I like to think of myself as quite a creative and visual developer, I like design, I'm aware of aesthetics and I get a lot of satisfaction from a good UI, but I do not use a Mac, and have no intention of doing so. I need Windows because I learned on MS tools and this is my home, and no one has convinced me to move. The problem is I develop for the web and I want everyone to get the same sense of satisfaction from my UI as I do, I test my sites in as many browsers as I can. At the company I've just left there are a number of Apple Macs, they even have a couple of dedicated test machines with VNC installed. Now I'm leaving to go into business, just two of us, and a Mac suddenly seems like a rather expensive luxury. I've been looking into a few alternatives, there are screen capture services that send you a screenshot of your site in Safari for a small fee, which is no use for testing an interactive UI. Then I spent some time trying to install OpenDarwin, I read that the browser engine of Safari was open source (branched from KHTML) so figured that the browser in OpenDarwin would be based on that and work similar to Safari. I was trying to install it in a virtual machine and couldn't even get it to boot once I'd spent two days trying to install! I also saw on their site that the OpenDarwin project is now dead. A little more research and I came across a project to port the Safari engine (WebKit) to windows and wrap it up in a browser GUI! It's called Swift and although still very young, it looks promising. I've just used it to test the new ASP.Net AJAX Toolkit and I am totally amazed by how much of it works! There are a couple of bugs with innerHTML and opacity filters, but these are probabably to do with server side browser sniffing, if I can tell ASP.Net AJAX to treat Swift as Safari then it will probably all work perfectly. The really cool controls, like MaskEdit, just work already though. This isn't going to be a perfect replacement for Safari, but it will mean I can nag my MacFan friends a lot less.

Labels: safari, testing, web development, windows

I went in to work yesterday and I quit my job. I've worked there for 7 years, since I was 17. It's been a bit crazy and emotional all day, I was fine this morning, then once I'd handed in my resignation letter it started to hit me what I've just done. From this time next month I won't have a salary to depend on. Whether I pay my mortgage or even eat will depend on what work I and my business partner have won, completed and managed to extract money for. It's a really scary thought right now, we've got work lined up but we're still some way from completing it, and even further from getting clients to sign-off and pay. It's also really exciting, it sounds cheesy but I've never felt more in control of my own destiny, everything and anything seems possible right now. I've been quite humbled by some of the reactions in the office, there were a few people in tears, and my boss seems to have been knocked for six by it. We've known each other for a long time and been good friends, I'm hoping we can keep that going and maybe turn it into a good business relationship. For me the fact that no one could of imagined me leaving the company has just reinforced my reasons for leaving, I'd become part of the furniture. I'm glad I'm not doing this alone though, my business partner is very much like me in a lot of ways, but from a very different background. He's very business and marketing, with a fascination in technology, I'm all technology and development with a fascination in business. We've worked together before and we've always bounced well off each other, and possibly more importantly we both respect each other. So it's on to a new era of my life, I know a lot of people have taken this same step before but that doesn't make it any easier. I know that the only thing I could possibly regret would be to not have done this though. I'm taking some risks, maybe I could loose my flat, but I won't regret trying. The company is called glow, website is coming soon. We can build content managed websites, bespoke web based applications and have years of experience of web based marketing (viral, search engine, cost per click) and innovating all sorts of new ways to converse with your customers. If you're interested then get in touch!

Labels: business, company, glow, web design, web development