-1 for forcing me to use the Mac App Store — the copy on the landing page you sent me to made it sound like there was a way to download it directly. Before I could download it I was presented with multiple alerts and pages of bullshit regarding my Apple ID and the App Store terms of service. Not a good experience.
-1 for not having a link to create a new account from the first dialogue box in the app. I can either log in or start without an account, but not create a new one? There's also no hint as to where I should go to make a new account. I clicked "forgot key" and worked it out from there.
-1 for not explaining the "open source" plan very well. What does "public" mean? Does that mean anybody can watch videos of whatever I'm working on?
-1 for making the credentials I actually need to use the app non-obvious. You should know that I'm coming from your app when I sign up for a new account, and when I'm done signing up, show me my account key in big, fat, auto-copyable text, instead of hiding it two screens later.
-1 for not automatically taking me to my localhost URL after Sauce Connect initializes. I had to say I wanted to go to a localhost URL, wait for Sauce Connect to initialize, and then try to connect to the URL again.
But once I got the thing working, it's really great! And I totally forgot that display:inline-block didn't work as recently as IE7 :(
I would suggest making it available outside of the app store. I work for a large company, and we simply cannot use software from the app store since it is tied to an individual Apple ID, and the company has no procurement process for app store software. In addition to that, there are many people who would prefer to install software without having to use the app store.
I browsed around quickly and noticed a lot of calls to /bin/bash and curl via a system() equivalent. That looks a bit dangerous, hope the arguments never contain `special shell characters`. :O
Folks, this website is not called "internet love fest". Please stop downvoting me for giving honest and complete feedback of my experience with the app.
I got the same feeling. Although I agree with some of the points made I think it was the way it was worded and the "-1's" that came off as really distasteful.
Didn't bother me, got the point across rather well I thought. At least he didn't put the negative ones in red because that would have really hurt someone's feelings.
Easy there, killer. This isn't some feel-good bullshit about maybe hurting someone's feelings; it's about the atmosphere we want our community to have.
We're all social creatures. Super negative comments bring everybody down, not just whoever they're directed at-- and it's easy to be both honest and pleasant to read.
The point I was trying to make is that his statements didn't bother me and I fail to see how it would any other, I admit just my opinion though. I didn't find them to be "super negative" so this is just a disagreement over how "mean" he was being. Therefore my comment red and people's feelings. I feel that a complaint over his negative ones is overblown and doesn't drag every one down. You may disagree with me but if someone feels bummed about negative ones preceding a statement then I have to feel they are easily bummed out I guess, since easily offended doesn't fit.
I agree that it's easy to be both honest and pleasant to read but there can be disagreements over the definitions of both of those. Plus, sometimes being honest doesn't lend to being pleasant.
Feedback is great! Everyone loves feedback, even if it's negative, it lets us improve and move on. How you presented your feedback was completely and utterly terrible, and turned it from constructive criticism to a situation where you looked like a bit of an ass.
I was a bit worried about how this would work on a company intranet. I know my IT network security people are pretty paranoid about bridge networks and all that. Looking at Sauce Connect[1], they recommend to put the service on a dedicated machine on your intranet that you can zone off so it only has access to the parts of the network you want to allow.
Seems like a decent solution to allow a running a cloud service behind a firewall.
Still. I feel like the price is way too much. The recommended plan is $149/month. For the long run, buying a decent machine and running your own virtual machines would be cheaper.
What you're seeing is actually pricing for our automated testing service. Sauce for Mac is either free (30 mins of testing/mo) or $12/mo (for unlimited minutes against all browsers). It also comes included with all the testing plans on that page.
Whoa, this is news to me, I checked out sauce a month or so ago and came to the same conclusion as highwind. $12/mo is something that I would be more interested in. You should make that way more obvious. I haven't fully harnessed the power of TDD and it isn't used at my current job so I have no use for it. On the other hand the ability to test websites on different browsers is very important to my job and for $12/mo it's something I can afford to get for myself to use for work and personal projects.
Maintaining selenium testing infrastructure is hell. Absolute hell. Sauce means you're not wasting time on that. I've watched people at both of my companies blow TONS of time on this, for relatively little results.
