I have started writing an extension using Crossrider, and really like it. But I have read some negative stuff about them being a browser hijacker - in particular search.crossrider.com
I am unsure if search.crossrider.com is a malicious extension built using Crossrider, or Crossrider itself. Among other places, this is a link which recommends you delete this.
http://forums.anvisoft.com/viewtopic-45-1190-0.html
Before I continue developing in this, I thought I would ask the experts.
Any comments, gratefully received.
Thanks
Crossrider is very safe to use!
We had some incidents in the past where developers had tried to write malicious extensions using our framework, but with our security co-operations with Google and Facebook we managed to mitigate them. (and the fact that we are a cloud-based solution allows us to remotely disable any malicious use that is against our T&C.)
Besides being very safe Crossrider is also a free and a must-have tool for any extension developers. (There are more than 20,000 developers the Crossrider community)
Crossrider not only provides the technical solution of building the API to support all major browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, but also gives the developer further tools and features to solve and simplify all the heavy lifting tasks when it comes to developing and publishing browser extensions:
Full statistical dashboards with information on numbers of Installations, Active Users, Uninstalls which can be broken down to per-country and per-browser usage.
Crossrider provides an online IDE that developers can actually start coding extension online in matters of seconds. The developer doesn't need to download any development packages to their computer (unless they really want to), and as you develop, you see your code changes take affect in real-time on your browser.
Another feature is Crossrider's auto code update mechanism, where any code change (including new releases or bug fixes) is getting published to all existing users (and new obviously) in matter of hours. Regardless if you have several users or millions.
Crossrider also provides advances publishing tools such as embeddable installation widget for your website, direct download links and more.
One of those publishing tools is the Advanced Window Installer that can install your extension on all browsers automatically. This installer can be easily configured to the developers needs and we even supply with an automated Code Signing Service where developers can sign their installers in real-time.
24/7 Support - We are really keen about our support. We always strive to keep our response time to the minimum and we treat the smaller developer(s) as it was our most important client. We even try to help developers when it's not 100% Crossrider related questions as we also believe in good karma :)
Hope this helps your decision of working with Crossrider.
p.s Not sure 100% about the search.crossrider.com thread you have mentioned but as we do not have any affiliation with this subdomain (in fact, it does not even exists on our DNS records) you can rest assure this has nothing to do with Crossrider as a framework.
(Disclosure: I work for Crossrider)
Related
A client I'm working with has a large CMS installed (Kentico) that they use for various sites. For their intranet they want to downsize to a simpler web system.
The site involves authentication (Active Directory), groups, and potentially some server-side code.
The client's on-staff web designer, who's in charge, really wants to be able to use DreamWeaver to manage/design the intranet. This is almost non-negotiable, and could be considered a requirement.
I'm not really sure what DreamWeaver allows. Being ignorant to DreamWeaver, I always saw it as a web-designer platform for static websites, or in use with php.
How feasible is it to use DreamWeaver to manage an intranet site that requires authentication, groups, etc., along with server-side code? Also, are there any CMS's that easily integrate DreamWeaver? Anything in .NET?
Dreamweaver is mostly a front-end tool that was made for coding HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and being able to preview the design as you wrote your code. As an Adobe product, the real emphasis there is on design: it's made to make visualizing the front-end of a website easy. It's a good starting point for a lot graphic designers to step into web development (it's where I started a few years ago), but you'll rarely find a veteran web designer that still uses it. You'll certainly not find any .NET devs using it who know better.
Now, there's nothing wrong if that's this person's favorite tool. However, Dreamweaver is NOT the right tool for working with .NET applications like Kentico. This would be akin to someone wanting to build a house using nothing but bricks and mortar. Sure, you'll be able make the outside look nice, but there's a lot more to a house than just the siding.
If your client has their heart set on Kentico, then they should look into working with Visual Studio. The community edition is free to use, even for commercial applications. I believe the difference between community and pro editions is that pro editions allow you install plugins and extensions and integrate with other tools whereas community edition is just the vanilla IDE.
