LinLog

You know what?  Amazon Cloud Drive is a little bit of a pain.  I think it's time to start moving away from it. I think I'm going to give DropBox another look.

To be clear, I don't plan to stop using Cloud Drive altogether. For one thing, the Kindle integration is actually pretty nice.  And for another, they give Amazon Prime members a pretty decent amount of space for free.  And I find that the desktop Cloud Drive app actually works pretty well.  It's just the mobile app and the website that suck.

The mobile app

For starters, let me voice my new complaint with the mobile app: the semantics of syncing your pictures are rather poorly defined.  Or, rather, they're not defined — at least, not to my knowledge.  By that I mean: what happens when you delete a bunch of files from your Cloud Drive, but not from your phone's main picture storage?  I'll tell you what: the app tries to re-add them to your Cloud Drive. 

This has happened to me two or three times in the last week or two.  A couple of weeks ago I went through my Cloud Drive and deleted some of the pictures that were duplicated, out of focus, etc.  Now, at semi-random intervals, the app wants to re-upload them.

In fairness, this could be due in part to the fact that Amazon's apps all seem to share authentication and it seems to be semi-broken on my phone.  I've had this problem several times recently.  The Kindle app on my Galaxy Nexus will stop synchronizing and the settings will report that it is "Registered to .".  No, that's not a typo, my name is just missing.  And when this happens, I can't authenticate with the Cloud Drive app or the Cloud Player app either — they just reject my credentials.  So far, the only fix I've found is to deregister my device in the Kindle app settings and then re-register it.  That fixes the Kindle app as well as authentication in the other apps. 

The website

I've blogged about the Cloud Drive website and it's useless "share" feature before.  Well, despite that, the other day I decided to give that "share" feature a try.  Hey, maybe it won't really be so bad, right?

Good Lord, it was even worse than I'd imagined.

So my task was to share one or two dozen pictures of my son with my relatives.  Seems simple enough, right?  The pictures are already in my Cloud Drive, so I just need to send out some links to them.  As I noted in the last entry, Cloud Drive doesn't actually support sharing folders or sharing multiple files at once, so the only way to do this is by sharing one file at a time and copying the URL into an e-mail. 

As bad as this is, it turns out it's made even worse by the fact that Cloud Drive is now reloading the file list after you complete the "share" operation.  And to add insult to injury, the reload is really slow.  Granted, I have about 1500 images in that directory, but that shouldn't matter because the reload really doesn't need to happen at all.  I mean, nothing has changed in the folder view.  All that happens is that the UI locks up for a few seconds and then I get a "file has been shared" message.

So this only confirms my opinion that the "share" feature in Cloud Drive is unusable.  I mean, if sharing were just a matter of popping up the "share" dialog that holds the URL, copying it, pasting to another window, and then closing the dialog, that would be one thing.  It would suck, but I could deal with it.  But the brain-dead UI locking up for five seconds after each share just makes it too painful to even try.  I got through maybe half a dozen pictures before giving up in disgust.

Solution - DropBox?

So, clearly, I need another platform for sharing my pictures.  So I looked around and found myself mighily confused.  My requirements were pretty simple.  I wanted something that:

1. Had a free account tier,
2. Had an easy way to share by just sending someone a link,
3. And provided a simple uploading option.

I briefly considered using the Google+ "Photos" feature, but gave up on that when I realized the whole visibility/sharing thing wasn't completely obvious.

For now, I'm trying out DropBox.  I've had a free DropBox account for a couple of years, but never really used it for anything, so that was one less thing to sign up for.  The desktop app is pretty nice and allows me just drag files between Explorer windows and shows an icon of the file's sync status.  And sharing things via the web UI is dead simple, which is exactly what I was looking for.  So we'll see how that goes.  Worst-case scenario, I won't have lost anything.

I'm currently on my annual "this time I'm really going to start doing test-driven development (or at least something close to it)" kick.  And it seems to be going pretty well, so hopefully this time it will actually stick. 

As I said, I do this every year and testing usually ends up falling by the wayside.  Granted, this is partly just due to a lack of discipline and commitment on my part.  Getting started with a new practice takes effort, and sometimes it's hard to justify that effort when "I've been doing just fine without it for years."  But there's also the matter of the type of projects I work on.  Most of the projects I've worked on have not had an establish test suite or a culture of testing.  Whether it's a work-related project or an old personal project for before I heard the gospel of TDD, the norm has been a sizable, years-old code-base that has few if any tests and isn't really designed to be testable in the first place. 

Getting into TDD with a project like that can be daunting.  Picture PHP code littered with static method calls, system calls, and direct class instantiations at multiple levels.  "You need to inject a mock object?  Yeah, good luck with that."  The classes may be well-defined, but there's not much compartmentalization of responsibilities within them, so inserting test doubles is not always straight-forward.  That leaves you in the unenviable position of either having to rewrite a bunch of existing code to make it unit-testable or set up some real test data and turn the unit test into an integration test.  The first option is obviously preferable, but can be much more risky, especially since you don't already have tests to validate the behavior of the code you need to change.  And while the second approach is certainly better than no tests at all, integration tests are slow to run, cumbersome to set up, and much more prone to breakage when things change.  Faced with a mess like that, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to say, "You know what?  I've got things I need to get done.  I'll get back to those tests later."  But, of course, you never actually do.

This time, I'm doing things a little differently.  For starters, I'm not writing new tests for old code.  I'm just doing the new code.  I'll get to the old code when/if I get around to refactoring it.  That means that I don't have to worry about untestable code, which makes the entire enterprise about a thousand times simpler.  I'm also not working with PHP code for the time being.  I'm trying to do TDD on two projects — one for work that's in JavaScript and a personal one in Python.  For Python, I'm using unittest and mock which, so far, I'm finding to be less of a pain in the neck than PHPUnit.

For the JavaScript project, I'm using Jasmine, which brings me to the title of this post.  Since I'm trying to do TDD (or rather BDD), I quickly tired of alt+TABbing to a browser window and then hitting ctrl+R to reload the page with the test runner.  Sure, it's not a big deal, but it's just one more thing that gets in the way.  I wanted to do what I could do in Python and PHP, which is just hit a hotkey and have Komodo run the test suite right in the same window. 

Turns out, that was actually pretty easy to set up.  I just banged out a quick macro that opens up the Jasmine test runner HTML file in a browser tab or refreshes it if it's already opened.  I bound that to a hotkey and I'm good to go.  Sure, it doesn't use the Komodo IDE testing framework, but that's not the end of the world — I just move it to a split pane and it works out pretty well.  I even added some CSS to the spec runner to make it match my Komodo color scheme.

Here's a screenshot of the side-by-side runner and some (unrelated but public) code:

And here's the macro itself:
(function() {
    var uri = 'file:///path/to/test_runner.html',
        view = ko.views.manager.getViewForURI(uri);
    if (view === null) {
        ko.open.URI(uri, 'browser');
    } else if (view.reload) {
        view.reload();
    } else {
        view.viewPreview();
    }
})();