Over the years, I’ve tried several different methods for testing my work in different versions of IE. I tried IETester, but performance was sketchy. Then I tried MultipleIE, which worked okay, but it’s no longer being maintained. Eventually I settled on IE Collection. For the most part, these testing tools worked well for quick previewing of layout and functionality, however, they’re known to have some issues which can result in a less than accurate experience.

Recently, I’ve been trying something different: Snapshots. Jonathan Snook’s recent post about using Snapshots in VMWare Fusion, made me wonder if I could do the same thing in VirtualBox (by Sun/Oracle). It turns out that you can!

After setting up your VM, in my case, Windows XP with IE6, take your first snapshot. Then install IE7 along with any updates and take the next snapshot. Finally, install IE8 and take the final snapshot. You can now restore each snapshot, at that specific moment in time, and have a clean OS install with a fresh version of IE for testing.

The new Get Satisfaction website launched this past month and one of the more exciting aspects of front-end development for this project was building wheel of satisfaction for the home page. The concept is kind of like the wheel of fortune wheel, but instead of the entire wheel spinning, the items spin underneath the wheel itself.

When I first heard the wheel concept, I was told the client explicitly wanted no flash on the new site. This was a fun challenge, but not overly difficult with the Raphaël JavaScript library. If you haven’t heard of it, check it out at raphaeljs.com.

Without getting into any code detail, Raphaël essentially injects an image into an SVG canvas, which is part of the DOM tree, so JavaScript events can be added to it. The click event for the the red spin button calculates a random rotation angle in 30 degree increments, and then fires Raphaël’s animate function.

Anyway, that was one fun project to work on! My andCulture teammates did an amazing job with strategy and creative and the Get Satisfaction team worked tirelessly at the end to make it all happen!

Just a few screenshots here from some projects where I’ve been able to do some responsive web design. This allows a site to adapt and reflow itself based on the screen size of the device being used to view it.

Last week the new BlackBerry Torch was unveiled, and it was described as RIM’s attempt at an “iPhone killer.” It’s pretty commonplace for any newly announced smartphone to be dubbed a potential iPhone killer. None have yet to succeed, and I don’t think the Torch will either. Apple has amassed a following of loyal subjects fans, and the company is such a big part of our culture that I doubt any one phone can live up to that kind of expectation.

However, a few things about the Torch that I really like are the slide out physical keyboard and the “universal feed” feature, which provides a combined stream of updates from email, text messages, calendar items and social networks. It reminds me of a concept that Teehan+Lax put together last year for a new iPhone home screen (below). I think this would work great as an alternate configurable home screen and I hope that Apple will implement something like this someday!