Development:Summer of Code 2009

For Summer of Code 2009, Dan Weber will work on Camino's location bar. Stuart Morgan is his mentor. The tracker bug for the project is 495490.

Although not officially part of my proposal (yet), I'm very interested in one-click bookmarking.

Proposal

Change Appearance

The appearance of the Camino autocomplete drop list should be updated to make it seem more at home on Leopard (and Tiger). The bug for this is 495496. There are a few options here. I've done some mockups on a number of variations, but I'm sure there will be other suggestions as well. Here's what I have:

1.

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2.

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2.5.

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3.

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4.

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5.

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6.

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Include Bookmarks

Autocomplete currently only matches against items in history. Bookmarks should be matched, too, and given a higher priority than history items (i.e. should appear higher in the list). The bug for this is 166288. However, this might get a little complicated because currently the autocomplete code is not Cocoa and the bookmark matching algorithm is going to be (Camino does bookmarks all on its own). The ideal solution would be to rewrite all of the autocomplete code in Cocoa (Bug 340611).

Better Sorting

Something like the Firefox frecency algorithm. It is probably unrealistic to compare my efforts to the frecency algorithm, especially given the current state of Camino's bookmark/history code, but it's not as unrealistic as the next item. If this gets good enough, maybe the powers that be will allow inline autocomplete to be turned on by default. That would be nice.

Social Bookmarks

This was the primary focus of my original proposal, as it is the thing that interests me most. However, it now seems almost infinitesimally likely that this will ever happen, let alone happen this summer. Still, it would be nice to make at least a little headway in this area this summer. At this point, not many details have been hammered out, but the basic idea is to allow a user's delicious.com bookmarks (and possibly others) to be searched by the autocomplete algorithm. Stuart proposed a "pluggable bookmarks" idea, which presumably would let you swap out local bookmarks for ones you have stored on Delicious or Google, etc. A demo I did of how this might be implemented:

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