I just got back from seeing Rilo Kiley! They are simply amazing and Jenny Lewis is so cute! The show was really well done, though at times it was hard to hear all of the incredible instrument sounds that come through on their albums. If you’ve never heard Rilo Kiley before, I highly recommend picking up their album “The Execution Of All Things” ASAP. They have other albums, but that is the best place to start. Riley Kiley’s band members play in lots of other great groups: Jenny Lewis sang for The Postal Service, Jason Boesel recorded with Bright Eyes, and Blake Sennett is the lead singer for The Elected.

A band called “Now Its Overhead” opened for Rilo Kiley, and they were pretty excellent too. I’ve never heard of them before tonight, so it was a pleasant surprise.

Giles Turnbull, O’Reilly Developer Weblogs – Ch-Ch-ch-changes – see the bottom half of the article.

“… Camino’s rock-solid performance outweighs anything it lacks when compared to Firefox. It doesn’t only Just Work, it also Always Works, and for me that’s the most important feature of all.”

MacUser UK Labs – Camino 0.8

“We have little complaint about Camino. It renders pages well and quickly, and the interface feels logical and professional. It doesn’t offer the web designer-pleasing extras found in some of the other browsers, but it does do its key job very well.”

John Rizzo, CNET – Camino, CNET Editor’s Take

“… Camino is one of the more popular and appealing Mac Web browsers, sporting a well-crafted Cocoa interface. Camino also offers the best implementation of tabbed browsing, one that is elegant and more straightforward than Safari’s. (Safari’s tabs appear to be upside down, and the color scheme makes it hard to tell which is the active tab.) We also love Camino’s tab sets, which load multiple tabs simultaneously with the single click of an icon in the Bookmarks toolbar. Camino offers superior bookmark handling: click the sidebar button to display a tray with bookmarks and histories. This is a much more compact display than Safari’s full-page bookmark mode, and it’s easier to use than IE’s sidebar.”

Tera Patricks: Why I Dumped Safari And Firefox. My New Browser.

I’ve never heard of Mac 360 before, but we’ll take all the coverage we can get!

Anybody know of other “reviews,” good or bad?

Update: Fixed the name of the reviewer. As Daniel Glazman pointed out, the review is by Tera Patricks (with an “s” on the end), not Tera Patrick (with no “s”), who is apparently a porn star.

I posted an entry saying that we need help writing/editing content for the new Camino project website at 5 AM this morning. Then I went to bed until noon, and when I woke up I had more than 10 enthusiastic offers to help out! Right now, 20 hours after the post, I have more than 25 enthusiastic responses. Amazing! You guys are awesome!

The best part is the diversity in the group of people who responeded – students, professors, grandmothers, technical writers, and journalists. Mind boggling. This new website is going to be great.

Now I need to coordinate the work I will figure out how to coordinate the writing with our website guru (Jasper Hauser) and send out emails to everyone when a plan is made. Perhaps we can organize a documentation team made up of those that can make a longer-term commitment, and those that can’t make a longer-term commitment can just help with the original website content development. It would be great to have a group of people willing to take charge of maintaining Camino’s website content and support documentation. With enough members and sufficient organization, being a member of the team wouldn’t be too much of a burden on any single individual.

I think support and marketing documentation will play a very important role in Camino’s future. In the past, we just haven’t had the time, resources, or organization to give it the treatment it deserves. With your help we can change that. Thank you thank you thank you!

We are putting together a new Camino project site and we need some help writing the content. If anyone out there is familiar with Camino (i.e. uses it on a regular basis) and can write fairly well in English, we could really use your help. We intend to make the new Camino project website much more comprehensive and useful than the existing one, but many of the support, FAQ, and how-to pages have yet to be written and/or edited.

Please email me at “joshmoz [at] gmail.com” if you can help out. Even taking the time to write and edit one page would be greatly appreciated!

This is another great example of how helpful non-coders can be to the Camino project, so if you want to help out but you aren’t a programmer, you should shoot me an email and I’ll help you get started!

Thanks for the comments on Camino’s release plans. Here is what I can say about them…

::The Drawer::

The draw won’t be back any time soon. Our current bookmark UI has problems just like any UI, but the drawer has problems too and I believe they are much worse. On small monitors, it doesn’t make sense space-wise. Its hard to fit all the features users want into a drawer. Not much room to expand. Lots of scrolling. Its more difficult to develop. More people complained about the drawer than people complain about the current setup. I am well aware the some people want a drawer, but we’re committed to our current setup. Even if it was a better idea in the end, the regression caused by dropping our current implementation and moving to a drawer is not acceptable for the minor benefits it might (but doesn’t ) offer.

