Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Downloaded Firefox 3.0, still on Camino

2008.07.02 – 18.50 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Firefox icon First of all I want to congratulate everyone over at Mozilla for the stellar and record breaking release of Firefox 3. Back when I was a Windows user I was an avid user of Phoenix (the original name) and eagerly awaited with almost fanatical excitement when newer beta releases were released. I’m extremely pleased that there is such a vibrant, usable, free and open source alternative to commercial web browsers on so many different platforms, especially Internet Explorer.

Camino on Mac OS X Leopard
Wait, this isn’t Firefox 3…

All this said though, and after upgrading Firefox to version 3 on my MacBook Pro this morning, I’m still typing this entry using Camino. Camino is a free, open source web browser for Mac OS X that uses the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox does. As usual Wikipedia provides the most succinct description for the software for those who don’t know what the heck I’m talking about:

Camino (Spanish for way/path) is a free, open source, GUI-based Web browser based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine (also used by Mozilla Firefox) and specifically designed for the Mac OS X operating system.

In heindsight, that Wikipedia quote really didn’t add much to my own initial explanation. Mental note: don’t add superfluous and useless quotes to weblog posts any more.

Life is a big old circle. There is no beginning, and there is no end. That’s because in a circle there isn’t a beginning and there isn’t an end. And if you had any brains at all, you’d understand that!

Jimbob Kloss, Whole Wheat Radio

It’s probably more to do with me being set in my ways or preferring to use what I’m most used to, but Camino to me still provides the best Mac web browsing experience, full stop. This isn’t to say I haven’t been tempted by other offerings. In my /Applications folder I can count no less than eight web browsers including Camino, Shiira, Safari, Konqeuror, Mozilla Firefox, SeaMonkey (I still see if it can replace Thunderbird, but it doesn’t… for another post) and the PowerPC version of Internet Explorer, for testing how my sites render.

Mac OS X web browsers
If you use VICE with a virtual VICMODEM it would count right?

What makes me keep coming back for more Caminoish goodness is… it’s good for me. I’m serious, I don’t rip any hair out of my head when I use Camino. That’s a big plus in my book. For me it also excels in several critical areas:

Interface
Camino, like Safari and Shiira uses Mac OS X’s native Aqua GUI framework instead of Mozilla’s XUL to draw the elements on the screen (save for the textboxes). This means it works like a Mac application, feels like a Mac application and has all the interface cues we’re used to… because it is a real Mac application! Firefox may have Mac-like skins available, but it does show through that it’s been hacked together in many places, such as the tab bar, preference panes and window controls.
Loading time
Again because it uses Aqua and is a smaller executable, Camino loads with just a few "dock bounces" on my iBook G3 and my original generation Core Duo MacBook Pro compared to the 7-12 bounces to load Firefox each time. I’ve read it argued that Camino loads faster because it’s simply less extensible than Firefox with plugins, but with my version of Camino absolutely loaded with plugins and add-ons from PimpMyCamino.com I question how much that latter reason can really be relied upon as an explanation for performance.
Integration
As I discovered in an earlier post, Camino uses Mac OS X’s keychain to store your passwords, in the same way Safari does. According to the Camino site it also uses the native Mac Bonjour system to discover bookmarks, though I haven’t ever needed to use that feature.
Icon
Camino has the most slick web browser icon (view the image I posted above). This is a critical point and one which must not be ignored for it speaks not only for… ah I can’t pull it off.

All this isn’t to say that Camino is perfect for everyone or isn’t without faults, but from my experience it’s still the best darn Mac browser. I know I’ve said this numerous times already; it shows how much I believe it to be true.

Camino icon

Older Camino posts

Categories: internet, mac os x, reviews, screenshots, software
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Twitterrific lovingly sending… errors

2007.11.18 – 21.22 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

AFTERWORD (is that a word?): After submitting this post I got a very helpful comment from Gedeon at the IconFactory who helped to explain why I was getting these errors and possible remedies.

As it turns out the cynical conclusion I came to about my computer preventing me from becoming too addicted to Twitter by forcing me not to use it as much… was ironically accurate! As it turns out Twitter itself has a limit to the number of accesses to their site you can make in a given period of time, and obviously with Twitterrific running on my Mac, TwitBin running on Firefox on FreeBSD and m.twitter.com on my phone I consistently overshoot my allowed number.

Twitterrific is a native Mac OS X application that displays tweets you and your friends have posted on Twitter, the microblogging site that I am hopelessly addicted to and post to almost every hour of every day.

Well I was having no end of trouble with the 2.x series of it on Mac OS X Leopard which is understandable considering it was written originally for Tiger, the latest version seems only to have added advertising and not fixed the endless stream of Twitter Errors that seem to always sit as the first post:

twittererror.png

ASIDE: That advertisement for Camino popped up just before I took the screenshot. As you might have already read, Camino is my favourite web browser on Mac… how ironic!

I’ve tried allowing the Twitterrific app in the new Leopard firewall settings panel and have checked all my other networking settings but it still shows these errors constantly. To get a version without advertisements you have to pay $20.00, but I want to know that what I pay for actually works :(.

Anyone else had problems running Twitterrific on Leopard? I tried running Snitter as an alternative, but uninstalled it because it was giving me even more problems. Does my beloved MacBook Pro think I’m wasting too much time on Twitter and is trying to stop me posting to it? Is it an intervention on my computer’s part? That’s probably the reason!

Categories: internet, mac os x, screenshots
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O’Reilly Objective C adventures in Singapore

2007.11.17 – 22.20 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

cocoabooks.jpg

I’ve been looking for a good, thick tome to work through to help me learn the Objective C programming language. Just like Ruby, I like the fact Objective C was also inspired from Smalltalk and given my past (icky) experience with C++ and the fact I run Mac OS X and FreeBSD (which has the GNU compilers) I figured it would be a cool language to work on for another study project, and gosh it just looks like a really interesting computer language. Girls love it when I talk like that you see.

Alas, Singapore seems to have as many books on Objective C as elephants have tails. Wait, elephants do have tails. That was a stupid comparison.

Anyway I’ve searched at Borders, Kinokuniya, Times, Popular… and nobody has anything other than For Dummies books on basic Cocoa development. My personal preference is the O’Reilly book series simply because I remember having lots of fun learning Perl and Python from their books back when I was in high school and I like their format. The Dummies series were fun to learn Visual Basic from back when I was in primary, but these days they seem to chatty to me.

I know I’m probably being really picky, but everyone learns in different ways and I find O’Reilly books to click with me the best. So it begs the question, does anyone know of any good places to buy O’Reilly books (or books that follow a similar style) on Objective C in Singapore?

My next try will be to go to that really good computer book shop in Funan Centre, I’m hoping they might have a better range that some of the generic chains. Or I could renew my subscription to Safrai Books Online, I’m sure they’d have some good material.

Categories: mac os x, programming
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Camino runs rings around Firefox

2007.10.21 – 15.48 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Today for a quick break from studies and work I decided once again to download the latest Mozilla Firefox for Mac and install it, and once again after half an hour it was wiped off my drive. Fact is, I’ve been spoiled completely by Camino.

Camino Firefox

It’s no secret to anyone that Firefox is slow on Mac. In a time where virtually every other Mac app has been written to use the Cocoa widgets or even Qt, Firefox (and unfortunately Thunderbird) still use the OS 9 era throwback Carbon widgets which really shows. The graphics and user interface in Firefox look tired and outdated, whereas the graphics and user interface on Camino look polished… and damn it Camino looks like a real Mac app.

Firefox Camino Comparison

Those complaints aside though, using Firefox today on Mac reminded me once again why I stopped using it: the scroll speed is abysmal. Despite the fact I have a MacBook Pro which you can use the two finger motion on the touch pad to scroll I still prefer to use the keyboard arrow keys, and using these there’s a noticeable lag. I’d guess that Firefox scrolls at almost half the speed that both Camino or Safari do.

Not to mention the fact that Firefox on idle with one tab open somehow manages to use so much more RAM than Camino (or even Safari) do:

Firefox, Camino, Safari RAM comparison

According to Wikipedia Gecko 1.9 will support native Cocoa widgets which should close this gap, then I’ll be able to use all the wicked Firefox plugins. Until then, I’ll continue using Camino, as I have for years.

Categories: apple, free and open source
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Using Smultron and TextMate

2007.05.27 – 20.14 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Smultron is an open source text editor for Mac OS X written by Peter Borg, and I must say I’m impressed with it. Simple code editing on individual files is a snap, and the sidebar is much more elegant than an entire row of confusing tabs.

I’m currently a TextMate on my MacBook Pro user mainly because of convenience. For one thing the projects are easy to set up and are in XML (which I’ve been told I have a borderline perverse obsession with), and from one Bundles menu I can select the language I’m coding in and I have all the actions and properties I need. Smultron does have Project like functionality, and it does have a code colouring menu which actually supports far more syntax rules than TextMate, but it doesn’t have the other functionality for individual languages.

I don’t think it’s fair though to compare TextMate and Smultron head on, because I use them for different things. Editing individual text files which have little in common with each other is obviously easier in Smultron because of TextMate’s maddening lack of tab support for files that aren’t a part of the same project, but TextMate is more useful for managing entire projects, such as Ruby on Rails site or a graphical Java Swing programme. If you’ve used Mac OS X for a while, I like to think of TextMate as a replacement for Xcode, and Smultron as a replacement for TextEdit. Sort of.

From a polish point of view, TextMate’s icons are certainly much slicker than Smultron’s default ones, though Gaetan Ark has released the original icons for Smultron he designed as a separate file you can use to patch your Smultron.app file.

Like a true open source gentleman Peter doesn’t ask outright for money, but he does have a donation page if you find his program useful. When I get my POSB MasterCard thingy I’ll definably put some bread in the jar. Even though I’m not a Piano Man.

Some basic screenshots of some crappy Ruby and Perl scripts I whipped up to demonstrate the syntax support. Ignore the date, as of May I’m still typing 2006 on everything.

Ruby in Smultron

Perl in Smultron

As for my FreeBSD machine though, nothing beats Kate!

Categories: apple, free and open source, software, technology
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