than tabs per se.

Anyway... just a heads up. Good luck and congrats on your summer of code!

John

John Pannell
Positive Spin Media
http://www.positivespinmedia.com

A little bit about me

2006-05-31T08:22:00.000+01:00

It has just dawned on me that I've not written anything about myself yet, so without further ado...

My name is Desmond Elliott, I am 22 years old. I am an undergraduate student at The University of Edinburgh studying for a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science - I have just finished the 3rd year of this 4 year degree.

I work part-time for Apple as a Campus Rep during term-time.

I have been using Apple Macs since OS X.1 in Spring 2002. My first Mac was an iMac G4 700 and I still use it (it runs Ubuntu these days). My main machine is an iBook G4 1.33 and that is what I will probably be using for Camino development this summer. I plan to buy a Mac Pro at the end of the summer with the money that I will hopefully earn from this summer.

My interests include music - I read several music review sites everyday; football - very excited about the prospect of being able to watch the World Cup; cricket - I play for my school team; cookery - it's a great way to unwind at the end of the day; and art - I studied a course in Art History in 2001 and it has become a personal interest.

MacDev link (will hopefully generate more activity on the brainstorming front!)

2006-05-30T21:47:00.000+01:00

Giles Turnbull at MacDevCentre has linked to my blog and my calls to the community.

It's great to see that people are taking notice of the work that we are planning to do to the Camino browser this summer. Hopefully his link will generate more discussion activity on MozillaZine and on the mailing-list.

Thanks to Chris Lawson for noticing this, it seems like I will have to add soo many more sites to my daily visit routine.

First communication with my Mentor

2006-05-30T20:55:00.000+01:00

I spoke with my Mentor for the first time today. He informed me that he was really really busy last week and was away at the weekend, which helped allay my fears. He has kindly allowed me to transcribe our conversations for purposes of record keeping when it comes to writing evaluations on the condition that I let him see what I am going to blog before I post it.

We spoke about the number of clocked hours Mike expected me to do, or when he needed me to be available to speak with? He told me that he didn't need or expect me to take a 9 - 5 approach to this position. Mike agreed with me that we should arrange a weekly check-in day - he will get back to me as to when is suitable.

We spoke about how Mike would be judging my performance when my interim and final evalutions are due. Mike suggested that we use the Project Schedule in my proposal and adjust it as necessary as the summer progresses.

I have been looking into the possibilty of interning at MoFo CA. Mike has suggested that I get in touch with Josh Aas to see what can be done. He thinks that it'd be a fantastic thing to do if I get the chance.

Mike suggested that when we reach week 4 of my schedule that we set more specific milestones so we can get an accurate picture of my progress. He seems to be pleased that I have taken the initiative and got in touch with the community about what they would like to see happen with tabbed-browsing.

I asked Mike if he was alright with my taking on summer work alongside SoC. He said that as long as I was on-top of my SoC work then he didn't have a problem with it and it wasn't as if he could stop me.

Mike offered me his instant messenger details and his work e-mail address for more direct contact than the one he uses for BugZilla and also told me that I should feel free to get in touch with him at any time. He also pointed out that #camino and #developers would be great resources to use when he is not around.

A different call to the same community (2nd attempt)

2006-05-28T13:17:00.000+01:00

(My last post may have broken the Camino Contributor's Blog Aggregator, hopefully it will not break it this time and this can save Nate Weaver some debugging time! The previous post which contained practically the same content except for what is within these parenthesis has now been deleted.)

Smokey Ardisson has suggested that I post my call to the community to the Camino mailing-list aswell as the forum because they cater for different kinds of user.

You (I) can keep track of the mailing-list discussion here

A call to the community

2006-05-26T11:44:00.000+01:00

This morning I posted a thread to the Camino MozillaZine discussion forum to call for as many wild, innovative, and interesting features as possible that could be included in my work.

I hope that some of the responses will take into account my proposal and suggest extra features that could be bolted on, or that some of the responses may provide some extra work for me that could really enhance a users' experience.

I have now been linked to at the Camino Contributor's Blogs, at least 6 hours ago ;-)

Congratulations!

2006-05-25T11:11:00.000+01:00

Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 00:22:25 -0700 [24/05/06 08:22:25 AM BST]
From: soc2006support@google.com
Subject: Congratulations!

Dear Applicant,

Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your
application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code. Please
check your student home page in the SoC web app at
http://code.google.com/soc/student_home.html to determine which of
your applications was accepted.

Over the next few days, you will be added to a special members only
Google Group (http://groups.google.com/group/Summer-Accepted-2006)
that will be Google's main way of interacting with you. On this list,
you will receive important information about the program including
information surrounding payment. The list will also function as a
discussion list amongst the students. Mentors will not be present on
this list, but Google personnel will be to make sure you can get any
questions you have addressed.

You should also get into the habit of visiting your Summer of Code
page on a semi-regular basis, as we will track status, payments,
paperwork and take interim and final surveys from this page.

Your mentoring organization will likely also set up similar lists for
you and your cohorts so that they may interact with you on your
project. You should not wait for them, please feel free to contact
them and let them know you are ready to start developing open source
software with them.

If you have questions surrounding payment, please wait until you see a
message from Leslie Hawthorn on the Summer-Accepted-2006 Google Group
detailing what we will need from you. This will take a few days as we
button up the Summer of Code Web Application and make sure all the
students are properly assigned to the proper groups.

If you cannot for some reason take part, please email us at
soc2006support@google.com as soon as possible so that we can allocate
your slot to another student.

Other questions and concerns should be send to soc2006support@google.com

Thanks for taking part; we're very excited to see what the Summer will bring!

Congratulations once again,

The Summer of Code Progam Administration Team