Camino 1.5 Released!

Wow. It’s been a crazy year and a crazy couple of weeks…

Last February (2006) was my first major Camino release (1.0). I honestly had no clue what I was doing. It was hard work. I stayed up all night a few nights before the release day and worked to finish the website. We issued an official press release courtesy the Mozilla Foundation, which helped generate some real press for this little project.

And, well, we just did everything again (well, minus the press release).

This time, I think it was much easier. Smokey spent a good chunk of time getting the documentation section ready for consumption and a good five hours putting his new docs into our design.

Jon Hicks (yes, that Jon Hicks… click folio26) started designing our website a few weeks ago and had almost everything ready for us. We had even started integrating some of the content back then and had a good start.

Looking at how much work there was to do, I knew that I’d be staying up all night to finish our website so we could release first thing in the morning. Initially, at our meeting last week, we decided to launch without the new site. But that just wouldn’t be very Mac-like of us, would it? Besides, no other Mac browsers would do something like that… (But honestly, that’s a pretty bold move on their part and it turned out successful.)

Just before midnight, it occurred to me that we we had a bunch of “placeholder” graphics, waiting to be filled. Now, I’m no designer. I can take screenshots and work to give them rounded corners, but beyond that, I’ve got nothing. Realizing that this wouldn’t be enough and knowing that our resident designer was far too busy to help this last minute (I emailed him a couple days prior), I did what anyone would do… I emailed for help. The one person I knew who used Camino and was another great designer, happened to be a friend of Jon.

This unnamed person (who I’d name if he gave me permission, but I haven’t asked) responded to my inquiry fairly quickly but, sadly, didn’t have time to help. However, he forwarded on my request to a bunch of other designers and, wouldn’t you know, a little while later, an email appears in my inbox.

Now here is where I have to pause and give mad props to the designer, Zach Inglis. Zach got the call for help just as he was heading to bed and decided to stay up anyway and help out. I kept him up ‘til almost 7am PDT, which was 9am where he was. And man, did he come through.

Without Zach, I’m honestly not sure we could have finished the site in time. The back up plan, to just modify the old site, would have been our only option.

I just want to publicly thank Zach for his hard work and dedication last night. It’s not just appreciated by me and the Camino team, but by the hundreds of thousands of visitors to our website each month. Thanks Zach!

More and more I’m realizing that this “open source” thing is really awesome. People are able to just jump in and help out, providing their talents to any projects that need them. The generosity of people, even at the last minute, astounds me.

To make this long story short, we finished the site in time, launched it and Camino 1.5 at about 8am PDT, and are now on our way forward, fixing the bugs I caused along the way. “Oh look, I broke all our promotion badges, yay!” (By the way, thanks for just catching that, Jeff.)

Oh yeah, we released Camino 1.5. Go download it. And check out our new website while you’re at it.