Dreamweaver can still be used as their HTML, CSS and JS editor. It may have added support for other languages, but that's irrelevant when we're talking about .NET applications. Visual Studio is Microsoft's IDE built specifically for working with .NET apps, and there's really nothing better (especially if you have a pro license and install Resharper from JetBrains). Many other devs will agree with me on this point.
EDIT: I forgot to address the other part of your question about Dreamweaver and other CMSs.
This series of video tutorials about working with Dreamweaver and WordPress should give you a good idea of what Dreamweaver is capable of. Notice when the narrator is actually using Dreamweaver and what he's using it for.
Jerreck's comments are great, and I'll just add a slightly different spin on them:
NET and Visual Studio live in the realm of developers. We use both for our core, cloud-based application, which is deployed in Microsoft Azure. Think: LEFT brain. I've worked with development teams for a long time. It is a rare developer who is also a strong designer. That's not a complaint; just an observation.
Dreamweaver lives in the realm of the web designer, who needs to manipulate HTML and CSS to achieve the effect they wish. Many of these designers ALSO start their designs in PhotoShop before moving them over to HTML and CSS. Think: RIGHT brain. I've worked with designers of all stripes for a long time as well. It is a rare designer who is also a strong developer. That's not a complaint; just another observation.
The ideal workflow starts with the designer (like the one at your client who needs to use Dreamweaver), who then passes his or her work (along with the HTML and CSS) to the developer, who in our case implements it in .NET -- so this is where Jerreck's comments miss the mark a bit.
While I know nothing of the designer at your client, I can tell you based on my experience very FEW designers ever make the leap to Visual Studio, nor should they. Most will know HTML reasonably well. Some will know CSS -- though too many of them still depend on outdated tables to create their designs. A few can code with JavaScript or PHP -- though many will cut and paste code that will work for them without actually understanding HOW it works.
Now add to this content management. This isn't really for the designer OR the developer; it's for the people who have to maintain the site (who might otherwise design like welders and write code like plumbers; because that is sometimes what they actually do).
The best content management systems are WYSIWYG, and allow the author or editor to easily add or edit content. Most CMS users do not user Dreamweaver OR Visual Studio, and many of them use free (or purchased) templates for their pages (or have a designer and developer build templates).
If your client needs CMS and it must be in .NET, you might check out DNN (formerly known as DotNetNuke). Most CMS also offer a wide range of plugins that can enhance function (such as assuring responsive design, tying in to a shopping cart or providing authentication for users).
I'd say your work ahead is going to be spending some serious time defining requirements.
Does anyone have recommendations for how to develop on the trigger.io platform with multiple developers? We have an existing source code repository / code review process / staging process, and would like to share the trigger.io build system in a sane way as we foray into mobile.
In particular, we would like several developers to be able to use the build system, with the extra modules enabled when we paid for the service.
There doesn't appear to much documentation or support for this within this trigger.io system...
Support for working in teams is actually a feature we have released recently. We just wrote a blog post that should be enough for you to get started with it: http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2013/01/15/introducing-projects/
If you have any feedback or run into any issues just ask here or send an email to support#trigger.io.
I'm going to be creating a few small mobile applications and have managed to find a great online Git repo hosting services that is free. It even comes with online issue tracking software but appears to be mainly geared towards the development team. I was hoping it would also have an interface for end-users to log issues/features and allow them to vote on what they wanted but it does not have this. It does expose an RESTful API but I didn't want to go down that path and wanted something ready to go (once configured).
I don't think I need it to be integrated with the Git repo so having something that is purely standalone would be great but I would definitely want something that is online as I don't want to install software on my local PC.
