Screenshots, Flickr, Mashups, Oh My!

Our 'next big enhancement' to the site is officially out... well,officially out in beta - the ability to capture screenshots of your testing session.

We had several goals for this release:
- make it easy for you to document problems you see by taking a snapshot
- ability to annotate the snapshots, recording details about any issues
- make it easy for you to share this information with others on your team
- ability to put together 'proof sheets' showing that web site has been tested in multiple browsers and rendered correctly in all of them.

In looking at this, we wanted to have a really slick UI to manage the photos, add captions to them, etc - so we started looking at how the 'pros' do it at sites such as Flickr. In looking at Flickr - it had everything we needed... so, instead of writing code to duplicate their functionality, we mashed!

We you press the 'snapshot' button at the top of the testing console, a new window or tab will appear. You will have to login or create a Yahoo Flickr account, then authorize CrossBrowserTesting.com to have write permission to this account. The snapshots will be automatically loaded into your Flickr account, where you can label them, share them, and create really cool slideshows which showcase your work, and let everybody (particularly your customers) see that your sites are built to work across multiple browsers and configurations.

Here is an example a test of Digg.com across multiple browsers and operating systems:

Help Wanted: Evangelists on the cheap

You may have noticed a new section added to the front page today. We now have a "Spread the Word" block to make it easy for you to help us get the word out about CrossBrowserTesting.com. If you happen to use one of the services in that block (or any others), please take a moment to post your opinion of our service (even if it isn't a glowing review, we'll take anything).

We've got some BIG things coming out. Oh I wish I could tell you. You won't have to wait long for the first, it should be in production in less than a week. Could be even just a couple of days. If I didn't think my partners would kill me for announcing it before it is ready I'd tell you.

Oh what the heck, it's mmmpph....

<signal terminated>

holy moly... someone posted us on to hacker news....

Wow, we got posted on hacker news. That is really cool. And we did not even have to pay them or anything... :)

IE8 Beta 1 and Firefox 3 Beta 4 configs added! Try them out!

We received the following suggestion from the contact us page:

Hi - great looking service guys! Do you have a configuration with IE 8 beta available? That is very important for us to test. I would like to give the free trial a try, but I am sure it would take longer than the 5 minutes allowed to get that monster installed!

If IE 8 beta is not currently available, do you know when you may be able to add it? I would really like to give this service a try ASAP. Thanks so much and keep up the fantastic work!

A great idea! We have now added a Windows XP and a Windows Vista configuration with the Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and Firefox 3 Beta 4. You can try out the latest and greatest version of these browsers with out risking your own desktop's configuration.

Try them out, and keep the feedback coming!

You make it hurt so good...

So, John Mellen Cougarcamp was inducted into the R&R Hall of Fame a couple of days ago. Wonder if they put all of his performing names on one plaque or if he got three of them?

So why, you ask, does it hurt so good? It doesn't really, it mostly just hurts. But YOU make it hurt good. By now you've either stopped reading, decided there is no point to this post, or that I am on some heavy medication. Technically, I suppose all three could be true. I can guarantee at least one of those is. Mostly it is just a good segue (I had to look that up, I always thought it was spelled segway, who knew) into my real point.

CrossBrowserTesting.com has had a heck of a week and it is just Wednesday. We have had a couple of small outages, but they seemed to come at the worst possible times. The good part is that we've had some users help us find some pesky bugs that we had not seen in any of our testing. So on one hand, having bugs hurts. It doesn't reflect well on the service or us. However, it is good because You are using the service we've built and that is the only reason we are able to find and fix them!

So I personally want to thank all our users, especially the ones that have put up with the bugs and still keep coming back.

Mike

Developer expresses love of IE6

Thought this was pretty funny...

Possible fix for the intermittent java applet security error in Firefox

We have made a site change to 'hopefully' correct this issue. Sun does not have a fix yet to the reverse dns java plugin security issue. In order to work around the problem and not have it interfere with people using Firefox, we have altered the browser testing console to use ip addresses instead of domain names when launching a particular configuration. The java applet security issue was related to a reverse dns issue... not a lot of reverse dns issues when you are not using dns. Hopefully, this will get rid of this intermittent (and quite painful) issue.
Thanks,
Ken

CSS Hates Me

I've been a developer 20+ years using various languages along the way. I'll admit that I've never truly mastered any of them, but I have always been able to make do and make a decent living with them. My first web application was created with Oracle and their OAS/WAS using PL/SQL in stored procedures. I was hooked on web apps from the start.

I've done a lot of web development since then, again using various languages and tools. Some took me longer to become productive with, but none of them have actively fought me while I was trying to use them. CSS is alive and evil and it hates me. It sees what I am trying to do and uses my own code against me. As far as I am concerned, tables are the best way to layout a web page and always will be. (I am going to get a lot of hate mail about that)

However, we are using CSS, though if you check the footer you'll see that we are using something I modified from Free CSS Templates. I never would have been able to do this myself. So what is my point? We eat our own dogfood. One of the reasons we think that CrossBrowserTesting.com will be successful is that we keep having to use it ourselves to check for problems with our own sites (not that we have everything perfect yet). No one can have all these different browsers or environments at hand to test browser compatibility with and these virtual sessions are great for being able to spot check changes or debug problems.

I can't wait until we get our Mac's up and running so that we can test against that OS and related browsers as well. Of course, that will just be another platform from which CSS will launch a brutal attack on what's left of my sanity.

Oh well, enough ranting. I hope you enjoy YOUR weekend.

Mike

hello world...

it is only fitting that my first post should be hello world.

It is snowing now and the ground is turning white. The kids are jones'ing to go outside.

That is about it.

Known issues, A.K.A. bugs

Well, my no good partners kept having an issue with Firefox and the configuration console (the VNC viewer applet for those in the know). Me, no problems whatsoever. Well, through brilliant deductive reasoning on my part and maybe a small bit of help from Ken and a lengthy post on one of the Sun forums, we figured it out. Unfortunately, we haven't figured out a way around the problem yet.

Until we do, the service is best launched in a browser other than Firefox (man that hurts to say). This is our top priority and we will get it working. We're also working on the black screens for Win98 and Ubuntu and hope to have a fix out soon.

As always, please let us know if you have any issues with any part of the site or service.

Thanks,
Mike

User, Users, Users, Users, Users...

If you recognized the poor reference to Ballmer's great "Developer's" rant, you're my kind of geek.

Anyway, while we still have some issues to iron out, we could really use more users. (that sounds funny doesn't it?) So, if by some miracle you are someone other than Ken or Tony reading this, please tell as many people as you can about our service. We need to push the hardware and software more and have as many different kinds of users using the system to flush out any pesky bugs that might be lurking in "the machine."

So, to put it bluntly, please please please please please please please help us get more traffic. We'd be eternally grateful. Well, maybe not eternally, but for a really long time. Alright, 2 days, max.

Thanks,
Mike

New feedback form after you run a session

We have implemented a new feedback form which shows up when you finish testing. We tried to balance two conflicting priorities - 1) not 'bugging' our users and 2) getting feedback we need to make the system better. We made the feedback form short, and, hopefully, easy. We used the ajax star rating system that a lot of sites have been using lately - just click on the 4th star to rate the session a 4 out of 5. There is an optional feedback field where you can type - please, please, please use this if you encounter troubles - knowing what the issues are that people are seeing is half the battle.

We used the Star Rating plugin for jquery to implement this - it is available at http://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/star-rating/ - it was really clean to implement and worked well.