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…

Read more...

Today I received Programming with Quartz: 2D and PDF Graphics in Mac OS X from Amazon. Quartz or Core Graphics is the graphics layer introduced in Mac OS X. Quartz allows applications to draw beautiful resolution independent images to the screen or “graphics context.” Don’t let the book’s ugly cover fool you, Quartz is a very attractive technology.

Currently Gecko 1.8.1 still uses QuickDraw which is a graphics layer with ties far back as System 1.0 eek. Soon Gecko will have a new vector graphics library called Cairo (see Cairo beats Safari) which utilizes Quartz. This was a necessary change since QuickDraw was depreciated in 10.4 Tiger and has trouble ahead since Leopard will be resolution independent. QuickDraw definitely held back the adoption of Gecko based browsers on the Mac in the text appearance category. That will soon however change with the advent of Cairo. Text now looks fresh and crisp.

So far Programming With Quartz looks to be a good read. After sitting hunched over at my iMac all day it’s nice to be able to sit back and relax with a good book. This one will definitely help me along they way on my graphics programming adventure.

As we begin it might be useful for you to have a few links related to the project.

• Tabposé Development Wiki


• Original Proposal


• Tabposé Mockups


• Project on Bugzilla


• Summer of Camino 1

I originally posted this on my nClass Software blog, I have now since copied it over here. On the 22nd we had the first scoping meeting for my GSoC project. After we made some preliminary decisions in the meeting, I set out to make some mock-ups of how I envision Tabposé. You can find the mock-ups here.

Welcome to the second installment of Summer of Camino. Here you can follow along as we bring Exposé to Camino and create Tabposé. Between coding and sleeping (if I get any) I will be writing up my experiences as a Google Summer of Code student as well as what it is like to be apart of the Camino team.

So sit back and enjoy the code…