me
Could you introduce yourself , including age, place where you live, name ?
hwaara I'm Håkan Waara, 21 years old, and I currently live in Stockholm, Sweden.
Right now I'm working for a grant from the Mozilla Foundation, to make Gecko more accessible on the mac.
me How long have you been involved with mozilla ? Camino ?
hwaara I started getting curious about the Mozilla community back in 1999. I had done some REALbasic programming on the Mac, and tried to learn C/C++. In the beginning, I just filed bugs, and tried to help out with really simple bugs - mostly in the Mail/News component of Mozilla (what later became Thunderbird).
I spent a lot of time learning new things, and making more patches all the way until somewhere around 2001.There were a lot of other things going on in my life, and around then there was *a lot* of controversy around the clumsy UI of Mozilla.So, most bugs that I was involved in became UI wars.
I think that was one of the reasons why they then created Firefox. To be able to design more freely, thinking about the basics, from scratch.
Then in November this year, I finally was able to buy a Mac again. Being without it for 5 years (having to use Windows at home) had been a learning experience, but I knew my roots. :-)
me Ok where you a Chimera user ?
hwaara No, back then I had Windows computer only. I used a Mac until around 1999 when that old Powermac became too slow to use even for emailing.So I got this iMac around winter last year, and started getting back into programming, Mac OS, and Mozilla. One of my friends introduced me to Camino, and then I was back in business.
me How long have you been using computer ? What was your first computer ?
hwaara I started getting into computers when my mother bought one around 1994. It was a Macintosh Performa, and I remember that one of the first things I did was to insert a 3,5" floppy disk upside down, and ruined the floppy disk drive. :)
me Was becoming a member of the Camino community difficult ?
hwaara The first few patches I submitted were probably quite horrible. I was learning Objective-C and Cocoa basics at that point, and thought to myself that the reviewers were a bit harsh. But as always, in the end it is the best (and only!) way to learn - from your mistakes. After logging on a few times on the #camino IRC channel, I started getting familiar with all the people, and their interests in Camino.
me What do you think is missing in Camino ?
hwaara One of my main pet peeves has been the lack of a find toolbar, similar to that of Firefox. If you search a lot on webpages, the primitive Find dialog is not of much help. Some support for routing RSS to my favorite RSS application is also needed, and I know Nick Kreeger has a patch brewing for that. One of the reasons Firefox has been such a tremendous success is because of its extensibility, where people can make extensions to hook in almost anywhere in the UI code and customize it. I think in order to compete with Safari on the mac, something radical like that would be needed for Camino.
hwaara TextMate is another example where extensibility has been one of the key points for success. I would love to see some way to extend Camino with bundles.
me Are you involved in other software projects ?
hwaara I'm active in Firefox a bit, obviously. Then I've written a small plug-in to TextMate called TabMate, that will make TextMate show Mozilla code nicely, according to how the local code style is defined at the top of the file (with a modeline). I've written a few small patches to Shakespeer, and right now I'm also trying to develop a new OS X app with my friend.
me Ok I think I'm donewith the techie side. I have one non techie question, where does your name come from ?
hwaara Håkan is an old scandinavian name. Historically, it means something like "descendant of the king". :)