Adobe have added a lot of new projects to their Labs page over at http://labs.adobe.com since I’d last checked it out. In particular there’s a new service / product called BrowserLab that allows you to test web pages in various browsers along the lines of Litmus, Browsershots or Netrenderer. Adobe describe BrowserLab as:
BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand. BrowserLab is a powerful solution for cross-browser compatibility testing, featuring multiple viewing and comparison tools, as well as customizable preferences. Since BrowserLab is an online service, it can be accessed from virtually any computer connected to the web. Also, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software users have access to additional functionality such as testing local and active content.
This service / app has been in development for some time, Adobe actually showed a sneak peak of it back in November at their Max Conference under the code name ‘Meer Meer‘. So although this might seem like Adobe playing catchup with Microsoft’s recent ‘SuperPreview‘ release it’s actually nothing of the sort. If you compare BrowserLab with SuperPreview you’ll see that they’re quite different apps – primarily that SuperPreview is a Windows app that only let’s you preview IE6 and either IE7 or 8 depending on which is installed – and of course requires you to be running on Windows to use it whereas BrowserLab is a browser based application that simply requires the Flash plugin and therefore works on both Windows, Mac and Linux.
Browser and OS versions currently supported in BrowserLab at this time are:
- Firefox 2.X and 3.X (Windows XP and Mac OS X)
- Internet Explorer 6.X and 7.X (Windows XP)
- Safari 3.X (Mac OS X)
So a good range of browsers are covered, although IE8 really needs to be there along with Opera as well to really cover all the main desktop browsers. Although there isn’t yet as big a range of browsers to test in compared to other services like Litmus, BrowserLab has a benefit in that it provides some additional tools to help you compare the preview of your site in the different browsers.
Browser Sets in BrowserLab – Only preview preferred browsers.
Browser Sets in BrowserLab basically let you create groups of browsers that you want to have rendered when testing. This can save time over just having every browser preview rendered for your site, if you only want to see IE6 and IE7 then you can create a BrowserSet with only those contained in it.
2-up View in BrowserLab
You can view a 2-up layout that lets you compare the differences between rendered previews. This creates a side-by-side view displaying two different browsers which you can quickly switch between to compare different browsers.
You can also zoom up to 200% to compare the previews more closely and also zoom out to 75% to get a more overall comparison.
Onion Skin view in BrowserLab
The Onion Skin view lets you compare two different previews but overlays them on top of one another. You can then use a slider to fade between the two selected browser previews, if you’re trying to work on something quite pixel accurate then this can be quite useful – although it has to be said that exact pixel placement accuracy of page layouts isn’t necessarily something to worry about. It’s still a pretty useful feature though.
Preview directly from Dreamweaver CS4 in BrowserLab
One other feature benefit that BrowserLab has over other services such as Litmus is that there is a Dreamweaver CS4 extension that allows you to test your site layouts directly from within Dreamweaver. The added benefit here is that this avoids the step of having to make your entire page live on the web before testing as it works with just the local files on your system.
As a beta release BrowserLab looks pretty good, although it does have some hot competition from services like Litmus and Browsershots – especially in regards to Litmus’ push towards supporting mobile Safari on iPhone / iPod touch.
To checkout BrowserLab for yourself, read more about it over at the BrowserLab pages at Adobe Labs website.
Navigate to the location of your MySQL databases. For my MySQL install this is found at /usr/local/mysql but depending on how you’ve installed MySQL it might be elsewhere.
The next step is to rename your MySQL data folder temporarily to avoid any clashes when restoring the data folder from the Time Machine backup. First you need to get into your MySQL directory:
Go back in time a sufficient amount so that you’ll definitely be getting the version of the data that you want, highlight the data folder and click Restore. Because we renamed the data directory Time Machine will simply restore the data directory without any prompts. You should now see both the restored data directory and the renamed data-bak directory.
That’s Clipstart’s features summed up in one paragraph but the application does what it does really well. There’s been a growing need for applications like these to manage the ever increasing amount of consumer video that many people have on their computers these days. iMovie is great for editing video and iPhoto can import video into it’s library but neither of them are up to the task of file managing the quantity of video files that users of digital video devices (e.g. Flip, Kodak Z series and mobile phones such as the Nokia N series etc) tend to produce.
One issue in particular is that the commands for Checking out and committing to a repository are the same as those used for the regular Checkin / Checkout functions of Dreamweaver which I think is a bit confusing as they are very different features. Using these terms is a problem as they don’t match up with the correct terminology used in Subversion. Dreamweaver is often the first app (rightly or wrongly) that people who are learning how to make websites use so there’s a bit of a responsibility for it to teach people correctly and to encourage good habits.
Once connecting to my SVN repository it was quite easy to create a working copy and update it from the repository files. After working on files it was easy to find the updated files with a simple click on the ‘Changed Files’ icon in the menubar. Only the new or updated files would be shown which could then be selected and checked in to the repository with appropriate comments added at the same time. It was also easy to get access to revisions of files via the ‘Revision Viewer’ button.
Versions’ main tool bar provides buttons for Update, Commit, Checkout and other options, just under the main toolbar there are three tabs, Timeline, Browse and Transcript. The Timeline tab gives you a timeline in the form of a list of revisions and accompanying notes which makes it easy to view the changes made over a period of time. The Browse tab allows you to view the repository files and view history of individual files as well as comparing, managing blame and also a Quick Look option for quickly viewing the contents of files.
You can easily filter the working copy files in different states such as Changed, Modified, Conflicted, Unversioned and Locked. The ability to filter files this way is an essential feature in an SVN app, finding changed files in order to commit them to the repository is one of the most things I do.
Coda’s SVN integration adds a simple source control status window that quickly highlights changed files making it easy to find updated files and commit them to the repository. There is also easy access to a Source Control menu option offering committing / discarding changes, refreshing, comparing and updating the repository.
FlamingoHD is a new application by 
The basic process is to select the source of your video footage. You can either connect your camera to your computer which will automatically show up in 
Once you’ve imported clips into FlamingoHD you can then group clips together into Projects, these projects can then be sent to exported in via several methods, either ready for editing or as final output.
You can export by either right-clicking on the Project name or by selecting the Project and clicking on the ‘Media’ option from the main menu. The four options at the bottom of the menu allow you several choices for your project:
Ok, slightly odd to call this a review when I haven’t even read the book yet! However, eduStyle have published a book titled “The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design”, given that the website is such a good resource then it’s certain that the book will be very useful too. It’s been released as a PDF version initially and will be published in print in due course for those, like myself, that like the feel of real paper! The book has some interesting goals: