Apple: Can I run Safari4 and Safari3 side by side?

I know that Safari 4 was just released, but I couldn’t stop wondering if there is any way I can try it out without having to give up my stable Safari 3. So, is there a way to run Safari4 and Safari3 side by side or is there a portable Safari?

While I don’t know the final answer, I can tell you one thing: if you are searching for running different IE versions side by side you’ll find tons of answers. If you’re looking for running different Firefox versions side by side you’ll find another pile of answers, plus various portable bundles, etc. But for Safari: almost nothing.

With the help of the guys from StackOverflow, I have found the unique resource pointing out that it might be possible to run Safari 4 and Safari 4 side by side: Multi-Safari. Unfortunately, so far Safari 4 is not available, but I really hope they will make it available soon.

Update: Here is an extract from another tutorial for setting this up:

1. Download and install the Safari 4 beta. You’ll need to reboot after the install because of the system framework changes.
2. After rebooting, rename the new Safari.app in your Applications folder to Safari4.app.
3. Download the Webkit build from 11/22/2008.
   Safari 3.2.1 was released on 11/24/2008 so I’m guessing this build is very close to that version.
4. Mount the Webkit disk image and copy the Webkit.app application to your desktop.
5. Rename Webkit.app to Safari3.app and move it to your Applications folder. In your Applications folder you should now have Safari3.app and Safari4.app.
   The Safari 4 installer backs up the previous version as an invisible file located at /Library/Application Support/Apple/.Safari4PreviewArchive.tar.gz. We need the original Safari.app bundle as the old version of Webkit we downloaded will not work with the new Safari 4 bundle.
6. Launch the terminal and change directories:
   cd “/Library/Application Support/Apple/”
7. Expand the backed up archive: tar -zxvf .Safari4PreviewArchive.tar.gz. This creates a few new folders in the current directory: Applications, System, and usr.
8. You can now copy the old Safari.app which is now available the the newly created Applications folder to the top-level /Applications folder. You can either use the terminal (running the command cp -R “/Library/Application Support/Apple/Applications/Safari.app” /Applications/) or by navigating to Library » Application Support » Apple » Applications in the Finder and copying the Safari application bundle that way.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound so simple and I have not tried it myself (moreover on the original post there are commenters saying it doesn’t work).

So, if you try it out do let me know if you can run Safari4 and Safari3 side by side! Also, if you find a portable Safari I’d really appreciate any leads!

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Google Desktop Breaking Privacy and More ‘Good’ Things about Google

Google and Privacy

This last week, I’ve decided to install Google Desktop for Mac, as I wasn’t very satisfied with how my PDFs are indexed by Spotlight and/or Yep.

While, so far I’m pretty happy with the way Google Desktop has indexed my PDFs, I have noticed one thing that makes me feel completely unsecure about Google products!

Even if I have configured Google Desktop NOT to send any statistics (see above screenshot), the firewall caught Google Desktop repeatedly attempting to connect and submit private information without my consent!

I’ll not rant about what this means, but this is a major security and privacy breach in Google Desktop.

Gmail: Multi-Inboxes

This is a brilliant idea that offers a way to have multiple ‘portlets’ on your GMail account, each configured to display mails according to specific rules.

While playing with it, I’ve noticed a couple of things:

• the Lab feature is useful for displaying emails that are either Archived or configured to skip the Inbox. If you configure the portlets to match emails in the Inbox then things may get a bit confusing (duplication, actions, etc).
• The sidebar display option seemed to be the most appealing configuration. Remember we are having wider, not longer screens
• In case you categorize your emails using multiple labels or you are watching group emails (so you have real email threads), the sidebar display configuration is pretty unusable as the displayed information is unreadable (basically, the email subject is not visible)
  

  Now, I am trying out the option to display the portlets underneath the main area, but so far I don’t really like it.

Offline Gmail

I suppose you’ve already read about this as it was covered by all major and not so major blogs, everybody praising it. But, I guess somebody must be reticent about it, so why not that being me.

