Larger software companies possess complex bug and issue tracking systems to help them capture, triage, and respond to this type of feedback, but smaller companies often still struggle to find a way of managing this information. Sifter hopes to change that with a simple and straightforward bug and issue tracking app.

Admittedly, a number of products have attempted to solve this tracking problem, simple or otherwise. What makes Sifter different? Sifter is built in the "less is more" vein of product development. There's just enough there, but not too much.

When I saw Sifter, I immediately thought of it as the perfect complement to Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction makes gathering customer feedback incredibly simple. And Sifter proposes to make dealing with that feedback just as simple. What's more, Sifter is so straightforward that practically anyone - not just developers used to issue tracking systems - can use it. And that has the potential of making every person on the team a valuable contributor to the system.

But there's something else happening here. Thanks to its simplicity, Sifter actually makes bug and issue tracking accessible to groups who may have never considered it before: Web developers, blogging teams, community managers, graphic designers, and the like.

When it comes right down to it, tracking issues shouldn't be terribly complex. There's a problem that needs to be solved. And someone needs to solve it. Unfortunately, that apparent simplicity leads many smaller teams to forego the cost of a traditional management system by using email or spreadsheets to manage the incoming requests and assignments. Then things begin to fall through the cracks.

Yes, tracking should be a simple process. But there still needs to be process. Sifter seems to understand this. And they've priced their solution accordingly.

In terms of product development, Sifter has something else that makes it interesting. Sifter's whole development history was transparent. So you can go back to see why decisions were made. And get an idea of what might be coming next.

If you're part of a small team of developers who find typical bug tracking software too arduous or don't want to deal with having to set up a service of your own - or if you're someone who deals with issues but has never considered a bug tracking system to manage them - Sifter may be for you.

The Firefox 3/Flash Bug

If you don't have any idea what we're talking about here, consider yourself lucky. The Flash/Firefox bug has been a major source of aggravation for many users running Firefox 3 on Windows XP or Vista. When viewing an embedded video on a web site like YouTube, the videos would start playing, but they would stop after only a couple of seconds. There was nothing you could do to fix it except to close the browser and re-open it (which only sometimes worked) or load up an alternate browser like IE or Chrome.

People's experiences with this bug weren't consistent - some people were affected, some not at all, and for some it was intermittent. To make matters worse, the only solution at the time was to install the Flash 10 player which was then still in beta and therefore unsupported by many large web sites, like CNN, for example. That site would prompt you to upgrade to Flash 9 as it thought you must be running an older version of Flash. 

Both Mozilla and Adobe were aware of the issue, but neither company seemed to really know what the problem was. At one time, Adobe suspected that it was another Firefox plugin that was affecting Flash. The Mozilla developers also did their best to determine the cause on their end, too, but because Adobe was a closed-source company, their efforts could only go so far.

This fix came just in time. Because the issue had been going on for so long, people were getting comfortable running two browsers - Firefox (as usual) and one that played Flash, like Chrome. That opened the door for another big browser switch - this time away from Firefox instead of towards it. What a shame that would have been because otherwise, Firefox 3 is a great browser. We're happy to see that Adobe finally figured out the issue and has made Flash usable again.

Other New Features

As far as the other upgrades go, developers will be happy to learn that the new Flash Player supports the following:

• 3D transformations and animations that take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration
• New text rendering engine that lets developers create their own text layout components
• Pixel Blender integration which lets developers create custom filters and effects which can be applied at runtime to videos, images, and bitmaps

For more details on the technical aspects of these features, Josh Catone has a good write-up over on SitePoint.

You can download the new version of Flash from here: http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer