Hi all,
During the meeting with our DOE program managers on Friday, they raised the issue that currently our only downloadable KBase product is the Mac dmg. People who work at DOE are forced to use Windows. Not only that--they are forced to use very old versions of Windows (and therefore very old versions of applications--which they are not allowed to update without permission). They are currently on Windows XP but will soon be upgrading to Windows 7. I forget which version of IE they said they had. A very old one, anyway.
So it is politically important to get something out in Feb that works on Windows. We told them that IRIS works on any platform, and doesn't require you to download any software, but now we need to check that IRIS actually does run in some ancient version of IE on Windows XP or Windows 7. Do any of you have access to an old PC? (Miriam, I know you switched to Mac fairly recently--you don't happen to have an old PC lying around, do you?) Susan said she can try out IRIS on her Windows machine, but we also need to be able to test it, particularly if she has problems. (I'm a little worried about some of the javascript stuff that we're talking about adding.) Maybe someone can run old Windows VMs to test this stuff?
It would also be good to make a Linux image available, but I think Windows is actually more important. Lots of people (even scientists) still use Windows. Linux users are generally power-users who are used to not being able to download plug-and-play software.
If it's not a huge hassle, it would be good if we could offer the downloadable tarball, which theoretically should work on any OS, right? Was there some reason to think it might not work on Windows, or were we just reluctant to state that it would work fi we couldn't test it?
Nomi Harris
Project Manager, KBase