In my opinion, the offline GMail in the current form is useless.

But let me tell you my reasons. The offline support is auto-configured, meaning that you don’t have any control on what and how it is brought for offline access. I frankly prefer to access specific emails while being offline than to read what some statistical algorithm is telling me to read.

I think there is an easy solution for it though: GMail should introduce a special Offline label that you can use to specify what emails you want for offline access. Then it can use this humanly input metadata to take offline those emails and the last X days in the Inbox. That would make Offline GMail really useful!

Google Analytics Loosing Data

While analyzing the monthly data for one of my Google Analytics accounts, I’ve noticed a 10 days gap in the collected data.

It looks like Google Analytics completely missed collecting data for that period and when trying to get some support help for this major problem in Google Analytics, the answer I’ve got back was along the lines: “Don’t complain! It is a free product!”. I’ll let you judge by yourself how I feel about it.

Update on Commenting Services Face-off

After my post on the 4 commenting services Commenting Services Face to Face: Disqus vs IntenseDebate vs JS-Kit vs SezWho, I have started to receive back a lot of feedback. I’d like to thank all the people that took their time to go through the article and send me their feedback.

Based on this feedback, I feel that an update is needed as the information might change the final evaluation. As a quick reminder my final ranking was something like:

Blog

1. Winner: IntenseDebate
2. Runner-up: Disqus

Site

1. Winner: Disqus
2. Runner-up: IntenseDebate

Now, if you check the different matrices in my initial post, you’ll notice that there is a question that isn’t really answered: why JS-Kit doesn’t show up in my final top? I have to confess that compared with the rest of the article which tried to be as objective as possible, the answer to this question was a bit more subjective and it was heavily influenced by the fact that JS-Kit is was offering the FREE widget for only 25k pageviews. But, for some the JS-Kit’s freemium model may be more comfortable as it may be seen as a guarantee that the initial investment will not go away any time soon.

I should also mention that there have been a major upgrade to the freemium model and now the free version is available for up to 5 mil pageviews (see more details about JS-Kit pricing).

IntenseDebate updates

Spam filtering

IntenseDebate offers integration with Akismet for spam filtering. The option is available on the account dashboard.

Data Access

There are 2 updates related to the data access in IntenseDebate:

1. IntenseDebate offers through the account dashboard an export to XML function
2. IntenseDebate is currently working on an API. It wasn’t yet launched and I haven’t had the chance to check it yet. I am in contact with their support team and hope to have a more detailed update on this topic.

IntenseDebate Matrix

Comment Threading:	Y
Anonymous Comments:	Y
Bookmarkability	Y
Comment ranking	Y
Comment ranking functionality	Y
Rich format comments	Y
Spam filtering:	Custom + Akismet
Comment Moderation:	Y (web + email)
Search Engine Friendliness	Y (for platforms support by the plugin)/N for custom web sites
HTML/CSS Customization	Y
Widget (JS API):	Y
Programming API:	private (work in progress)
Data export	Export as XML
Costs	Free
Documentation Support	GetSatisfaction

With these updates, it looks like the only missing piece from the IntenseDebate offering is the lack of an off-the-shelf SEO friendliness feature. Moreover, this missing feature applies only for custom web sites that are not able to use the IntenseDebate integration plugins.

JS-Kit updates

Model/Costs

While, at the time of my initial comparison, the JS-Kit FREE version was available for 25k pageviews, JS-Kit has pushed a major update and now JS-Kit FREE applies for 5mil pageviews. This is imo a major change in their offering, one that makes me feel that JS-Kit wins its place in my top.

Data access

In my initial matrices, JS-Kit is missing both a Programming API and Data Export functionality. Well, I have some good news about these: JS-Kit folks are working on a public API and I hope to get access to it very soon and add more details. Also, JS-Kit offers access to all the comments through RSS. While, this is not optimal, your comments are not completely locked-in and so JS-Kit cannot score 0 anymore.

