Most of the time I haven't been working recently has been spent on Camino, which is part of the reason it's been so quiet around here. For a while I was averaging about a bug fix per day, which was pretty satisfying. I'm scaling back a bit now, partially because I need to spend time on things besides Camino at least occasionally, partially to make sure I don't burn out, and partially because I've overloaded the review queue lately and don't want to make it too much worse until it's had time to drain.

Most of the work I've been doing has been to try to chip away at the 1.1 bugs, many of which have been minor polish that Camino has been needing for a while but weren't ever really high enough priority to fix. Having them on the 1.1 list was good incentive to just burn through them instead seeing many of them punted (again, in many cases).

There are some bigger ticket items on my plate too though; on top of the Keychain rewrite I did to celebrate my return, I'm hoping that there will be time in the 1.1 schedule to do the part users will actually care about: Keychain interoperability with Safari. We've heard lots of times that people trying Camino after using Safari are dismayed to discover that they have to try to remember all their site passwords... which mostly they don't because they've just been letting Keychain do it for them, that being the entire point of the Keychain. I think a lot more people will be willing to give Camino a try once we pick up Safari-stored passwords, and it should also be a boon for those who can't quite decide and go back and forth regularly.

The other larger thing I'm working on is session saving, which is something I've wanted for a while. I tend to accumulate lots of open pages over time as a sort of holding area for my brain. This works fine up until a) I want to either install an OS update or upgrade Camino, or b) Camino crashes (pretty rarely, but it does happen since I live on development builds). When I find myself delaying system upgrades for upward of a week just because I don't want to go to the trouble of manually saving all my browser/brain state, there's definitely a need for the software to be doing something different—and of course minimizing data loss is always a good thing. I'm a little concerned that users won't understand why things like forms and AJAX-y pages don't look just like when they quit; I suspect there will be some unhappiness the first time people discover that it's remembering where they were, not the actual page as it was when they were looking at it. There's some hope that we may be able to leverage the work Firefox did for session saving and get the whole experience, but if not, well, losing a bit of data is better than losing lots, and there are still a lot of pages out there that do actually look the same when you reload them.

In short, I'm definitely feeling good about developing again, and definitely feeling good about the upcoming 1.1 release.

Oh, and I also did my first (mini) super-reviews and my first check-in recently, so that was pretty cool.

Category: Camino

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