Often imitated.
Posted by Tom Mollerus on January 24, 2012 9:53 PM
My company, Ping Identity. Often imitated. IMPOSSIBLE to duplicate.
My company, Ping Identity. Often imitated. IMPOSSIBLE to duplicate.
I've recently found myself evaluating wireframing tools, and I thought I'd share the results of my analysis. First, let's put out a definition of just what a "wireframe" is:
"[a wireframe] is a visualization tool for presenting proposed functions, structure and content of a Web page or Web site. A wireframe separates the graphic elements of a Web site from the functional elements in such a way that Web teams can easily explain how users will interact with the Web site."
From Webopedia
Here are the main criteria I used to compare wireframe tools:
I looked at the following tools:
I've been tearing out my hair, muttering curses under my breath, and slamming my fists to my desk for much of this week. The fault lies with Subclipse, and its stubborn refusal to find the default SVN client (namely JavaHL) that I so kindly installed for it on my MacBook Pro.
It all started when I completely rebuilt my Eclipse environment, using the latest version, Indigo, so that I could install the wonderful PhoneGap plugin. I installed the latest version of all of my plugins, including Subclipse, and I also installed the latest CollabNet subversion binaries. Subclipse's wikipage for JavaHL says that if you install these binaries says that you shouldn't have to do any further configuration to get Subclipse to work, but in my case that turned out to be wildly optimistic, to say the least. Each time I tried to use a Subclipse feature, I was presented with the dialog that I gather all too many people are familiar with: "Unable to load default SVN client". A search across the Googles for this sentence gave me a lot of results, almost all of which referred to confirming the path variables in your .profile file or your eclipse.ini file. I edited, I confirmed, I failed. Again and again. I even tried to install SVNKit, but their subversion client doesn't support the svn client version of 1.7.x that Subclipse was looking for. Aargh.
The binaries that Collabnet installs have version numbers of "1.0" in their filenames, so you really can't tell what version they are. Instead you have to run "svn-javahl --version" to get that information. And what do you know, I had version 1.6.x.
So the final solution?
sudo port install subversion-javahlbindingsAfter watching Ray Camden's show-and-tell session today on using PhoneGap to create his mobile app WTFRU, I was inspired to install some of the same Eclipse plugins that he used so I could create some apps myself. It's been a while since I fiddled with the Android SDK, so a lot of my packages were way out of date.
But I ran into errors while trying to updated the Android plugins; quite a few of the errors in the update log referred to messages such as "No repository found containing org.eclipse.mxunit/osgi..." Most of the messages referred to that osgi library, somehow. I thought that somehow I had some majorly screwed up libraries on my hands.
After searching, it turned out the problem and solution were relatively simple: update URLs should have trailing slashes at the end. Refer to this blog post for the specific solution. If anyone else runs into update issues because you're inspired by Ray's work, I hope this solution is helpful to you.
A good friend of mine, Kirby Salerno, just launched a new business called Classroom Window that aims to democritize the process of evaluating educational textbooks and resources. It's an incredible idea, and I want to help spread the word. Here's how Kirby puts it:
"ClassroomWindow addresses an absolutely critical missing element in education -- understanding what works, and for which kids. Sounds obvious, but it doesn't exist (yet). Our mission is to provide transparency into the effectiveness of educational texts, tools, and resources. It is Yelp + Consumer Reports for education products and services, combining crowd-sourced input from teachers and others on the front-lines of education with expert opinion and student data."
ClassroomWindow is preparing for a private beta later this year. If you or others you know (teachers in particular) would like to have their voices heard on which products work and which don't, please sign up for the beta at www.classroomwindow.com, check them out on Facebook, and follow them on Twitter.
I want to thank Marc Esher for a great presentation last night on how to install, configure, and use Jenkins and ANT to provide continuous integration in your development environment. I've wanted to get a build system up and running here at Ping for a while, and now I feel as if I know exactly how to start. (I did install them today, as a matter of fact.)
For those of you who, like me, want to refer to Marc's slides to set up your own CI system, you can find his presentation files here:
http://wiki.mxunit.org/display/default/CFObjective+2011+--+Continuous+Integration