Search Engine Friendliness

In the previous post, I’ve been complaining about the fact that I wasn’t able to search the JS-Kit forum for more details. It looks like I was a bit wrong and the forum search functionality is in fact available, but a bit hidden under the Control link:

The guys from JS-Kit have promised to improve the widget UI so that the search functionality to become more visible and easily to access.

Also, having in mind the SEO solution created by JS-Kit (and then re-used by other commenting services), search engines should be able to correctly index the comment threads.

JS-Kit Matrix

Comment Threading:	Y
Anonymous Comments:	Y
Bookmarkability	N
Comment ranking	Y
Comment ranking functionality	Y
Rich format comments	Y
Spam filtering:	Custom + Akismet
Comment Moderation:	Y (web + email)
Search Engine Friendliness	Y (for platforms support by the plugin)/N for custom web sites
HTML/CSS Customization	Y
Widget (JS API):	Y
Programming API:	private (work in progress)
Data export	RSS
Costs	Freemium model (see JS-Kit pricing for more details)
Documentation Support	Q&A Forum, on site documentation, PDF

Conclusion

Based on the new information, I’d say that the top has changed a bit and without further ado, here is the new ranking:

Blog

1. Winner: JS-Kit
2. Runner-up: IntenseDebate

Site

1. Winner: Disqus
2. Runner-up: IntenseDebate and JS-Kit

More JS-Kit Features

I have received a ton of information on JS-Kit features, so I’m sharing here with you. If guys from Disqus and IntenseDebate are willing to share their complete feature list, I’d be glad to publish it.

User Related Features: JS-Kit Additions

• Ability to get replies to comments via email. Ability to respond with email. Response automatically inserted into the comment thread.
• Private messaging between commentors.
• Ability to embed and play YouTube videos within comments. (configurable through the JS-Kit admin interface)
• Ability to upload photos up to 10MB in size with automatic thumbnail generation. (configurable through the JS-Kit admin interface)
• Facebook Connect and OpenID support

Owner Related Features: JS-Kit Additions

• Obscenity filters
• Support for multiple administrators and sub-section moderation (eg. you can only moderate this \subdomain)
• Community moderation. “Mark as offensive” is set by blogger to N, where N = remove comment and place in pre-moderation
• Selective moderation (eg. Once the blogger approves a commentor N times, that commentor is no longer moderated)
• JS-Kit also provides Ratings and Polls for bloggers using the same cusomization, support, and administration system
• (integration with blogging platforms) Option to highlight Blogger comments with a different background color.

Data Access: JS-Kit Additions

• (integration with blogging platforms) JS-Kit innovated “Sync” which automatically updates the base platform with all new comments.

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If you are interested in cloud computing you can start visiting DailyCloud: the daily coverage of the cloud computing market. The DailyCloud, which is still in early beta, synthezises the content, links and social stream on cloud computing and its adjacent topics: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, HaaS, grid computing, virtualization, data centers.

Commenting Services Face to Face: Disqus vs IntenseDebate vs JS-Kit vs SezWho

There is a major update to this post: Update on Commenting Services Face-off. Make sure you read it before jumping to any conclusions!

I have received a lot of feedback from JS-Kit and SezWho which lead to changes in the evaluations. I am working on an update to the post. Meanwhile, you can read Jitendra’s comment which is providing more insight about SezWho offering.

This is a long post, so I’ll jump directly to the main topic. I’ve run a face to face comparison for 4 existing commenting systems: Disqus, IntenseDebate, JS-Kit and SezWho. The rest of the post presents the criteria I’ve used, the winners and references to specific features.

Please feel free to comment and correct me if I got anything wrong!

