Monthly Archives: May 2008

Will Developing For IE Ever Really Be Easy?

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We all know just how much “fun” it can be to test for all the different versions of Internet Explorer.  Multiple-IE kind of works, but the best solution so far is still using Virtual Machines.  Developer Jean-Fabrice Rabaute, the author of DebugBar for IE, has developed a new solution which allows you to compare web sites in different versions of IE side by side.  The software is still in alpha, so there are still some issues.  Most notably, Flash does not work under IE6; that can be something of a show-stopper for most of our sites.  IE6 may still be the anchor that drags our cool applications down into the abyss of compatibility nightmares, but when this tool is ready for prime-time it could really help make IE testing slightly less painful.

link: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
Original Ajaxian article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/testing-ie-versions-just-got-a-little-easier 

Firefox 3.0 and FireBug 1.2 – An Addict’s Confession

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Hello.  My name is David, and I’m a FireBug addict.

Hi, David!

It all started innocently enough.  I was introduced to FireBug about a year and a half ago.  “Hey, try this Firefox plugin.  It’ll make your web development experience incredible!  And the download is free!”  Being a modern-day developer, I was willing to try new things.  I can always uninstall it later; I’m in control.  Or so  I thought. Continue reading →

New and improved – jQuery 1.2.5 is released!

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After a very short-lived jQuery 1.2.4 (it was up for less than a day before being marked as a “bad build“), jQuery 1.2.5 has been released into the wild!  It contains the usual flurry of patches, optimizations and fixes which are all spelled out in the Release Notes.

Of course, what you really want to know is whether or not this release is compatible with the $.string plugin, and the answer is yes!  (Really, I’m sure that’s what was on your mind.)

An Urgent Energy Crisis

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I’m diverting from my usual web development topics to day to write about what I consider to be a very serious development in our nation’s energy crisis.  No, I’m not talking about the price of gasoline which is hovering near $4/gallon.  I’m talking about caffeine.  I was in Trader Joe’s this morning to buy myself a supply of Trader Joe’s Energy Drinks.  I’ve been having trouble finding them lately.  The Orange Passion flavor, my personal favorite, is completely out at every location that I’ve visited (about 6 stores total at this point), and many locations are out of the Wild Berry flavor as well.  As I was checking out at the Culver City, CA store, I asked the clerk when they were expecting the Orange Passion flavor in.  He said that they weren’t!!!  The manager then spoke up and said that they were discontinuing the product due to poor sales chain-wide, although he confessed that it was actually a pretty big seller locally.  (I was walking out with 16 cans this morning.) Continue reading →

dotString 1.0 for jQuery released

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I love modern JavaScript libraries.  You get a lot of bang for your buck, keep your code clean, and make my life as a JavaScript developer easier in general.  I regularly use both jQuery and Prototype in my projects.  jQuery is a fantastic javascript library with excellent CSS selector capabilities and DOM manipulation. It’s light-weight and really fast. Prototype is an excellent all-purpose library with many great utility features, including string manipulation, enumerable arrays and hashes. I love using jQuery for its speed and simplicity, but I miss Prototype’s utilities. Luckily, jQuery is very extensible with its versatile plugin system.  dotString is a jQuery plugin that aims to bring Prototype’s string manipulation functions to jQuery. Continue reading →