CS and the City

I have more web browsing software in my Applications folder than any sane person should have. The usual suspects of Safari and Firefox, Internet Explorer Mac 5 (just in case…), Flock, Opera, and OmniWeb. Missing for whatever reason was Camino.

Camino is a Mac-only browser implementation on top of the Mozilla core which powers Firefox. Essentially, you get the best of both worlds: The power of the Gecko rendering engine and the tight integration you’d expect from a Mac only app.

I can’t explain its absence. I may have tried an earlier version, who knows. In fact, it wasn’t until I watched Mike Pinkerton’s presentation on the history of Camino that I decided to (re-)give it a go.

And I’m impressed so far. The load times are noticeably faster than Firefox, and the memory footprint seems smaller (though not as much smaller as I expected after dumping all of Firefox’s cross-platform interface stuffing). There are still some stability issues to be ironed out.

I’ve also filed my first feature request. As I wrote before, I am in absolute love with how Safari handles PDFs. Though Camino boasts about harnessing the true power of OSX, they still turn a blind eye to PDFs.

So I filed my first feature request bug with Camino. It promptly got marked as a duplicate. I didn’t think I’d be the first one to miss Safari’s perfect PDF functionality. I hope anyone that stumbles upon this article will do both of us a favor and go “Me too!” the feature.

The reason they haven’t added the feature is that OSX’s PDFKit is a 10.4+ feature only and Camino boasts support for 10.2 and up. Legacy support is a sensitive subject depending on which side you’re on so I understand the Camino devs being hesitant to leave users behind. I just wonder how much of the user base is still that far behind? I don’t want to have to wait till Camino 2.0.

Interesting note: The dictionary that Camino uses for its in-line spell checking says the word “Camino” is incorrect.

The interview and offer round for my sixth and final co-op term has come and gone.

Summary: I wish all co-op terms were 6th round co-op terms.

I knew going in that this round would be different. With a year and a half of experience, and two “Outstanding” ratings from my last two terms at Business Objects, I was pretty confident I’d have some impressive offers. I decided to limit the number of applications to avoid being overwhelmed with interviews. This was a very wise move.

I applied to 13 companies (15 positions in total)

Amazon (Seattle)
Apple x2 (California and Vancouver)
Christie Digital Systems (Kitchener)
Google x2 (Both in California)
IBM (Germany)
Infosys Technologies (India)
Kaleidescape (Waterloo)
Microsoft (Seattle)
Nortel Networks (Ottawa)
Oculus (Toronto)
Pacific & Western Bank Of Canada (Saskatoon)
Pandora (California)
Sydus (Singapore)

Note: Pandora was not through JobMine (University of Waterloo’s co-op system)

Pandora didn’t actually have a co-op program when I approached them and I couldn’t get them rolling in time sadly. I didn’t hear back from Apple California, one of the Google positions, Infosys, and Nortel (probably because I got too frustrated with Nortel’s application site and didn’t submit my resume outside of Jobmine).

I had interviews with 10 of the companies. Some of them went better than others. I did better than I had hoped in the technical ones, which is always a nice sign.

Ironically, when it came to offer time, I got an offer from every company I interviewed with except Apple. This is ironic because Apple was by far my first choice and one that I had spent significant amount of time smoozing with.

I also had a few great compliments over the process:

• One of my interviewers said that I had “the most beautiful resume he had ever seen”
• This was the first term that one of my interviewers had offered me the job straight up in the interview
• After an interviewer had quoted their co-op weekly wage during an interview, they emailed me to offer me a substantial increase on that number if I took the position
• A company strategically revoked an offer to me after they explained that “I was a highly desirable candidate,” and that I was “unlikely to accept the position.” Which, although the company was very interesting, was ultimately true.

Each of the companies had a lot offer: Very interesting products and technologies, opportunities for travel, relocation to exotic locales, more than generous compensation, on and on and one.

I’d like to say it was a tough decision, but to be absolutely honest, once I knew what companies were giving me offers, there was only one choice:

Google

Even when people found out I just had an interview with Google, I had people coming up to me and congratulating me. Google is the tech company right now. To be honest, I don’t have any expectation to return after I graduate (though I don’t rule it out). I would really like to work for a smaller company or start-up come graduation time.

For me though, I need to see what all the fuss is about. Not just at Google but Silicon Valley, San Fran, everything. Though these things change quickly in my industry, right now, Google is my Mecca, and I got offered an all expense paid pilgrimage.

A lot of excitement surrounds multi-touch interfaces, partially because of the iPhone and partially because the technology is starting to get cheap enough to be realistic.

Here’s a collection of related links I’ve stumbled upon lately (and a few from the past)

Jeff Han’s original TED talk
More of Jeff’s work

Speculation that Multi-touch is Apple’s next big move
How to build your own Multi-touch interface

Multi-touch communities:
Multi-touch interfaces and usability
NUI Group