In summary, my requirements are:
Free or very cheap
Simple end-user interface to allow users
to submit issues/features
Allow end-users to vote on their own or other users issues/features
Visible status of issues/features (i.e. whether they are pending, in progress, rejected, fixed etc)
A more advanced management system for me as a developer to manage the
issues
Some basic reports/charts/graphing would be great
Email/RSS notification of new issues/suggestions would be great too
Something that is ready to go after some configuration/settings.
Can anyone recommend something that would be suitable for this?
TIA
I based my question on a website I saw a while back but couldn't find it. Anyway, I've now found it again (it's called http://www.uservoice.com/). It's not really issue tracking but more of a way of letting end-users report features and allow them to vote on them. The important thing is that it is a very user friendly interface which is perfect for end-users. Obviously, I would then need to maintain issues/features in my own system (e.g. Mantis) and then manually sync features requested in uservoice to Mantis but that shouldn't be a big issue. Anyway, this perfectly meets my needs for my low volume applications at the moment.
On a network I use I'm not able to install any third-party applications. There's just MS Office plus a web-browser.
But, I want to introduce some version control of the Excel spreadsheets I'm developing.
As I said, I can't install any other apps, so an SVN/Git client is out of the question.
Does anybody know of a VCS for which the client runs in a web-browser? I need to add files, submit new versions, compare deltas, etc.
I'm not just looking for web-based read-only browsing of a repo - I need full functionality via the browser.
I welcome your thoughts.
Google Docs/Drive has versioning, comments, sharing, etc. and may be able to do everything you need.
Most of the work I do is with what could be considered enterprise Web applications. These projects have large budgets, longer timelines (from 3-12 months), and heavy customizations. Because as developers we have been touting the idea of the Web as the next desktop OS, customers are coming to expect the software running on this "new OS" to react the same as on the desktop. That includes easy to manage automatic upgrades. In other words, "An update is available. Do you want to upgrade?" Is this even a realistic expectation? Can anyone speak from experience on trying to implement this feature?
At my company we have enterprise installations ranging into the thousands of seats. If we implemented an auto-upgrade, our customers would mutiny!
Large installations have peculiar issues that don't apply to small ones. For example, with 2000 users (not all of whom are, let us say, the most sophisticated of tool users), tool-training is a big deal: training time, internal demos, internal process documents, etc.. They cannot unleash a new feature or UI change without a chance to understand how it fits in their process and therefore what their internal best practices are and how to communicate that to their users.
Also when applications fail, it's the internal IT team who are responsible. Therefore, they want time to install a new version in a test area, beat it up, and deploy on a Saturday only when they're good and ready.
I can see the value in making minor patches more easy to install, particularly when the patch is just for a bug-fix and not for anything that would require retraining, and if the admins still get final say over when it's installed. But even then, I don't believe anyone has ever asked for this! Whether because they don't want it or they are trained to not expect it, it doesn't seem worth it.
Well, it really depends on your business model but for a lot of applications the SaaS model can end up biting you. It's great for a lot of things but for some larger applications the users are not investing as significant amount up front and could possibly move to something else before you've made any money.
See
http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-218408.html
and here
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/21/SoftwareAsAServiceWhenYourBusinessModelBecomesAParadox.aspx
for more information
One of the primary reasons to implement an application as a web application is that you get automatic upgrades for free. Why would users be getting prompted for upgrades on a web app?
For Windows applications, the "update is available, do you want to upgrade?" functionality is provided by Microsoft using ClickOnce, which I have used in an enterprise environment successfully -- there are a few gotchas but for the most part it is a good way to manage automatic deployment and upgrade of Windows apps.
For mobile apps, you can also implement auto-upgrades, although it is a little trickier.
In any case, to answer your question in a broad sense, I don't know if it is expected that all enterprise apps should make upgrading easy, but it certainly is worth the money from an IT support standpoint to architect them to allow for easy upgrading.
If you're providing a hosted solution, I wouldn't bother. Let the upgrade happen silently (perhaps with a notice that you did it). If you're selling an application that's hosted on their servers, let the upgrade decision be made by a single owner, not every user of the app.