::More Tab Features::

They’re on the way! We had to land the initial massive change, and that allows us to tweak it much more easily.

::Easier Way to View History::

I’m all ears for suggestions on how to do this. Putting session history into the back/forward buttons was a big step for improving history access, but I don’t know of any good plans to further improve the situation without making bad UI mistakes.

::Bookmark Importing Improvements::

We’re working hard on this right now. A couple of good patches have landed in the last few days that improve import integrity, and more are on the way within the next week. We’ve really been focusing on it lately.

::Spell Check::

I wholeheartedly agree that this needs to happen. Somebody is supposedly working on it, but I haven’t seen any code or been given an ETA. All I can say is its on our list of things to do, and near the top. I don’t think we will release 0.9 without it.

::Form Autofill::

Same situation as the above spell check feature, but as far as I know nobody is working on it. However, we are actively making plans for it. Its coming, but I can’t say when. I don’t think we will release 0.9 without it.

::Embedded Media (i.e. plugins)::

We are certainly lacking in this area. Its one of the more difficult components to develop. I’ve looked into it a bit over this last week, but I didn’t actually fix anything. I don’t have much else to say unfortunately. We’re well aware of the problems in this area, and we will hopefully do something about it before 0.9.

Some of these responses aren’t what you were waiting to hear, but please understand that we have very limited resources. You asked good questions and requested tough features (for our limited resources anyway) and you got tough answers. We’re doing the best we can. The other Camino developers have been working really hard lately, and the teamwork and commitment that I’ve seen over the past year is really uplifting. We really do appreciate the time you take to express your thoughts and concerns – and file bugs when you get the chance! Its great to get responses on my blog, but bugzilla is where things really happen.

Camino 0.9 is going to rock, but we need every bit of help we can get!

Tonight my housemate Adi was ambitious and made some top-notch seitan (sometimes called mock duck) from scratch. While he was making it, I played hacky sack with my friend Léo. I’m such a helpful guy to live with. A visitor came during the game, the one and only Christian Haberstroh, and Adi threw him a half-cooked, doughy piece of seitan to eat. Christian mistook it for the hacky sack and started hacking the chunk of seitan. As it turns out, seitan is sort of fun to hack with. We played hack with the seitan chunk until it was gross and picked up too much hair off the floor, then ran next door and left it on a different friend’s floor. I’m gonna die laughing when he comes over to tell me about the crap he found on his floor.

Got tickets to see Rilo Kiley today! I’m pretty excited to see them live. If you haven’t heard them before you should check them out. Rilo Kiley’s lead singer Jenny Lewis is also in The Postal Service, another band I’d like to see live.

In the interest of keeping users informed and hopefully involved, I’d like to let people know what we’re planning on doing in the next couple of Camino releases.

Addressing the most commonly asked question first, there are no plans to include the new tabs in any 0.8.x release. They are pretty stable at the moment, but they are a big enough change that we won’t risk releasing them until they’ve been tested quite a bit (and that means 0.9). Any further 0.8.x releases will only include critical fixes. At the moment, we are thinking about releasing version 0.8.2 to fix the fact that we have buggy Firefox bookmark importing. In fact, Camino 0.8.1 won’t even offer to import bookmarks from more recent builds of Firefox since the Firefox developers have yet again changed the location of their bookmark file. Furthermore, a bug in our Firefox bookmark file parsing sometimes causes folder hierarchies to get messed up. Both of these bugs have already been fixed in nightly builds.

We are putting most of our effort into moving forward with 0.9, a release that can and will include lots of cool new features. New tabs are in our nightly builds already. Geoff, the tabs developer, is working on making them even better. We plan to overhaul our keychain support, which is currently stuck in the past because we had to support Mac OS X 10.1.5 with the 0.8.x releases. Other planned features and fixes include a better organized and feature-complete preference system, all the rendering engine goodness that has happened since Mozilla 1.7, some more privacy tools including browser reset, and the usual slue of bug fixes and optimizations. Oh yeah – lest I forget, we should be replacing parts of our Quickdraw drawing code with Quartz code. I’m not sure when we’ll be drawing entirely with Quartz, but hopefully some time in the next year. Moving to Quartz should give us some speed gains, fewer bugs, and better maintainability.

Anything else you want to know about our plans? Any suggestions? Put well-thought-out questions and comments in the comments for this post and I’ll respond to the good ones as soon as I can.