The majority of people using/playing around with Information Cards seem to be using Microsoft CardSpace as their selector. That's not surprising since it is pretty much the de-facto standard for selectors and, as people always hear me remark, it's really pretty. More than 50% of my time is spent using Fedora, so CardSpace (running under Windows only) is really out the question. Those who know me, know that the selector that I prefer is the xmldap plugin for firefox. Even with
the problems I used to run into by using it. I say used to because it finally now works without having to modify any of the code.
It turns out that the cause of my problems was due to the dependency on Kevin Miller's
selector chooser. The initial usage of the chooser allowed users running firefox to use the CardSpace selector (normally only available within IE 7). Now, as I said I am running Linux, so this chooser was useless to me. In fact, it does not work on Linux or Macs as detailed in an open bug report. Really, that is not an issue because for one thing CardSpace isn't available on those platforms and secondly, it's easy enough to enable/disable plugins in firefox to choose which selector you want to use anyways. Over the past couple of days, I worked with
Axel Nennker to finally resolve the major issues I was having and there is finally a
working version again.
I was never aware of this, but, the selector and it's development efforts can be found within the
openinfocard project. Prior to this discovery, I would always just monitor the version available at
Chuck Mortimore's site. I'm glad to have found this so now I can stay on top of the changes made to make sure the selector continues to work on non-Windows (at least Linux) systems.
On another note, during the process I started getting fed-up with the broken state (hey, it happens to all of us once in a while) and decided to give the
Higgins selector another shot. I hadn't tried it since the 0.6 version (currently at 0.8), so wasn't sure what to expect. A lot of progress has been made and it had a nice clean UI. I went to one of my test sites and gave the selector a spin. From what I can tell, it appears that the card manager is online, meaning that a users cards are stored remotely allowing them to be accessed anywhere by any machine with the Higgins selector installed. This means no having to jump through the import/export hoops and having to physically move them to different machines. Again, I say appears to as when I tried to use the selector, I had problems.
My card store was empty so I needed to create a new self asserted card to access my test site. For some reason, I could not get the card manager to create a card. All other buttons on the page worked and the Add a card (the little plus sign) showed that it was used to create a card, but it just would not kick of the steps to create a card. It is still in the development stage, so hiccups like that are to be expected. I simply went back to working on my original problem with the xmldap selector and maybe in a month or so return to try the next version of Higgins. I can see the advantages of having cards stored remotely online (provides easy access to them like using OpenID), but am torn about my feelings of storing my cards with someone else; out of my control.
so, all in all, I am back to the xmldap selector. Although frustrating at times when problems crop up, it has served me well on both Windows and linux platforms since its inception that I think I will stick with it for the time being. A big thanks goes out to the developers of the
Openinfocard project, especially Axel who put up with all the traces I sent him over the past few days.