Greetings, we just made some changes, ran the tests and deployed an update to the Sauce for Mac launch page -- it should now be clear that you can use the desktop app to your heart's content for $12/mo. http://saucelabs.com/mac
I've had great experience with http://crossbrowsertesting.com/, it costs $29.95 per month. I can't recommend it enough. You can't start a VM from a desktop program but all it takes is a few clicks in the browser, and everything works like a charm.
Your own VMs have to be created, stored and maintained. For small shops, managing even a relatively small catalogs of images can be quite a time-consuming process, let alone building multiple automated test processes.
No one said you need to test every browser. I mean, pragmatically speaking, basically you need to test the major versions of IE on Windows if you're already on a Mac.
I tried hacking their patches into a recent snapshot of the KVM tree but there were some issues. I sort of wonder if anyone else has managed to get their code working, because it would be a neat hack if so.
Hi, author of that blog post here. I meant to follow up with a more detailed tutorial on how to specifically spin up a Mac VM using those patches. Sorry I haven't done that yet. :-(
As a long time SauceLabs customer I just tried Sauce and I am loving it!
Being able to open multiple browsers at the same time is fantastic. I can launch them at once and take a look at them. We have been using browserstack but constantly closing and opening different browsers is a lot of work. Screenshot:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/132641/screenshots/sauce.png
It also seems to be faster compare to browser based solutions.
I like the concept but the product doesn't seem to work well (at least the free version), perhaps due to HN traffic. I can't connect to most websites and the ones I can connect to take a long time.
As for your website, I agree with some of the other comments. Its not really obvious that you have a free plan or what that offers unless you read closely. I'd suggest you move that up into your pricing grid.
I'd also move the Sauce with Mouse row up to the top. I see your main value for users (or at least starting point) being manual testing. Focus less on automating and scaling up to huge numbers of tests. Get me in the door and familiar with the product, then upsell me once I'm convinced your product is awesome.
Best of luck to you. I'll check back in a few days to see if things are working better.
I was part of the team that built this and I can say from extensive use that it does work. It doesn't do everything that I'd love for it to do (for example, we're still working on supporting higher screen resolutions), but it's a really solid start. Please do check it out, and let us know what would make it more awesome!
It's great for manual testing, just be aware that the performance of the machines they host the browsers on is REALLY bad, to the point that it may make it hard to do testing of HTML5 apps. For basic website testing it works pretty great.
The application is in some sense basically a wrapper around a VNC connection. It's likely that the performance issues you're seeing are due to VNC latency rather than the power of the virtual machines themselves or the hardware they run on (which is pretty beefy). But your point is well made: given this architecture you can't really watch video or do things that require high framerates.
Regarding iOS support.. does this just run the simulators that come with XCode? I have found that the simulators don't do a very good job of reproducing real mobile safari behavior.
Greetings, we updated the page at http://saucelabs.com/mac to clarify the fact that you get unlimited usage of our VM's for $12 a month. Sorry for the confusion, I think it's a fair and reasonable price.
Different browsers (well, their rendering engine) will render html differently. The reason ie6 got so much slack years ago was because it didn't render 'correctly' at all. Web developers need to test in different browsers (/different versions) to check everyone is seeing the same thing.
overriding the UA just shows if the server serves different html to different clients
Ignore the app and sign-up on the website. I already had an account for the browser-based testing so I didn't experience the sign-up problems other people are describing.
-1 for not having a link to create a new account from the first dialogue box in the app. I can either log in or start without an account, but not create a new one? There's also no hint as to where I should go to make a new account. I clicked "forgot key" and worked it out from there.
-1 for not explaining the "open source" plan very well. What does "public" mean? Does that mean anybody can watch videos of whatever I'm working on?
-1 for making the credentials I actually need to use the app non-obvious. You should know that I'm coming from your app when I sign up for a new account, and when I'm done signing up, show me my account key in big, fat, auto-copyable text, instead of hiding it two screens later.
-1 for not automatically taking me to my localhost URL after Sauce Connect initializes. I had to say I wanted to go to a localhost URL, wait for Sauce Connect to initialize, and then try to connect to the URL again.
But once I got the thing working, it's really great! And I totally forgot that display:inline-block didn't work as recently as IE7 :(