It makes sense to me

I have had a iPhone 3g since launch day I queued up at 4 am to get one and since then I have still not used it to it’s full potental.

One of the features I rarely use is the iTunes and app store other than buying a few songs when drunk and the odd free game or Twitter app I never use it, however I’m bored now and playing about with it I was looking through the app catalog and most of them are totally crap, why would u pay £2 for some app which once a day created an alert that u had to do some situps or a need for multiple rss readers and the stuff they pass off as entertainment is laughable some of them the graphics look worse than something I would have had on my NES 20 years ago, tho after my search today I now have 4 apps Texas holdum, bejewlled, twiterific and as off today wordpress so I can blog on the go, granted it will be difficult to post source code but at least I can post random stuff and still attach various lolcat images that somehow tie into my ramblings

Web, general apps, iphone

As we all know one of the most annoying things about web development is making sure your application looks and behaves the same in different Internet browsers.

Imagine the situation when you have spent hours getting you CSS right in Firefox only to discover that in IE all the positioning is wrong, your images are upside down and instead of your background being blue its bright pink. OK maybe not the colour or image thing, but you get the idea of what I am saying. Now comparing how a site looks between IE6 and Firefox is a simple exercise, that involves having both installed on you development machine and checking between the two when ever you make a change.

But what about comparing different versions of the same browser? IE6 vs IE7. By default you cant have both of these installed on your pc at the same time, Windows wont let you. Installing IE7 will overwrite IE6 and wont let you reinstall it. There are some solutions out there most of them involve hacking the registry in some way and are not supported. Microsoft offer a solution to let you run multiple browsers via virtulisation using theVitual PC application , This solution is free however Microsoft periodically expire the license on the image you download so You may need to redownload it every so often.

Another drawback of this method is it is very resource intensive running multiple virtual PCs might cause problems if you try to start other applications.

However the good people at Tredosoft.com have come up with another solution to getting multiple versions of IE to run on a PC without virtulisation, their Multiple IE app allows you to install a stand alone copies of previous IE versions from IE 3 to IE 6

I have recently installed this and so far I have had no problems with it, It will also work with IE7, although IE7 is not included in the download so you should install that from Microsoft first and let that be the “default” Windows version of IE then download the Multiple IE app from Tredosoft.com

I work behind a proxy and although I was unable to manually configure my proxy settings in the stand alone IE’s I found I was still able to access in the Internet. I am therefor assuming that the stand alone versions use the proxy settings set up in the “default” IE version because if I changed the settings in IE7 I was unable to access the Internet in the other versions. If anyone can confirm this please post a comment, similarly if I am talking rubbish let me know!

Now I can run multiple Instances of different versions of IE, I can make sure my site looks the same in each. However looking the same is the end of the story I still need to ensure that all my functionality behaves the same in different browsers, this will be done via acceptance testing using the Selenium framework and will be covered in my next post “Acceptance Testing with Selenium”

Testing, Web IE, Internet Explorer, Multiple IE, Testing