If you are like me you use Gmail and love it. You also use a Mac and have found Firefox has started to become too bloated and slow to use for accessing your Gmail. For a while now I have been using Gmail as it’s own “stand-alone” application using Fluid.

This has been nice for a couple of reasons:

1. It gives me browser independence. If I want to use Firefox for development, say, I can. If I want to browse the web with Safari, because the experience is better, I can. But I don’t need to have either up and running to check mail.
2. I can fire up Gmail from spotlight (which I use like Quicksilver). I hit Cmd + Space hundreds of time a day to search my computer and launch programs. I need just hit Cmd + Space and then “G” and Return and Gmail is open.
3. The Gmail logo sits there looking pretty in the dock.

But then Safari 3.0 was released. Despite numerous improvements, the change that effected me the most was one that didn’t allow my Gmail Fluid app (which used Safari) to add contacts by tabbing (only return works). I have enough muscle memory built up that this was actually a major problem for me every time I would search for and add contacts.

Then, when looking for info on Firefox 3 I saw Camino sitting there and remember using it before. Well I downloaded and installed it and for a speed test, openened Gmail. To my surprise it was fast – faster than it has been in years I would say. This got me wondering (aside from contemplating using this as my primary browser) if I could replicate my Gmail.app Fluid file using Camino somehow. Well, it turns out not to be that hard. Here’s how I made my Gmail faster and more usable:

1. In Camino > Preferences > General Tab – make sure to check the box next to “Load the pages that were open before quiting” (and choose the default browser in which you would like links to open)
2. Adjust any Tab preferences while you are in here.
3. In Camino > View – choose to hide the toolbars, if you wish to make it seem more application like. You can always turn them back on by clicking the lozenge in the upper right corner of the browser window.
4. Now that the boring stuff is done, find Camino in the Finder and choose “More Info”. Change the application name to Gmail.app.
5. For this last step it helps to have had a Fluid app already installed that uses the Gmail logo. As this is the only way I know how to easily do this, just open the Fluid app and click on the icon in the upper left and hit Cmd + C to copy it.
6. In the new Camino/Gmail app click to select the Camino icon in the upper left and hit Cmd + V to past the Gmail icon. Viola’, a fast Gmail app that is readily accessible via the OS.

MacOSXHints.com has a sweet little tip to get tab completion for ssh. Just enter the following line at the bottom of your .bash_profile script for tab completing goodness.

complete -W "$(echo `cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sed -e s/,.*//g | uniq | grep -v "\["`;)" ssh

Perhaps the best part is that you can type ssh-[tab]-[tab] to quickly see all of the hosts that are in your known hosts file and then quickly pick out that IP or host name that you can never remember.

Only a couple things have bothered me during this past year’s transition to OS X. One of them has been Firefox’s issues with tabbing through form fields. Specifically, how it can tab through text fields and textareas but not dropdown lists.

Safari has the the same problem but it is easily remedied via System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse controls. Clicking the Keyboard Shortcuts tab/button at the top and then the radio button labeled “All Controls” will enable tabbing into dropdown lists.

UPDATE: As it turns out (as of some update) the System Preference change above will affect both Safari and Firefox so you do NOT need to do the steps below, if you have all the updates.

But the Firefox fix had been more elusive, until today, I just couldn’t take it anymore and search again. Eureka I have found this post. It is a bit less user-friendly but here are steps to get Firefox forms up to snuff on the Mac:

1. Type about:config in the URL bar.
2. Click inside the Filter field that will pop up, and type tabfocus. This will narrow down the listed preferences to accessibility.tabfocus, which is what you want to edit.
3. Double-click this preference, change the value to 7, and then restart your browser.

This will save me a bunch of time and a good deal of moving my hand to my mouse and back.

One of the first things we thought we knew about the way we wanted to employ agile methods* was that our team should nearly always be on-site with the customer or stakeholder to facilitate communication most effectively.

With several projects now under our belts – projects where we were on-site full-time and others where we were never on site – we have found that the optimal place to be is somewhere in the middle.

For some clients the temptation to communicate too much is overpowering. Wanting to discuss something turns into calling a meeting, turns into inviting everyone – all in the name of effective communication. While there are certainly times when it is bet to have everyone in the room, those times don’t occur daily or even weekly in most cases. On those projects where our time with the client was constrained we found that we were more efficient. We didn’t have meetings to make us comfortable, we had them to answer questions, set direction, and knock down hurdles.

In the future, I think we are going to try to set-up false constraints to help minimize meetings and require that the meeting “prove itself” even before it has been scheduled. Damn those 37signals kids if they aren’t right again!

* You probably won’t see me use the big “A” agile much as I don’t really believe in that

Jesse and I have been back from the Groovy/Grails Experience in Reston, Virginia for about a week now and we have had time to digest what we took in. Like most conferences, it was the time between sessions I found most valuable. We got a chance to meet with Alex and Graeme of G2One and had lunch with Jason Rudolf and Steven Devijver. It was great to see so many people from all around the world converging (England, Italy, Russia, France, even Australia, all were representing).

Some of the most encouraging news was the growing acceptance of Grails as the “go-to” platform for many new projects – projects that would have traditionally been Java projects. There were also several stories of companies switching from Rails to Grails for performance reasons. Mike Hugo and I will be talking about our experiences at the conference at this month’s GUM meeting next Tuesday the 11th.