January 17th, 2006
WebKit and thus Safari just got a new, totally sweet Web Inspector palette—the best browser for the Mac just got better!
The Web Inspector lets you browse the live DOM hierarchy in a compact HUD style window, catering to the needs of web developers and WebKit hackers alike.
The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. You can also search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name.
One of the unique features of the inspector is the ability to root the DOM hierarchy by double clicking a node to dig deeper. This lets you easily manage large nested pages and only focus on a particular sub-tree with minimal indentation.
Under the Style pane we show all the CSS rules that apply to the focused node. These rules are listed in cascade order with overridden properties striked-out—letting you truly see how cascading stylesheets affect the page layout. All shorthand properties have a disclosure-triangle to show and hide the expanded properties created by the shorthand.
To get all this webdev glory, just follow the instructions on Surfin’ Safari.
Next step: please add a decent JavaScript debugger! 🙂
January 15th, 2006
It’s official now—I’m going to have a talk on Ajax in Rails at the first-ever conference dedicated on Ruby on Rails: Canada on Rails.
The conference will be held in Vancouver, B.C. (in Canada obviously) on April 13 and 14, 2006.
There’s not much time left to get one of those early bird tickets, so you’d better hurry!
January 9th, 2006
The lastest episode of the Audbile Ajax Podcast is all about script.aculo.us, web usability and other subjects:
Some of the first “wow” moments were due to the effects created by Thomas Fuchs in his Script.aculo.us library that builds on top of Prototype. Many people didn’t realise that with one line of JavaScript code they could get such a nice effect to happen, and now ugly developer-created sites have a chance 😉
We had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas, an we got to discuss his frameworks, and gain knowledge from his experience.
What you will learn in this podcast
- How script.acuo.us was born out of a real project
- Why Rails was chosen for Fluxiom
- Where Rails shines with Ajax
- The new RJS templates feature that makes Ajax even easier
- The difference between Prototype and Script.aculo.us
- How Script.aculo.us is available in Rails 1.0
- Future plans for Script.aculo.us
- When you should use the cool effects, and when you should not
- About drag and drop and web usability
- Challenges that Thomas has faced with his Ajax projects
- Why you would choose an Ajax application versus using other technologies such as Flash
- How hard it is to build a very rich Ajax application
- How to handle browser differences
- Experiences with DOM manipulation and innerHTML
- How naming collisions are not as much of an issue in recent builds of Prototype
So, tune right in!
January 6th, 2006
Over at the Carson Workshops site, you’ll find a bunch of photos from my December 2005 workshop on Ajax in London.
Also, hoping to see some of you at my Get Started Using Ajax Workshop in New York!
January 6th, 2006
The nice guys over at Macromates just released TextMate 1.5, the good-lookin’ editor you get to see in also those nice Ruby on Rails screencasts.
If you’re on OS X and not using it, you’re either a die-hard fan of some ancient editors, or you’re not into programming.
January 4th, 2006
Sebastian Gräßl is doing a Workshop on Ruby on Rails in Graz, Styria on January 21 and 22.
It’s cheap too, so if you want to start with Ruby on Rails, there’s no excuse now…
