I turned on native form controls yesterday, in time for today’s nightly build. There is more work to be done on them, but this is a big step. Pull new nightlies as time goes on and you should see the remaining kinks get worked out.

It took us approximately 5 years and a few failed attempts to get here. Camino has had native form controls for a while now, but those were a series of hacks that came with some significant negative consequences. The hacks are finally gone, a lot of code has been rewritten, and now we are comfortable turning on native form controls for all of Mozilla’s Mac OS X products. I owe a big thank-you to Robert O’Callahan, David Baron, and Boris Zbarsky for helping me with troubles I was having in layout code during the home stretch. This would have taken a lot longer without them.

I landed some more Mac OS X native form controls work on the trunk so I thought I’d post another build. This still has some patches that haven’t landed yet but we’re much closer!

Click to download:
- Firefox 3.0a5pre with native form controls (Universal, Intel & PPC)

I met some friends at the 400 Bar in Minneapolis tonight and saw a singer called Caroline Smith. I didn’t know she was playing, I’ve never heard of her before, I just picked the 400 Bar tonight sort of randomly. Anyway, it was one of the best shows I’ve seen in years. Its been so long since I’ve had my breath taken away by a live band. It wasn’t a flashy afair, but the beauty of it more than made up for that.

I haven’t listened to the music on her myspace page yet, but I can definitely vouch for her live shows and her CD ($3, hand made, each one unique!). She plays every Wednesday night at the 400 Bar at 9 PM. I’ll be there.

I sold my Nintendo Wii and bought a canoe with my friend Andrew. We live right next to a bunch of lakes including Lake of the Isles, and they are awesome for canoeing. Turns out I don’t really want to play video games much.

We got a canoe that is pretty wide so it’ll be stable with a passenger and for having on-the-lake picnics. I’m so excited! Off to buy some life jackets…

Got a great deal on this Old Town Canoe off of craigslist. Guy bought it for his kids, they don’t use it, but I will!

I’ve been doing a lot of hacking on Mac OS X native form controls for the past couple of weeks and I’m getting close to the point where I can turn them on. I’m close enough that I can make my own builds with pretty nice form controls, though I can’t land the code yet because it would break Windows and Linux (who uses those anyway…). Here is a preview of what should be coming in the next 2-3 weeks, and it should be even better by that time.

Click to download:
- Firefox 3.0a5pre with native form controls (Intel only, PPC coming later)

Please do not report bugs you find with this build – it contains a lot of code that has not been accepted into the Mozilla tree yet. Reporting bugs from this build will cause considerable confusion. If you are concerned enough you can find me on IRC (irc.mozilla.org) and talk to me about it there.

That said, please also download official Firefox 3 nightly builds and report any bugs you find there.

Enjoy!

I spent Sunday and part of Monday with my friends Ryan and Ashley on Cape Cod, in a town called Chatham. It was beautiful. Ryan’s parents live there so we stayed at their house.

One of my favorite things about Cape Cod was that I knew very little about the environment there. I had all sorts of questions about what kinds of fish and wildlife they have there, and I got to see a lot of it. We saw horseshoe crabs (mating no less!), hermit crabs, huge snails, a big hawk, and a few other things. We even dug up a couple of littleneck clams! We reburied the clams, partly because apparently that is illegal without a permit but I was curious. I learned that they don’t really have sharks there, they are so rare they are never even seen near land. I saw a huge number of different dead critters, including spider crabs, razor clams, and a bunch of other shellfish.

Me (right) and Ryan (left) on a sand dune

Mating horseshoe crabs

Last Saturday I went to Providence, RI, to visit my friend Ryan who goes to RISD. He and his roommate Alvin threw a great party, though like too many good parties it was broken up by the police in its prime. I had an awesome time and met a bunch of cool people, including a guy that I went to high school with in Minnesota.

Ryan and Alvin DJing, mostly with Traktor

Me, Ashley, and Ryan