ADM Blog

Firefox has emerged victorious from the Great Browser War – at least as far as web developers are concerned. While it may not be the most-used browser for the everyday web surfer, Firefox is clearly the first choice of developers for a few very simple reasons. Its support for web standards is legendary, but the real super powers come from Firefox’s extensibility. With a plethora of add-ons and extensions, created for developers by developers, Firefox becomes much more than just a browser and turns into an essential part of your toolbox. Rather than digging through your source code with squinted eyes, use Firefox add-ons to pinpoint Javascript errors and debug them like a pro. Use add-ons to measure areas of your page, select colors directly from the site or view the specific CSS assigned to a pesky

2. Web Developer Toolbar

If writing Javascript without Firebug is like fumbling in the dark, building a site without the Web Developer Toolbar is like blindfolding yourself, tieing your hands and and trying to run through the woods without hitting a tree. Disable your cache, images and cookies, switch style sheets by media type, auto-fill forms with temp data, outline certain element types, resize the browser window to common sizes and validate your markup – all from within one toolbar. The Web Developer Toolbar does a whole lot more and is always the first add-on I install in Firefox. Give it a try and you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Download: Web Developer Toolbar

3. Measure It

Ever need to know just how much space you have for a photo, or how wide a dynamically sized column is? This handy little guy lets you measure, in pixels, any area on the page. Super simple and super helpful.

Download: Measure It

4. Colorzilla

Another very simple but very useful add-on that displays the RGB and HTML color codes directly beneath your cursor. With a click, Colorzilla will copy the HTML color code to your clipboard for use in your favorite editor.

Download: Colorzilla

5. CSS Viewer

CSS Viewer takes one of the features in the Web Developer Toolbar and makes it a little easier. Just point your cursor at any element on the page and CSS Viewer will show you all of its CSS attributes, from size and position to fonts and colors, all in an easy to read overlay.

Download: CSS Viewer

6. ScreenGrab

A simple screenshot tool, Screengrab will save the visible area or the complete page as a file on your desktop. You can choose to save as a png or jpg, and even auto-add a datestamp to the file name

Download: ScreenGrab

7. Gridfox

If you use grid layouts or want to learn how, Gridfox is for you. It displays a simple overlay on your page to help you align elements to both vertical and horizontal grid lines. You can easily set the column and row sizes and spacing, choose from left-aligned, right-aligned or centered layouts and set the opacity of the overlay.

Download: Gridfox

8. User Agent Switcher

If you swap style sheets or display alternate content based on which browser the user is viewing your site with, this add-on will tell Firefox to pretend it is another browser. Choose from Opera, Internet Explorer, or add your own custom user-agents to the list.

Download: User Agent Switcher

9. PageDiff

Those of you familiar with the linux/unix “diff” command will instantly understand what this add-on does. Compare the source code of any two pages and see where they differ. This is very useful when comparing staging and production environments, or comparing a backup to a current deployment before restoring any code.

Download: PageDiff

10.  Cache View and Cache Status

CacheView is a GUI Front-end of “about:cache” that allows searching,sorting and saveing memory and disk cache files. Very usefull when 1) You want to see what is in your cache and 2) Save things from memory or disk cache since firefox has a very cryptic way of storing it’s cache.

Cache Status is a customizable presence to your browser window’s statusbar that gives you up-to-date information on your browser’s cache usage, both RAM and the hard drive. The presence also has a right-click context menu, where you can easily clear your browser’s cache. It can also automatically clean your cache when it reaches a specified level, through its Options.

Download: Cache Viewer, Cache Status

Misc, Software add-ons, designer, extensions, firefox, web

Visual Studio is really popular with developers and for good reasons. It’s fast, has some of the best Intellisense and debuging there is and now you can also use it for Flex authoring. Amethyst is developed by SapphireSteel and it’s currently in public Beta.

One of the smartest moves Adobe ever did was to release the Flex SDK and make it easy to integrate it with other code editors. We know of quite a few editors (commercial and open source) that use the SDK, so this is certainly extending the Flex echo-system. Amethyst is a free IDE that builds on Visual Studio. If you already have Visual Studio and the Flex SDK installed, you only need to run the Amethyst installer to get started.

