SoHo Trends

I’m sure you’re familiar with Murphy’s Law… “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”  In computing, Murphy couldn’t have been more spot on.  Things happen.  Disk drives crash.  Blue screens of death occur unexpectedly.  A construction crew cuts a line and your T-1 goes down for next three days.  It’s happened to all of us.  What’s refreshing is when a vendor proactively informs its customers about a bad situation, explains what’s going on and how its customers are affected and takes steps to insure that it doesn’t happen again.  Unfuddle is such a vendor.

Unfuddle provides Subversion hosting, Git hosting, bug and issue tracking in a secure, hosted environment.  I use their free, “Private” service to host several small Subversion repositories.  Unfuddle offers five different plans, ranging from free (Private) to $99/monthly (Enterprise), that appeal to an audience ranging from a single developer (me) to very large, geographically diverse development teams.  When I outgrow their free servce — which will happen fairly soon, hopefully — I will definitely subscribe to the Micro service for a reasonable $9/mo.

One evening last week, I received an unsolicited e-mail from Unfuddle stating that the hardware which hosted my account had experienced a failure with its attached storage earlier that morning.  I don’t access my Unfuddle account daily.  On that day, I hadn’t committed any changes or otherwise accessed my Unfuddle account, so I wasn’t affected  by the outage (or even knew it occurred).  I was very impressed with how Unfuddle handled the situation and really appreciated the open and honest discussion of the outage within their e-mail.  Unfuddle certainly wasn’t obligated to tell me about the outage.  I’m not a “paying” customer and, frankly, I probably woudn’t have known about the outage if they didn’t tell me.  The important point is that Unfuddle did inform me about the outage.  Not only that, they discussed improvements to their service that would deal with these types of outages in the future AND they also waived my entire June payment.   This is their response to a non-paying customer.  If they treat non-paying, “free” customers that way, just imaging how they would treat me as a paying customer!

My blog entry today is to praise Unfuddle for their actions and tell as many people as I can about my positive experiences with them.  It’s far too easy to criticize companies when they do something wrong.  This time, I’m complimenting Unfuddle for what they did right.  Try Unfuddle today!

Adobe BrowserLab is a web-based service that allows you to view websites on popular browsers and operating systems. Supported browser/operating system combinations include:

• Firefox 3.0 / Windows XP
• Firefox 3.0 / OS X
• Firefox 2.0 / Windows XP
• Firefox 2.0 / OS X
• IE 7.0 / Windows XP
• IE 6.0 / Windows XP
• Safari 3.0 / OS X.

BrowserLab runs inside your favorite browser as a Flash application.  It takes a few seconds to load the first time; subsequent loads were faster.  It’s quite easy to use.  You simply choose the environment you want to simulate and enter the URL (for a public web site) that you want to test.  A few seconds — okay, maybe more than a few seconds — later, BrowserLab will show you how the web page looks in that browser/OS combination.  Here’s an example of how the SohoTrends web site looks in Firefox 3.0 and IE 7.0 (both on Windows XP).

BrowserLab 2-up view

As you can see, the user interface is pretty simple and straightforward.  In addition to viewing how the same URL looks in two different browser/OS combinations side-by-side, a really neat (and helpful) option is the “Onion Skin View”.  In this view, both screen are laid on top of each other.  There is a slider that you can use to adjust the transparency (or alpha channel for you purists) of each view so that you can see how the views differ.  Take a look at the same information as above, but in the onion skin view.

BrowserLab onion skin view

With the Onion Skin View, you can see where the two environments differ.  There’s not much difference; however, the exact placement of items does differ slightly when comparing Firefox 3.0 and IE 7.0.  Even if you had both browsers installed on your machine, the onion skin view is a helpful way of identifying differences visually.

According to the Adobe BrowserLab FAQ, the service is currently in a “limited free preview” mode.  The FAQ also states that:

There is no charge to use BrowserLab during the limited free preview. It will eventually be released as a paid subscription service, and the final price has not been determined at this time. There will be no limit to the number of pages a user tests.

So, take advantage of the free BrowserLab service while you can.  In order to use the service, you’ll need to sign up for an Adobe ID.  Also, you’re not guaranteed access to the free preview.  I was able to sign up for the service today with no problem.  As always, your mileage may vary.

As many of you know, I do some Flex development on the side (see my post about Ribbit for an example).  One of the most helpful resouces I have found is Flash and Flex Developer’s Magazine.  The magazine is published six times per year and is a great source of articles for both Flash and Flex developers.  The February 2009 issue contains articles such as:

• Flash Flex developer interview with Dave Schroeder about the Flashbelt Conference
• BannerSnack – A quick alternative to Flash?
• Working With Flash CS4 New Features: Inverse kinematics (IK) with Bone Tool
• Tracking Time with Screenweaver HX
• Using all the different components within CS4 to built a complete site
• Model View Controller – What’s the Secret Sauce… ?
• JSFL Quirks
• SWX: The Native Data Format for Adobe Flash
• An introduction to Flickr In Flash
• Flash video and AS3
• WebORB tricks
• Multi-user Applications in haXe
• Achieving a retro-style using only Flash
• Secrets of a professional Flash game programmer
• Interview with Lee Brimelow.

Walk, don’t run to the Flash and Flex Developer’s Magazine web site and check them out!