Criteria

• User related Features
  • Comment threading
  • Anonymous posts
  • Bookmarkability
  • Comment ranking and additional features (sort, most, filter, etc.)
  • Rich format comments
• Owner related features:
  • Spam filtering
  • Comment moderation
  • Search Engine Friendliness
  • HTML/CSS customization
• Data access
  • Widget (Javascript API)
  • Programming API
  • Data export

Evaluated products

• Disqus
• IntenseDebate
• JS-Kit
• SezWho

Winners

After completing the evaluation of the mentioned criteria, I have decided that there should be 2 categories: Blogs and Custom sites. Even if there are no immediate visible differences, the existence of a programming API offers a lot more extensibility and freedom to site owners, while this feature might not be as important as features like additional comment ranking features (sorting, filtering, recommendations, etc.) for blog owners.

Drum roll… The winners are:

There is a major update to this post: Update on Commenting Services Face-off and you should make sure that you read it before further considering this top.

Blog

1. Winner: IntenseDebate
2. Runner-up: Disqus

Site

1. Winner: Disqus
2. Runner-up: IntenseDebate

User Features

	Disqus	IntenseDebate	JS-Kit	SezWho
Comment Threading:	Y	Y	Y	Y
Anonymous Comments:	Y	Y	Y	Y [7]
Bookmarkability	N	Y	N	Y
Comment ranking	Y	Y	Y	Y
Comment ranking functionality	– [12]	Y	Y	Y
Rich format comments	Y	Y	Y	Y

Owner Features

	Disqus	IntenseDebate	JS-Kit	SezWho
Spam filtering:	Custom + Akismet [1]	Custom [2]	Akismet	Akismet [3]
Comment Moderation:	Y (web + email)	Y (web + email)	Y (web + email)	Y [4]
Search Engine Friendliness	Y [8]	N [9]	Y [10]	N [11]
HTML/CSS Customization	Y	Y	Y	Y

Data access

	Disqus	IntenseDebate	JS-Kit	SezWho
Widget (JS API):	Y	Y	Y	Y
Programming API:	Y	N [5]	N	N [6]
Data export	API	None	None	None

Other Criteria

	Disqus	IntenseDebate	JS-Kit	SezWho
Costs	Free	Free	Free for 25k pageviews + Commercial	Free [13]
Documentation Support	API docs Low Traffic Forum	GetSatisfaction	Q&A Forum [14]	FAQ Page [15]

Comment ranking functionality

Basically, once comments can be rated themselves, there is a lot of new functionality that can be offered by these services. I am thinking of: filtering the comment thread, sorting, most commented content, etc.

[12] I couldn’t find anything about Disqus support for additional functionality.

Spam Filtering

1. [1] According to the following links, Disqus is employing a combination of custom filtering and Akismet integration
   • http://blog.disqus.net/2008/12/03/howto-mark-spam/
   • http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/12/disqus-gets-serious-about-growing.html
2. [2] I couldn’t find any place in the IntenseDebate documentation detailing what solution is used, so I’ve concluded that some custom filtering is employed. Considering that IntenseDebate is now part of the WordPress universe, it might be possible to also integrate with Akismet.
3. JS-Kit documentation is clear about this point: LINK
4. [3] While some sources are mentioning the integration with Akismet for spam filtering, I couldn’t find this info in the SezWho documentation

Comment Moderation

All 3 Disqus, IntenseDebate and JS-Kit support advanced moderation features. But my advice would be to effectively test them if comment moderation is important for your site or blog.

[4] Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any info about SezWho’s support for comment moderation.

Search Engine Friendliness

This is probably the most debatable criterion used for evaluating the 4 services and unfortunately to cover it I will need a whole new post (which will come later on).

• [8] Disqus is offering a hosted page for each comment thread, so search engines can index the comments.
• [9] I’ve read about improvements implemented by IntenseDebate, but unfortunately these are not useful for the sites that do not use the IntenseDebate custom plugin
• [10] JS-Kit employs the same solution as Disqus.
• [11] No information available.

Disqus and JS-Kit approach to this problem is quite good (even if a bit complex) as with the help of some subdomain mapping you can instruct the search engines to see the comment thread content as site’s content.