Amethyst offers code completion, formatting and intellisense for AS3 and MXML. There’s class templates for AS3, AIR, MXML, MXML components and more. The code is color coded and collapsible and all the neat Visual Basic panels such as Object and Solution Explorer works. The Personal Edition of Amethyst will be a free download for always, but some IntelliSense features may be provided in the ‘Professional’ edition only. The latest version was released only days ago and the beta now has super-fast intellisense, so if the slow intellisense in Flex Builder is killing your productivity, this could be worth a shot.

Check out more and download from here

Misc, Software actionscript, air, amethyst, flex, ide, mxml, sapphiresteel, visual studio

Xobni is a new plugin for Outlook 2007 users and it kicks your email capabilities ass.

Email search. Way faster than the current Outlook07 search. When I started typing in the first two or three letters in Xobni it immediately began pulling up emails with those letters used. It has been a time saver because Outlook takes forever to search through 2 years of emails. With Xobni, it’s pulling them up in seconds.

Email Analytics. Fancy little graph showing you the frequency of email usage between you and your contact. Below the graph, it shows you the number of messages sent in and out and the contacts rank based on that number.

Click-to Functions. Click on their phone number, click to schedule time with person (creates a default email and pulls your availability from your calendar!), or click to email this person.

Network. Shows you all the people you and that person are associated with.

Conversations. Shows you the history of correspondence between you and that person. How easy!

Files Exchanged. Shows you all the files you and that person have exchanged. How convenient!

Fun Facts. Share fun facts with your contacts, such as who responds the fastest to your emails.

Unlike many Outlook add-ons, Xobni seems to add its functionality without dragging down Outlook’s performance, or worse, crashing it. It’s useful and it doesn’t get in the way. There’s no reason not to try it, but be warned: it’s still in beta, so just because others haven’t had problems doesn’t mean you’ll get away scot-free.

And the download link.

Enjoy

Misc, Software analytics, download, email, Internet, outlook, xobni

The company, Gird Iron Sofware, calls Flow a “Visual Workflow Manager.” I call it a miracle.

Programmers had versioning tools since the begining now it’s time for the designers to get theirs. And it’s a really good one.

Flow follows a project’s workflow by tracking and mapping out the revisions a file has gone through during your work process. It manages your project files, how they’re related to each other, and where they’re located.

How It Works

Say that you have a final document for a client. It’s a PDF file that includes particular fonts and several images. Drop that PDF file onto Flow, and the application maps out the assets and the iterations of those assets for you. Double-click on a previous revision of an asset, such as one of the images, and Flow finds it on your computer instantly. Flow will let you know if you are missing any of the fonts in a project file.

Flow doesn’t care what the names of the files are; it identifies them through an ID number so even if you can’t remember what you named a file, Flow will find it for you and map it.

Flow not only gives you a history of a file and its iterations but allows you to revert to any version as needed. They call this “Visual Versioning.” You can also perform a “Visual Search” to locate any file and to see a visual diagram of how it fits into the project you’re working on.

Asset Tracking
One of my favourite features is the asset tracking across multiple programs. Without any intervention from the designer, Flow will detect copy/paste and import functions from application to application. That means it can tell that you’ve created a vector in Illustrator, imported it into Photoshop, and then exported it to JPG and added it to an HTML file.

Project Reports

Another nice feature is the ability to track how much time was spent working on a particular file or on a project as a whole. This actually fits quite nicely with how I used to determine how much time was spent on a project. I’ve often gone through my email and phone logs to see which project I was working on at any given time. Timesheets have always been a hassle and this would definitely help me get a more accurate view of where my time is being spent.

Versioning

I like how it’ll automatically version the files that you are working on and even tracks when you do Save As. You’ll be able to configure how far back a file is versioned so as not to eat up your entire hard drive (although considering I barely use 20% of my drive now, I’m not overly concerned). It creates thumbnails of each version, letting you quickly eyeball changes from version to version. It’ll even track files on network drives or on removable storage.

Check out their video for a quick demo and a bit more details. For full details, just go and download it

Misc, Software flow, gridiron, photoshop, versioning, visual, workflow

RARPlayer is a multimedia torrent player that allows you to watch movies and listen to audio without downloading the torrent. It streams movies and music directly from the torrent file so that you can start watching it just like any streaming video without having to wait for it to complete downloading.

So, if you have a good download speed and a torrent with enough seeders, you will like this. You can even use it at your office

Misc, Software download, music, stream, torrent, video