Well, it’s about time I spoke up.  Greetings from beautiful Upstate New York.  My name’s Peter, and I’m the other guy.  Google couldn’t give Mozilla quite enough Summer of Code slots for more than one Camino position, which went to Jeff, but thanks to the hard work of Sam, Pink, and I’m-not-even-sure-who-else, Mozilla and the Camino Project are funding my project anyhow.  What is that project?  You might well ask.

I’ll be bringing AppleScript support—real, honest to God scripting—to Camino.  Scripting support bugs have been waiting around on Bugzilla since at least 2002, and this summer I intend to deal with most of them.

The first part of this project is Windows & Tabs.  Scripts will be able to interact with browser windows and the tabs they contain, getting their URLs and titles and setting their URLs as well.  (Hopefully I’ll find a way to do things like “make new browser window”, but the “make” command is apparently full of bugs on Apple’s end.  We’ll see.) The main development for W&T is over as of yesterday, and as of today the new code is waiting for its second review.  You can follow along at home if you like.

Next will be Bookmarks & History.  Stay tuned.

I was fortunate enough to visit the Googleplex while I was out in California. It is quite a surreal environment with people on scooters, segways, bikes, you name it. There just seemed to be people everywhere and each and everyone of them seemed happy, how could they not be? Google goes beyond what most places would call a “relaxed environment”, they have a nerd Shangri-La. Beyond the amazing food and endless micro-kitchens, Google is a great place to let your creative juices flow. Some might call it a college atmosphere, but it goes beyond that. Google is in a category all by itself, it has a Google atmosphere.

The day after I visited Google HQ I flew back home to New Jersey and was invited by one of my friends to come and visit him in the Google NYC office. So a little over a week after visiting the Googleplex I got to indulge in more excellent food and ride more scooters. Google NYC is unique, as I am sure most of their remote offices are. They occupy a few floors in their massive 9th & 16th avenue building and have a very cool display of vintage computers. While I was there I also got to meet Mark Mentovai who is one of the project leads on Camino.

After visiting both of these offices and seeing what they have to offer all I can say is “wow.” I hope I get the privilege to work in one of their offices someday.

This announcement is sorta old ... but Camino has a second Summer of Code student. Peter Jaros will be working on improving Camino’s Applescript support. The Mozilla Foundation and Camino are funding Peter. In the next few days you will start to see posts from him, as he too will be spending his summer making Camino even better. Sorry that it took me so long to get you on the blog Peter .

Tonight Tabposé started to show it’s first signs of progress. I was able to get thumbnails of all the open tabs aligned into a grid. The previews are jagged and distorted and the grid acts funky sometimes, but it’s a start. I am going back now to clean up and refractor some of the code and hopefully submit my first patch to the project. Sorry about the lack of posts, I had to switch web hosts ... again…

Here is a close-up. Oh and ignore the sliders.

This weekend I am in Mountain View for the Camino meetup. It has been great meeting everyone and being able to put a name to a face. There are some exciting things that are coming in the next few releases of Camino. Also on thursday my homebrew server starting acting funky and so I decided to be daring and upgrade Apache… bad idea on Gentoo. So after hours of hard work I still had no luck. I decided to move my plans to move to a new host ahead by a few months. Many of my sites are down as of now and I will slowly bringing them back online once I learn how to uses the convoluted networkredux cPanel system.

Sorry in advance about any issues you might run into. 

My trip out to California has been great so far. This year Steve Jobs stated that there were over 5,000 attendees at WWDC and boy does it feel like it. There is a noticeable difference in the amount of people from last year. Along with this Apple has seemed to become cheeper with no campus bash, less food in the morning, and no student sunday. On top of that students were not allowed into the main Keynote and had to watch from a overflow room. There will be more on that later...

Overall WWDC has been great. There are good sessions, good people, and ok food.

Tomorrow I leave for San Francisco to attend what looks to be an amazing World Wide Developers Conference. I had an amazing time last year and I’m very excited for this year’s events and sessions. I like the whole Universe/Carl Sagan theme they have going on there, probably since Leopard will be making them ”Billions and billions.”

I will be attending all of the events that don’t require me to be 21. If you want to hang out or meet up, shoot me an e-mail.

See you in sunny California!

I have finally made some visible progress on Tabposé! Tonight I was able to get a grey to white gradient to display in my TabposeView. After reading up on the not so friendly CGShading I set out to get this basic component of Tabposé done. I think that this gradient helps the overall look and feel of Tabposé, similar to how exposé and dashboard have that semi-transparent background. You can find a boring screenshot of my progress here.

As I said above, CGShading is no walk in the park. Here are some links that you might find useful when you decided to add gradients to your apps. Some people will use images to get this effect; however, this will cause problems when we start seeing higher DPI screens and resolution independence in Leopard. CGShading is a wordy, yet elegant solution.

• Pimp My Code, Part 3: Gradient TableViews
• CocoaDev: CGShadingInMoreDetail
• Quartz 2D Programming Guide

With this canvas I can now start to paint my picture…

The other day all GSoC students received a little package. Enclosed was a gift from Google, Producing Open Source Software by Karl Folgel. A thoughtful gift for the start of coding. In it Fogel discusses what it takes to have a successful open source project as well how to deal with the human aspect while working on one.

This book is great for anyone just getting into open source development or someone who might need some help with their current projects. The book is released under creative commons and is available free online at producingoss.com.

To top it off the book was signed by Karl Fogel saying “Happy Hacking.”

Thanks Google!

I think when I start getting distracted by buttons being slightly a different color from one another, that I have had one too many coffees. In the past few days I have been brushing up on my Quartz as well as getting my Tabposé view displaying in the browser as my mentor Stuart suggested.

Nearing the end of my coding for the night I started to notice that some of the buttons in the BrowserTabView were slightly different shades of grey. I would think that since the buttons are “etched” into the same bar that they would be the same color. The different colors might be on purpose or it’s such a minuscule difference that it doesn’t matter (thats my bet ).

I know I am totally splitting hairs and that the images were probably made at different times by different people. Just for fun, here are the values of the different buttons which I attained with DigitalColor Meter:

Overflow Arrow (disabled)

• R - 36237
• G - 36237
• B - 36237

Down Arrow

• R - 30326
• G - 30326
• B - 30326

Close Button

• R - 44461
• G - 44461
• B - 44461

I know. I need a life…

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