Product quality suffers. I know that inside out .. yet I just got caught myself. I’ve just updated our front page with some lovely pics of our shop. If you click them they spring to life in a lightbox (I’m using lightview). With a minor update to layout and some testimonials thrown in, it’s no biggy, just an incremental improvement.

So, as always I get it working in Firefox. Easy! I develop on a G5 Power Mac, so to test on IE I’m caught between the VPC days of G4s and the Parallels world of MacIntel. So I have a crappy windows box that sits under my stairs and is networked in. I use it remotely via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection, which is great, but the RDC/windows combination still freezes way too much and I find myself getting up and rebooting the windows box more often than I’d like. Then of course we hit the beauty of IE and no multiple installs. With Firefox, I have 3 live installs: 1.5, 2.0 and the latest 3.0 nightly. Easy! With IE I should also have 3 live installs: IE6, IE7 and IE8 beta. Not Easy. In fact not possible! MS offer a free VPC image so I can run natively with IE7 and use VPC to test IE6 and IE8. But it expires regularly and on my box runs like a dog. So with an expired VPC image at this point, I’m removing and installing each version of IE to test against. Great.

So I got lazy. Tested in Firefox. Fine. Tested in IE6. Fine. Great! IE6 is normally the problem child so IE7 should be fine. Bugger it, I’ll just deploy. 2 days later I find the layout in IE7 is completely screwed and people have been seeing this weird Mondrian take on the APPLEBOX front page. Don’t worry, I’ve kicked myself enough times already. Turns out IE7 doesn’t like floats attached to unordered lists like Firefox and IE6 does. There’s another variation in the IE world to remember.

All sorted now though, and everybody can see what a lovely shop we have

Posted April 11th, 2008 under Technology and Coding.
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