Chris Mallinson

I’ve been using Billings for about a year now. It’s a great OSX application for managing clients, projects, and invoices. It’s currently $40, and for the price, it has saved me enough time to be worth it. On the downside, I’ve found it to be less than intuitive on occasion, and I’ve often had to search for a function that really should be apparent. It allows me to create custom invoices, and generate them based on project work, or even monthly invoices for hosting or maintenance.

All that is great, but I’ve begun to expand my use of the program.
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This is for Mac people only – sorry Windows friends. I’ve been looking for this for a while.  Now, I’m pretty hard core, but I’m not hard-core enough to use the command line for all my interactions with MySQL.  If you’ve been using the MySQL Query Browser that can be downloaded form mysql.org, you probably know that it will crash if you breathe on it. I’ve looked at a few of the clients that have come out for MySQL, but none have made me want to shell out money to replace what I had.
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Adobe really needs to get this right.  Bolt, the soon to be released IDE for ColdFusion, is the talk of the town in the CF community, and let me tell you – it better be good.  I have to say, I’m not really that pleased that this is an Eclipse based product.  I’ve almost completely dropped Eclipse lately due to instability – at least on the Mac.  I think that Adobe could have made this product a stand-alone product on its own platform, and still allowed it to be extensible  (If you have not heard, you will be able to write extensions for Bolt with CFML, which is all kinds of awesome).

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Am I the only one who just doesn’t understand why so many ColdFusion developers are jumping to Flex? I’m aware that my opinion on Flex and its place may be unpopular in the ColdFusion community, but I’m wiling to entertain the possibility that I may be wrong, so bear with me.

I’ve taken in all the Flex coverage and sessions at CFUnited and MAX, and I’ve attended full day workshops on Flex more than once. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been nothing but impressed with the capabilities of the platform, and pleased that Adobe has made everything work so well with ColdFusion. I just don’t like the end product of most sites built in Flex. I am most impressed with sites that use nice clean markup and unobtrusive JavaScript for progressive enhancement. Whenever I visit a Flex site, it feels like I’m using someone else’s computer. You know that feeling? for me it’s the fact that usually, my MacBook Pro’s trackpad scrolling will not work with the Flex scroll-bars. Not a huge deal, but it makes a difference.

One of the big advantages of using Flex is not having to worry about testing in multiple browsers. I believe over 99% of people can access your Flex site with their existing version of Flash. This is a great benefit, but it’s not as big of a deal as it was a few years ago. Today, the biggest problems are still with IE6, and for many sites I’m happy providing decreased functionality for those users. Using jQuery also eliminates a large amount of JavaScript incompatibility between browsers.

There is a market for Flex, and I think that market will continue to grow. I’m also pleased that Adobe has embraced it, since it adds a perfect piece to their product suite. I just don’t like the whole “If you’re not jumping on the Flex bandwagon, you’re missing the boat” mentality that I hear a bit too much in the ColdFusion community. I hope that Adobe continues to support and enhance the capability of ColdFusion to work with HTML based content.

I’ve always thought that as a ColdFusion developer, I should use CF for my own site. It wasn’t even something I’d thought about. I’ve used both BlogCFC and Mango Blog for my own site, and still use both on various other sites. I’ve been really happy with both, and have no plans to swap them out on any other sites.

I found it really easy to add all kinds of functionality using ColdFusion as a blogging platform, and that’s why I’ve stuck with the CF blogs so far.  But then I did a little work on my cousin’s blog last year (check it out if you like illustration), and was intrigued.  Since then, WordPress has made a bunch of updates, and the admin interface is simply beautiful.  I found a very simple template, made some changes to the CSS, and everything worked.  My last step is usually to bite the bullet and open up my new sites in IE6 – to see how late I will be up fixing it.  For the first time ever, I had absolutely nothing to fix.  I know this is due to the good work of the template designer, and not necessarily WordPress, but it speaks to the magnitude of people working on this platform.

I still think ColdFusion is the best platform for a ton of things, and personal sites may be one of those things.  As a developer though, I can appreciate the amount of work that has been put into WordPress, and when a piece of software fits your needs so perfectly, it’s hard (and irresponsible) to ignore it.  The reason I love WordPress is the same reason that I love Macs.  They just work, and they look great.  It may seem silly that the look of the admin interface is so important to me, but if I need to look at something every day, I like it to look good.

I must say that I’ve got a bit of guilt about this.  I almost feel that I’m betraying the CF developers that have put work into open source applications that come close to meeting my needs.  There are still plenty of CF open source applications that I use daily and support, and I don’t see that changing.

So, I’ve done a couple of sites lately that need to display well for a wide variety of users, many of whom may be using older computers. Since IE7 has replaced IE6 for most Windows users, I’ve spent limited time making sure sites appear perfectly in IE6. I always make sure they are at least completely accessible, but they may not be perfect.

For developers, it’s not easy to test a site in IE. If you use Windows Vista, you have IE7 installed by default, and it’s not trivial to install IE6. If you use a Mac, you would need multiple instances of Windows running as virtual machines in order to test in IE7 as well as IE6.

Then I came across this: Multiple IE from Tredosoft This little application will install IE3, IE4.01, IE5.01, IE5.5 and IE6 on an XP machine with IE7. They can all run concurrently. I runs multiple versions of IE in Parallels, and can test all my sites without booting up the old Windows boxes to test sites.