Stop With The Releases Already!

I’m in the middle of doing platform testing for EditLive! 6.0 which involves setting up and testing a huge array of OS, browser and JVM combinations to run through and manually verify that everything is working as it should be. Normally this is hard enough to do, but at the moment it seems every tech company has either just released a new version or is about to. We’ve got FireFox 2.0, IE 7, Windows Vista beta, OS X Leopard beta, Java 6 beta, OS X Java 6 beta, Office 2007 beta and who knows what Linux and Solaris is going to do to me.

To keep things moving, you wind up installing multiple things on the fly. Right now I have an intel Mac Mini installing OS X Leopard, Vista installing on a VM image1, and my laptop testing out FireFox 2.02. There are way too many large installers flying around the network and pretty much all available hard drives are pegged for one reason or another.

Speaking of FireFox 2.0 – it’s the latest member of my OS X installer hall of shame. This is what FireFox’s dmg comes up looking like:

If only that picture of the applications folder was actually a link to the folder it would be perfect. Instead it gives the impression that you should drag the big fox on to the picture of the applications folder. Sigh. On the plus side, they don’t seem to have broken anything we depend on. We’ve obviously been testing out the betas prior to know, but you never know what’s going to change when the final release comes out. We spent quite a bit of time trying to find work arounds to bugs in IE 7 that caused problems with our Windows only editor only to find that when the final release came out it all worked perfectly. It’s always better when it works that way though – every so often you get a bug introduced in the final release version and it blind sides you.

Anyway, installs are starting to finish again and FireFox 2.0 on Mac seems to be working out pretty well.

1 – You have no idea how slow that is…↩

2 – in fact, this post is a part of that testing…↩