Hello HN. My partner is a UX designer and I'm a full-stack dev. While watching her work, I found that she was wasting so much time building her usability evaluations reports that I built a tool to help her out.
It's a SaaS service for generating reports with a Chrome extension to allow capturing problems onsite.
I'd love to get feedback from fellow UX designers and usability professionals about their workflow and how to cover all the needs.
I've been working on that topic too in the last year. I developed Capian (http://capian.co), a tool to help usability professionals make better heuristic evaluations faster.
I'm a full-stack developer and my partner is a UX designer. There's a lot of missing tools in our space. Great to see other people trying to address them!
These are all good points, I should have made my goals clearer. I do not use it as a web development machine or something that needs to be always on.
I use it as an occasional machine, to compile and test stuff that's not working or unavailable under OSX. I was looking for a powerful and cheap VPS (which is uncommon) when I figured I'd be better served by a headless VM.
Another big plus for me is having access to it when there's no connectivity.
I mostly use OSX for everything. The only times I switch to the VM is when I'm having a hard time installing something (for an example, see my earlier comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2969509) or want to try a tool that's not available under OSX.
I admit the post would have been better with examples and without then unfounded critiques, taking notes for the next ones.
Just wondering if you could think of anything obvious I'm doing wrong (I'm pretty much a newbie when it comes to this)...
I'm following the instructions in your post on my Macbook Pro (2010); however I get 'Booting from DVD/CD... 180MB medium detected. Boot failed: Could not read from CDROM (code 0005) No bootable device.' I am using the netinstall Arch Linux ISO.
This is really a great overview of why I like this setup, I couldn't have put it more clearly.
An example of something I've been trying lately and didn't work well under OSX: ruby bindings for FUSE filesystems. I wanted to write a quick FUSE fs using ruby, so I installed gems and other dependencies. But since MacFUSE has been deprecated for a while, it's not easy to get everything working.
It could probably work under OSX, but given the current state of FUSE on Lion, I gave up (and did not try it under Linux yet).
While trying to setup my FUSE environment, I installed every FUSE version, many gems with a couple of ruby versions with rvm, rbenv, ruby-build, etc. When playing with new tools and environments, I always end up with lots of useless or broken stuff.
This setup allows me to keep my base system clean and simple.
I do not use it daily, but it's nice to have it ready to launch when needed.
One of the benefits of VMs is that it's usually quite easy to create a backup of a certain state, so that you can easily mess around with it, install lots of stuff, wreck the system, and then easily get back to the pristine state. Or do the same again three months later when you have to test the next version of the software…
That's one of the reason why I think that every company larger than one person should have a dedicated VM server…
What I still have to try is NFS mounting my Mac's $HOME directory. Introducing some special cases into the shell startup scripts etc. shouldn't be a big deal, but me and NFS had a bit of a tiff a few years ago…
It's a SaaS service for generating reports with a Chrome extension to allow capturing problems onsite.
I'd love to get feedback from fellow UX designers and usability professionals about their workflow and how to cover all the needs.