Programming API

• [5] I am still investigating the possibility to access IntenseDebate data through a programming API (see thread)
• [6] Even if there are a couple of sources mentioning a SezWho API (see Mashable and CenterNetworks I couldn’t find any reference to it in SezWho’s documentation

Other notes

• [13] SezWho:
  

  The basic SezWho rating, reputation and profile services are provided for free on the currently supported platforms. SezWho will be offering upgrades to premium products and services in the future, but basic SezWho integration for standard social media platforms will always be available as a free service.

• [14] JS-Kit Q&A Forum is unfortunately pretty unusable as there is no way to perform any searches. It has over 450 pages of comments, so even if I am pretty sure there is a lot of information in there, it is a pity that you cannot get to it. Search Engine Friendliness is a major and extremely important feature that you should consider while integrating a 3rd party commenting system.
• [15] SezWho FAQ Page contains minimal information and unfortunately I couldn’t find other sources.

More information

Here is a set of other features compared on RWW:

Disclaimer

SezWho documentation is pretty scarce, so I haven’t been able to find detailed information on the evaluated set of features.

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You can contact me on Alex Popescu @LinkedIn | Alex Popescu @Facebook | Alex Popescu @FriendFeed | Alex Popescu @Twitter

The Ultimate Resource about Distributed Version Control Systems

If you postponed reading about distributed version control systems hoping that somebody will just tell you which one is the best, then I guess that resource has become available: Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through.

As for myself I have tried darcs a long time ago, then moved to Mercurial and successfully used it for a couple of my projects. I was quite happy with its SVN integration which sometimes is quite important if you are planning to use it with existing repositories for which migration is not an option.

Not so far ago, I have also installed Git on my Mac. I must confess that installing Git is probably the most difficult task (install xcode, install macports, use macports to download and compile all 20+ dependencies) and I would advise you to use this time to read the article!. However, I haven’t used it for long enough to have comments, but there is one feature that I really like: branching can be done in the same folder, so you don’t have to setup your environment for each idea you’d like to test.

Crappy software: Qumana

When I was pretty close to say that there will be no other post for today, Qumana has stepped in to prove me wrong.

What is Qumana and why it changed my mind?

Qumana is a desktop blog publishing tool for Mac that works with many of the most online blogs (WordPress, Blogger, etc.). Unfortunately, in fact I shouldn’t be using the verb work. Because it definitely doesn’t work. Publishing to Blogger doesn’t work (the screen gets stuck into a publishing state), there are way you can add categories to posts for Blogger and a few more small problems.

While a bit annoying all the above problems haven’t really convinced me to dump it. What a big mistake!

Following the rebranding movements I’ve been taking lately (described here and here), I was using Qumana for cleaning up. I had some local posts and I was trying to delete some. But at no moment was I announced or asked that Qumana is going to make the decision to apply those same changes to the online blogs. No dialogs, no warning, no signs that the operations are having major implications. I was close to lose all the post from the last 3-4 days. Wow!

Advise

Dear developers, I would like to kindly ask you to pay more attention when designing your apps. The users of your software should be aware at every step what is happening. Don’t think that your app is smarter than your user. Ask (and offer the user the chance to configure this) about any major operation. Be clear in your messages

Conclusion

If you planning on using Qumana, I would advise you to be very careful about what you are doing. I am not saying that Qumana is completely broken (some things are actually working), but make sure that you are not doing any major operations that may impact your online blog.

Extensive list of Amazon services resources

Tools

• Simple Command-Line Access to Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3: + project page
• EC2
  • EC2 AMI Tools
  • EC2 Command-Line Tools
  • EC2 AMIs
  • Cleaning up EC2 Images, AMIs, and Instance
  • EC2 New Instance Types
• S3
  • Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer S3Fox
  • Bucket Explorer
  • S3tools project
  • Jungle Disk
  • S3Drive Windows app
  • S3Browse
  • CLI to Amazon S3 Service using Ruby
• A MySQL Storage Engine for AWS S3

