Design is difficult

Camino 1.6 was released on Thursday 17th April 2008, which means my scrollable tab bar work from Google Summer of Code 2006 has been released.

The third item of the Features page on the Camino website, ‘Tabbed Browsing Improvements’, describes what I did and what it adds to Camino.

“Camino 1.6 includes a scrolling tab bar. When more tabs are open than can be displayed in the tab bar, arrows appear at the right and left edges to allow scrolling the bar. As part of this change, the tab overflow menu has been replaced by a menu displaying all open tabs in the current window. “

For those who don’t use Mac OS X, or don’t want to use Camino to find out more, this screenshot shows what the new tab bar looks like:

A couple of details not explained on the Features page: the tab overflow menu at the right has menu dividers to split the menu into 3 sections: tabs to the left of the currently visible tabs, currently visible tabs, and tabs to the right of currently visible tabs; if you select a tab from the tab overflow menu outside what is currently visible in the tab bar, the selected tab becomes the left-most or right-most tab depending on whether you chose a tab from the left or right side of the overflow menu bar.

I think those details are typical of the polish in a Camino point release and I’m pleased with the result of my work. A lot of people helped out during the project and without them I wouldn’t have succeeded, so thanks guys.

I’m keen to see Jeff Dlouhy’s Tabspose work from Google Summer of Code 2007 become part of the upcoming Camino 2.0 release and look forward to hearing the conclusions of the Camino Meet 2008 to learn more about the direction of development for Camino 2.0; Stuart already has some interesting thoughts.

After considering my options, I turned down an offer to work for the British Civil Service as a Technologist to pursue an opportunity at Hewlett-Packard Labs as a Research Intern in Bristol, England. I joined the Web Services & Systems Laboratory at HP Labs in September 2007 to work on Digital Repository research and development.

I have been part of a team researching and developing a recommender system for the DSpace digital repository system. Our approach is to extract terms from the stored items and the metadata associated with the items and use the terms to perform a comparison between a pair of items to determine if a recommendation is appropriate. Our work has been exploratory and proof-of-concept.

On 3rd April 2008, we delivered a presentation to approximately 100 delegates at the Open Repositories 2008 DSpace User Group in Southampton, England. On 21st April 2008, we published a technical report through the HP Labs Library detailing the first phase of our work.

I’m rather enjoying my time at HP Labs, there are plenty of interesting projects and a wide variety of extra-curricular activities. For example, the HP Labs Science Lectures are a series of evening events to promote the breadth and depth of science to the public. In January, we were entertained by Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University and his presentation of the work-in-progress discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism. This week, Herbert Huppert from Cambridge University will deliver a lecture on Extreme Natural Disasters and I’m looking forward it!

Finally, I liked Apple’s Think Different corporate culture advertising campaign and was pleased to find a dusty old poster in Building 3 of a corporate culture advertising campaign from HP. I think these rules offer an interesting way to think about your new career, regardless of profession.