You can't design for one platform these days—the standards just aren't, well, standard. Of course that's not strictly true—it's their implementation that is non-standard. So if you do your development on one platform, how do you ensure that your designs look OK on another?
Dan Cederholm over at SimpleBits asks:
Is there a PC equivalent to the Mac Mini? I'm looking for a cheap PC to run Windows strictly for testing designs. It doesn't need to be fast, it just needs to be inexpensive, with the smallest footprint possible. I've been using Virtual PC for the Mac for a long time now. It's convenient and works fine, but it's dreadfully slow—not to mention the version I have isn't compatible on newer, dual processor G5s (where I'm sure it'd run faster). So, my other option is: set up a bare bones Windows machine for testing without spending a ton of money and taking up a lot of desk space. Share with us your secrets.
The solution I shared is this:
I have an old Dell laptop connected to my home WLAN, sitting on my desk beside my Mac. Web development is done on the Mac, in the Sites folder. I turn on Personal Web Sharing in Mac Preferences.
PC-compatibility is tested by firing up IE6 and Firefox on the Dell, with the homepage of each set to http://192.168.1.xxx/~bruce/blog/ and thus all my live and test pages are available on the LAN.
For any change I make on the Mac I just push the Refresh button in IE6 or FF to see the effect as rendered by PC clients.
So any low-end networkable PC hardware (eBay?) should do the trick.
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