Backups on S3

• Why I Started Using Amazon S3
• Backing Up Flickr Photos with Amazon S3 (Python scripts)
• Amazon S3 PHP Class Update (PHP)
• File Uploads to Amazon S3 the AJAX way thanks to Dojo
• How I automated my backups to Amazon S3 using s3sync
• S3 Backup – Fail-safe, Encrypted Online Backup

Amazon S3 Resources

• Amazon S3: 16 Sites and Resources, Example
• CacheFly vs. Amazon S3
• Using Amazon S3 as in Image Hosting Service
• Introduction to Amazon S3 with Java and REST
• Automated Server Pool Management in Java
• Running Hadoop MapReduce on EC2 and S3 + Sample code

Amazon SimpleDB Resources

• What You Need to Know about Amazon SimpleDB
• Amazon SimpleDB – Limited Beta
• Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide
• Amazon SimpleDB. What nobody is talking about?
• Eventual consistency
• Relating to SimpleDB
• Query 101: Building SimpleDB Queries
• Query 201: Tips & Tricks for SimpleDB Query

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Amazon S3 Tips & Tricks

CNAME + domain name

You can create a CNAME record off your domain and point it to s3.amazonaws.com, creating a branded URL to your S3 bucket. Your bucket name must also match the CNAME + domain name.
So, you could create a CNAME record named “S3” and point it to s3.amazonaws.com. Then, create a bucket called “s3.codinghorror.com” in your S3 account and place all your static stuff there. Then, when you create the reference in your code you can use “s3.codinghorror.com”.

Virtual Hosting of Buckets

Virtual Hosting of Buckets

Past issues

S3 was designed for occasionally sharing large files, not “often sharing” small files. Ping times can be over a second, sometimes 2. It is great for 80 meg files every once in a while, but not for 15k PINGs 100,000 times a day.

S3 still seems to have some problems with speed. When serving greater than 60,000 hits per day, the images load VERY slowly. Except on days where it’s so slow it’s not even loading. We like the idea of s3, but we switched back to hosting our own images on likebetter.com after too many speed issues. Also, about 1 in 100 loads fail randomly.

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Amazon Services Code

Java

• General
  • typica – An Interface to Amazon SQS, EC2 and SimpleDB in Java + typica
• EC2
  • EC2 Library
• S3
  • JetS3t (Amazon S3 library)
  • S3 SOAP Library
  • S3 REST Library
  • S3 Eclipse plugin
  • S3OSCache to Store Cached Data on S3 + http://www.lokitech.com/projects/s3oscache/index
  • S3 Key Management
  • S3Shell in Java
• SimpleDB
  • ‘Simple’ SimpleDB code in single Java file/class (240 lines)
  • Java Library for Amazon SimpleDB
  • JPA implementation for SimpleDB + simplejpa
• SQS
  • Amazon SQS Sample in Java
  • REST SQS Demo

Python

• boto: AWS for Python + boto
• EC2 Query
• S3 REST Library
• Monster Muck Mashup – Mass Video Conversion Using AWS

Ruby

• General
  • RightAWS + project page
  • RightScale Ruby library to access Amazon EC2, S3, SQS, and SDB
  • http://ruby-aws.rubyforge.org/ruby-aws/
• EC2
  • Amazon EC2 Ruby Gem + http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=2753 + http://amazon-ec2.rubyforge.org/
  • EC2 Query
• S3
  • Amazon S3 Library for REST in Ruby
  • s3sync.rb and s3cmd.rb tools
  • Using S3 from EC2 with Ruby
  • AWS::S3 S3 REST API
• SimpleDB
  • Using SimpleDB and Rails in No Time with ActiveResource
  • Using SimpleDB with Ruby on Rails (ActiveResource)
• SQS
  • SQS – A Ruby interface to Simple Queue Service + http://sqs.rubyforge.org/
  • Amazon SQS Sample in Ruby
  • Basic Amazon SQS Sample in Ruby
    

Mac: Launchers and text expanders

Back on my Windows times, I have been using a couple of apps that were definitely increasing my productivity. I’ve been looking for their corresponding apps under Mac, and lately this list has started to grow quite a bit, so I’ve decided to post the links here.

