Archive for the ‘Browser Plugins’ Category

Yahoo! Announces YSlow, Firebug based performance tool

July 26th, 2007 by Aaron N.

This. Is. Brilliant.via ajaxian:

Steve Souders, performance architect at Yahoo!, announced today the public release of YSlow.

Stoyan Stefanov reviewed it briefly and gave tips for custom scoring at his blog.

What’s YSlow?

It’s an extension to Firebug (yes, correct, Firebug, not Firefox) that helps with performance optimization efforts. It scores your page on the scale A to F, based on compliance with Yahoo’s performance rules. It’s a tool that has been used internally at Yahoo and is now released to the world.

Steve is going to be speaking about YSlow at the Ajax Experience that just kicked off. I am looking forward to meeting him and check out the tool. We should give it a run on your sites and post how you did (don’t run it on Ajaxian ;).

Recent news round-up

June 14th, 2007 by Aaron N.

Over on the Mootools forum digitarald (a contributor to Mootools) has posted date.js, a date parsing script that converts just about any date a user could imagine entering into a field into an actual date. I’m probably going to add this to our /mootools.extensions/Native folder and integrate it in with our own date.picker.js.

var date1 = date2 = new Date() = "Fri Jun 08 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200"
date1.increment('day', 2) = " Sun Jun 10 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
date2.decrement('hour', 12) = " Fri Jun 08 2007 02:42:57 GMT+0200 "
date1.diff(date2, 'hour') = " 60 "
date1.getOrdinal() = " st "
date1.getDayOfYear() = " 161 "
date1.lastDayofMonth() = " 30 "
date1.getWeek() = " 24 "
date1.getTimezone() = " GMT "
date1.getGMTOffset() = " +0200 "
date1.format('db') = " 2007-06-10 14:42:57 "
date1.format('iso8601') = " 2007-06-10T14:42:57+0200 "
date1.format('rfc822') = " Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:42:57 GMT "
date1.format('short') = " 10 Jun 14:42 "
date1.format('long') = " June 10, 2007 14:42 "
date1.format various strftime = " a = Sun ; A = Sunday ; b = Jun ; B = June ; c = Sun Jun 10 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 ; d = 10 ; H = 14 ; I = 02 ; j = 161 ; m = 06 ; M = 42 ; p = PM ; S = 57 ; U = 24 ; w = 0 ; x = 06/10/2007 ; X = 02:42PM ; y = 07 ; Y = 2007 ; T = +0200 ; Z = GMT "
Date.daysInMonth(2, 2006) = " 31 "
Date.isLeapYear(2006) = " false "
Date.parse('10/12/1982') = " Tue Oct 12 1982 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('2007-06-08 16:34:52') = " Fri Jun 08 2007 18:34:52 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('2007-06-08T16:34:52+0200') = " Fri Jun 08 2007 16:34:52 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('today') = " Fri Jun 08 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('tomorrow') = " Sat Jun 09 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('yesterday') = " Thu Jun 07 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('next monday') = " Mon Jun 11 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('1st') = " Fri Jun 01 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('14th October') = " Sun Oct 14 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('24th May, 2007') = " Thu May 24 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('May 3rd 2006') = " Wed May 03 2006 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "

History Manager

Here’s another digitarald script that I’m eyeing with a bit of interest, a state manager for ajax environments. From his site:

“Ajax History”, “Back-Button”, “Ajax Bookmarks”, call it however you like. This is an unobtrusive MooTools plugin to allow history handling for multiple modules, try it out. It can handle back/forward history actions and bookmarks with the location hash.

Features

  • Allow users to bookmark your ajaxified application in the current state
  • Forward/Backward history browsing for your Accordion and every other
  • Save states of One-Page-Applications over sessions
  • Change easily default options and customize the behaviour with Events

New Mootools Blog

The Mootools site now has a nifty blog and it’s got some great stuff on it already. First up is a quick set of reference links to everything you need to learn javascript. Many of these things are stuff I’ve linked to in my side-bar or in various posts, but it’s a nice collection for sure.

SlickSpeed

You might have seen this show up on Ajaxian, but the Mootools gang released Slickspeed, a set of browser tests for dom selector comparisons for various browsers:

IE Debugger: My DebugBar

Here’s a new debugger for IE that looks promising. I haven’t fooled around with it yet but if anyone has or does, post a comment with your thoughts!

