Maybe the worst thing about writing software is worrying how it will work in other people’s computers. As an indie / open source developer I don’t have much of a testing department, so what I test is pretty much what I have. If my computer has Windows 7, that’s what I test and I can only hope I wrote good enough code to avoid any platform-specific problems.
Why did I think about that now? Because it turns out that I made kind of a rookie mistake in Paddle Storm – using a backslash in file paths, which is the Windows way and probably fails on Linux. I uploaded a fix to SourceForge today, but I still can’t test it because I have no Linux machine. All I can do is be grateful to those who take the time to try and report to me when things go wrong (thank you!).
So keep that in mind in your work. And if you’re writing Java code, use File.separator.
I did get an idea today, maybe I’ll burn a Knoppix live CD so I’ll be able to test things on Linux without the trouble of installing another operating system. I’ll check that in the next few days.