Launchers

I think at this chapter, the most advanced Mac users will cry together: QuickSilver. Well, I must confess that it looks impressive, but it is a bit overcomplicated for my taste. Here, are my findings, starting with the one I am currently using (in the past I’ve been using just the integrated Spotlight):

• Namely. Some more details can be read here.
• Butler. Still a bit too complex for me. There are a couple more apps available from the same author.
• ABCLaunch. I haven’t tested this one, so don’t consider this a recommendation.
• Quicksilver. I think this one doesn’t need any special comments. The app has been extensively covered on Lifehacker
  • A beginner’s guide to Quicksilver
  • Advanced Quicksilver guide – slashes, appends, and proxies, oh my!
  • Top 10 Quicksilver Plug-ins
  • The Quicksilver video extravaganza
  • A look under the hood of Quicksilver

Probably a subcategory of launchers should be the shortcut based launchers. Here, I’ve been using only Spark, but basically with a complete different purpose (see text expanders).

Text expanders

These applications allow you to define different abbreviations and then they are taking care of replacing that with the full expanded version. The feature can be found natively in apps like Vim or your IDE. But, the following are providing a generic solution that works with all apps.

• textexpander. (commercial)
• TypeIt4Me (commercial)
• Spark. It works a bit differently than a normal text expander: you have to define shortcuts for the text snippets.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably provide a list of the corresponding Windows apps.

Posted by: Alex Popescu (aka the_mindstorm)

JXInsight: how to document a rich UI app?

One of the suggestions I’ve had for improving JXInsight documentation was to create a small document describing the application (called JXInsight console) UI. Basically, this document should contain some short descriptions for the panels and also a legend for the icons used. In my experience, this approach proved to be the simplest, the cheapest but most effective.

But, it looks like this will not work (or it will just partially work) for JXInsight. The console UI (doesn’t this sound weird ? 🙂 ) is using around 1000 icons (yes, you heard me right). So, creating this document is gonna take a lot of time and is gonna be quite expensive to maintain. I am wondering what other options would you suggest for documenting a very rich UI?

Here is a screenshot of the app, just to get an idea of what I am talking about:

Posted by: Alex Popescu (aka the_mindstorm)

JXInsight documentation

After the other day William’s comments, I decided to invest some more time in reading about JXInsight. So last night, I’ve started my look through their blogged documentation and put together everything that might get me started. Thinking that others may be facing the same issue as I was, I am listing here those entries that may get you some ideas about the product.

101

• Services (description of concepts)
• AspectJ(Usage and extensibility of JXInsight based on Aspectj)
• Introducing Diagnostics

Configuration

• JXInsight and Tomcat 6
• JXInsight and WebLogic screencast

I have listed only the link for Tomcat as that is the configuration I was looking for, but it looks like the blog contains entries for other deployments too. There are a couple of more links that may be interesting, but they look a bit old: Apache Tomcat Monitoring and Configuring Servlet Traces.

My continued quest for information resulted in finding a couple of more pages, but I’ll have to filter them out firstly:

Concepts at work

• JDBInsight
• Probes
• JVMInsight
• Diagnostics
• Metrics

What I am still looking for, and doesn’t look like being around, are the following pieces of documentation:

• Definition of the concepts
• Console details
• Terminal usage

I’ll probably ping William about these. So far I’ve been a bit puzzled by the terms the documentation is using. These are not clearly defined, and I think I am that kind of person that agrees with usability guru Steve Krug when thinking that you shouldn’t introduce new terms for existing concepts, as these are usually leading to confusion.

Last, but not least, I have noticed that JXInsight 5.5 was released and that William will focus on creating the so-needed documentation:

Now the hard part begins – rebuilding the documentation set! This will be ongoing for the next few weeks[…]

I am looking forward to seeing it.

Posted by: Alex Popescu (aka the_mindstorm)