Camino buying advertising? How and why?
Today I was surprised to see an advertisement for the Camino web browser while surfing the web. This struck me as odd because Camino is an open source project that is available for free. Camino exists under the Mozilla Foundation which I know has a good chunk of money but I’m certain that they aren’t giving any of it to Camino for advertising. So how are they paying for it?
According to Samuel Sidler, Team Coordinator of the Camino Project, the money came from the generosity of various people. First of all, kudos to the various people. I really respect people who donate to open source projects, but is advertising really what Camino needs?
Camino certainly deserves more attention. Camino is currently my favorite web browser on OS X and I would like to see it be more widely adopted. Firefox 2 is slow and fugly and Safari does not have some of the features I demand like quick searches. I’m expecting Firefox 3 to give Camino a good run at being my default browser on OS X. I would certainly love to go back to using extensions without having to open another browser.
I remember when Firefox was making a big push to build up their user base. They did a great job of getting their users to promote Firefox in a zillion different ways including homemade commercials, a crop circle, and a New York Times ad. The Firefox marketing team always got their users involved and never “just bought ad space” to my knowledge. Why isn’t Camino doing the same?
Ditching Monaco
This month marks the one year since I purchased my 13″ Macbook and I have to say I’ve had fewer problems when my Mac than any other computer I’ve owned.
That also means I’ve been using TextMate as my primary editor for a year which has also been great. I can’t say that I like its functionality that any more than ViM’s but it sure does look better.
I’ve been using OS X’s default fixed width font Monaco up till now which is gorgeous but its been a year now and I’m ready to see what else is out there.
For reference this is a look at what TextMate looks like using Monaco. I’m using the Twilight theme.
The font I ultimately decided on is Inconsolata. It looks great at 14pt.
Note! I did a poor job with the screenshots and its hard to notice a difference but it’s there! Try switching your own terminal to Inconsolata 14pt to see the difference more clearly.
The way Monaco letters are very close together feels a little sloppy in places and while thats certainly part of its appeal, I’m ready to try something a little more defined. Inconsolata feels great so far. I’ve also switched Terminal.app to use Inconsolata and it looks great there as well.
Sweet Black Terminal Theme for OSX Leopard
The usability black terminal theme that comes with OSX Leopard is definitely lagging. Tom Werth has created a kick ass custom theme that I actually like. It uses Monaco for the font which I have become accustomed to looking at from my long coding sessions in Textmate.
Screenshot
HOWTO: Setup SSH keys
Setting up SSH keys is an extremely useful and fairly easy thing to do yet I delayed doing it for over a year because I never found any simple straightforward instructions for how to do it.
Here are my straightforward, no nonsense instructions for setting up password-less ssh remote login.
Run Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a Case Sensitive Filesystem
My roommate just slaved over his macbook for the past ~7 hours to get Adobe Photoshop CS3 to run on Leopard (with a case sensitive filesystem). Adobe has admitted that their products don’t work in with a case sensitive filesystem but refuse to invest the time required to fix it citing lack of “user benefit provided by case sensitivity” and that they’ve “chosen to invest elsewhere” John Nack. My roommate spent a few hours and was able to get Photoshop running on his Mac after renaming only 65 files.
You can read a full write up of the instructions to get Photoshop working here http://imaginationunbound.blogspot.com/2007/12/adobe-photoshop-cs3-on-mac-os-x-case.html
Update 01/10/2008: Updated the link to the Photoshop fix