Google Gears

If you’ve followed ajaxian in the last two weeks no doubt you’ve seen this already, but Google launched Google Gears a week or two ago. In their words:

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using the following JavaScript APIs:

  • Store and serve application resources locally
  • Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
  • Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

    Sounds promising. Here’s a nice little write up from Uriel Katz.

    Fx.Morph

    Was glancing through the demos at http://demos.mootools.net and stumbled on to Fx.Morph, a short little Fx class that transitions an element’s properties from one css class to another. I wrote something like this a few months ago but ultimately decided I didn’t really need it but now I’m giving it a second thought.

    Enabling Strict Warnings

    March 8th, 2007 by Aaron N.

    Part of writing clean code that doesn’t cause you grief in esoteric browsers is doing the best you can to ensure that your code is completely syntactically valid. My pal Valerio (principle author of Mootools) pointed out how to turn on strict warnings, which I couldn’t get to show up in Firebug, even though I enabled them there.

    The problem turned out to be the excellent Web Developer Toolbar which, if you haven’t installed, you should.

    The issue is that the default setting in Disable > Javascript > Strict Warnings is to suppress these errors, so even if you enable them in Firebug, you won’t see them. You have to enable them in both places. Read the rest of this entry »

    Firebug 1.0 presentation

    January 30th, 2007 by Aaron N.

    Today on Ajaxian there’s a post about Joe Hewitt’s recent presentation where he demonstrates the nice new features in Firebug 1.0 (note that the ajaxian post actually includes a video of Joe presenting Firebug from last may, which I think is an error as the post refers to this most recent presentation). If you haven’t had time to fool around with Firebug, or feel like you’re not getting everything out of it that you can, you really should watch this presentation.

    Firebug one-dot-oh

    January 26th, 2007 by Aaron N.

    What are you waiting for? Get Firebug now.

    One year and twelve days later I am happy to announce that the leopard’s growl has been quieted to a purr, clearing the path for the final Firebug 1.0 to make its way in the world.

    If you read this blog, that won’t mean much to you personally since you’re probably already using 1.0 beta. However, there are still tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people who are still using 0.4.1 and are going to get a very nice present the next time they restart Firefox.

    Thanks to all the people who have supported Firebug during its infancy, especially those who have contributed new ideas and donations to the project. We’re just getting started here! If nothing else, I hope Firebug inspires the makers of other browsers to invest more time in development tools. The web development paradigm wants to evolve, but we can’t build the future with yesterday’s hammer.

    Ajax Debugging w/ Firebug

    January 18th, 2007 by Aaron N.

    For those of you out there who are using an old version of firebug, or aren’t using firebug at all, you best get with the times. If you’re writing html or css or javascript or application (server side) code that talks to pages via ajax, you NEED this plugin.
    via Ajaxian:

    Joe Hewitt somehow managed to find the time to write an article on Ajax Debugging with Firebug, which he created.

    The article will show you that Firebug is more than just a JavaScript console: Read the rest of this entry »

    Short Firebug screencast

    December 12th, 2006 by Aaron N.

    via ajaxian:

    …What are you waiting for?? Go watch this short screencast (direct link to the mov file) of the 1.0 beta to see some of the power, and then get it.

    One of my coworkers today had firebug installed but didn’t seem to be really using it to its full potential. I think Dion almost fired him on the spot. Its so far ahead of any other web dev tool that its not even funny.

    Firebug 1 beta!

    December 4th, 2006 by Aaron N.

    What are you waiting for? www.getfirebug.com

    Firebug 1.0

    Firebug 1.0 in beta

    November 16th, 2006 by Aaron N.

    Holy crap I want to install this.
    via ajaxian:

    Firebug 1.0 is currently in beta, and looks very different to the 0.4.1 that we all know and love.

    The new website Get Firebug gives you a glimpse of what is coming shortly:

    I really like how the top screenshot is actually “live”, letting you click on the tabs to see each area. Very nice indeed.

    Firebug 1.0

    DOM Helper: IE Inline CSS Editor

    October 26th, 2006 by Aaron N.

    via ajaxian: DOM Helper: IE Inline CSS Editor

    Rhys Jeremiah created DOM Helper, an inline CSS editor for Internet Explorer: Read the rest of this entry »