Congratulations (2007)

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

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)

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:

1. 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
   
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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?
5. 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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!)

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.