On Development

IE Web Developer Toolbar

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Just stum­bled on a link of a link and found that there is too a “web devel­oper tool­bar” for IE. Although (cur­rently) unrated, it seems to pro­vide some use­ful functionality:

  • Explore and mod­ify the doc­u­ment object model (DOM) of a web page.
  • Locate and select spe­cific ele­ments on a web page through a vari­ety of techniques.
  • Selec­tively dis­able Inter­net Explorer settings.
  • View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index val­ues, and access keys.
  • Out­line tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
  • Val­i­date HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
  • Dis­play image dimen­sions, file sizes, path infor­ma­tion, and alter­nate (ALT) text.
  • Imme­di­ately resize the browser win­dow to 800x600 or a cus­tom size.
  • Selec­tively clear the browser cache and saved cook­ies. Choose from all objects or those asso­ci­ated with a given domain.
  • Choose direct links to W3C spec­i­fi­ca­tion ref­er­ences, the Inter­net Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
  • Dis­play a fully fea­tured design ruler to help accu­rately align objects on your pages.

But, don’t go and down­load­ing all at once… after all it is still in beta—“Beta 2″ to be exact.

Who Said Yahoo Doesn’t Share for Free?

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Just last week, pre-Valentine’s Day, Yahoo! shows it love to the pub­lic by launch­ing User Inter­face Library and Design Pat­terns Library. Not to men­tion, the crazy cats over at the Yahoo! UI depart­ment have started a blog as well. Dang, they seem to be grind­ing and shar­ing great tools with every­one. I like that. You may read more about inter­est­ing tech­nol­ogy via Yahoo! Devel­oper Net­work.

Spe­cial thanks goes out to Blingo.com, that I came across Peter Freitag’s blog entry about it. It’s just too bad I didn’t win anything =|

Rehashing Firefox Extensions

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I recently updated to Fire­fox 1.5 as read in my pre­vi­ous entry a cou­ple of days ago. Not to men­tion, I also posted about exten­sions that I think are a must-have for web developers/designers a month ago. With those in mind, I took some time this past week­end to do some house cleaning.

With the hol­i­days steadily truck­ing its way for the new year, one should keep their envi­ron­ment free. This also helps you out so you don’t catch a cold or flu, and be bed-ridden when every­one is par­ty­ing it up. I know this is com­mon knowl­edge but peo­ple still forget—even me some­times. Take for exam­ple this past Sat­ur­day morn­ing while I was get­ting ready to play pickup-softball at Krusi Park.

I was on my way to my car when I just seem to for­get an essen­tial item, my shoes. I knew that I put it near the bar in the enter­tain­ment room area but I seem to not find it any­where. I recall that I just left it there last week­end. Then I remem­ber Biggy’s mom clean­ing up and prob­a­bly grabbed it along with the other shoes. To make a long story short, I found it later but used my san­dals to go to the park and play. Lesson-learned, stay orga­nized as it might save you some time and energy when you need it the most.

Mean­while, back to Fire­fox exten­sions. So I was clean­ing my room and stuff, and decided to do some main­te­nance on my PC as well. Did the usual Ad-aware, Anti-virus and Defrag work­flow. Then, was enticed of upgrad­ing my browser to 1.5 there too but later decided that I should keep my home-PC at 1.0.7 at the moment.

I then tried to see which exten­sions have updates, which led me to go and learn more about new exten­sions. After an hour or two of opti­miz­ing which exten­sions to take out, add and update, here’s what I think are necessity:

I also have been using Tab­browser Exten­sion (TBE) but lately fig­ured out that I don’t need every­thing that comes with it. So I did some research and dis­cov­ered that there’s a cou­ple of exten­sions that can achieve the same func­tion­al­ity. Here they are:

I hope these exten­sions become use­ful to you as they were for me. They totally make the Fire­fox expe­ri­ence bet­ter; not to men­tion, the improve­ment of effi­ciency and pro­duc­tion in my work­flow. I also noticed a lower CPU usage when I took out TBE and installed the four exten­sions above (TBP, Ses­sion Saver, Tab X and Last­Tab) instead.

So, there you go… Keep things orga­nized. Keep things clean.

Note: Thanks goes out to Petr for updat­ing me with the Fire­fox Site­Bar exten­sion update (Site­Bar Client).

Try Ruby!

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No, not the stone. I’m refer­ring to the pro­gram­ming lan­guage.

Ruby is the inter­preted script­ing lan­guage for quick and easy object-oriented pro­gram­ming. It has many fea­tures to process text files and to do sys­tem man­age­ment tasks (as in Perl). It is sim­ple, straight-forward, exten­si­ble, and portable.

Any­ways, here’s a nice inter­ac­tive demo on what Ruby can do. Good job whytheluck­ys­tiff on this project. Very enter­taint­ing. I’m sure this will open some eyes and get some peo­ple to learn more about it.

Note: For those non-technical peo­ple, don’t be scared to try the demo. It’s clear enough to fol­low. Just read the tips below the command-prompt area and you should be good to go.

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