If you’ve ever worked with Firebug you’ll know its possibly the best tool out there for aiding in web development within Firefox; thankfully there are some really handy extensions for it to make it even more indispensable!

Firecookie

Allows the same controls that you get with HTML to apply to cookies, so far I had been using the Web Developer toolbar to view/change cookies, however this allows for much easier editing. It also has a feature to show you when cookies are changed, which is great for debugging.

YSlow

This is useful to work out either why your site is running slow, or for you to make improvements to make it faster. It has various rule sets which can be found here which define what exceptions it allows.

It’s going to be that time of year again soon, when a browser gets updated and all developers frantically have to make their websites compatible and all working fantastically. However, this time around the team behind Internet Explorer 8 are going to make this much easier on all us devs.

They are doing this by allowing the web-site itself to control which rendering engine IE8 will use when you browse. This will mean if you site is already compatible with IE7, it can also be compatible with IE8 by simply including one line of HTML in the header…

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

This will apparently force newer version of IE8 to render the current page in IE7’s format, which from a standpoint on the priority of getting things upgraded, can allow it to go a few notches down on the list rather than being the number one.

For once it will be nice to worry about feature sets, improvements and bug fixing rather than worrying if the styling will still work when the next version of IE comes out.

Thank you Microsoft IE team!

Ever find that you are searching through various programming language’s API sites, and wished that there was an easier way of doing it all? Well I found this site the other day called GotAPI, and on their site it allows you to specify which API’s you are interested in, and from there you get a very clean interface in which to search through them with.

So instead of having to have 5-10 bookmarks for all the different languages I now only need the one. It’s very fast searching and uses the standard web 2.0 style of ajax. But it’s done in a way which is very useful rather than showing off the fact its ajax and it being intrusive and annoying.

You can have as many languages as the site supports open as they all load up in tabs at the top, so you can search between them by just clicking the correct language. It also includes API’s for various databases and major sites such as Flickr as well, so it’s not just useful for programming.

The bottom line, there’s no adverts, it’s fast, free, and all in one place. GotAPI

So another week of work goes by, and along with that a miniature world of delays and problems on the tube. I can hear you now, “well what’s new about that one?”, unfortunately as im learning very quickly that this isn’t some freak occurrence that the tubes don’t run on time and can’t be relied on for keeping time or even running. So, to combat this situation, and hopefully make my life a little easier I knocked up a little app to get the service status of the London Underground from the Transport For London web-site and display it in, yeah you guessed it, a client side application!

Again, it all started off being very simple, but then progressed and gained features. Currently it fetches the service status every 5minutes which is configurable via the command line when you start the program. For example..

tlu-status.exe 60

…would mean it goes and fetches the data every 60 seconds. Although I wouldn’t recommend you set it that low, I think the TFL webmaster might have something to say about it otherwise. Again, like the other apps I have created so far, they minimise to the tray, as I don’t see a reason for a background program to remain on the task bar other than when your using it. So for those who are interested in seeing this wonderfully uselessful app…

I have already has people asking why I made this into a app if the information is already available on the internet? Well.. I’m lazy and I can’t be arsed to load up a web-site if I want status updates, I just want it on my desktop, always being available quickly. It also means I can just put it on another screen, and glance at it occasionally during the day to see how things are going.

Download Links

TLU Status (937kb) – (Sorry, this doesn’t work any more since they changed their website)

After creating some very simple applications in WinBinder to test to see how things worked out, I decided to try and make something a little more challenging. So I came up with the idea of a Winamp interaction application, starting off slowly with just the plan to get the current track and artist name from Winamp and displaying it to the user. From there, if I wanted to, I could expand the program to possible do statistics on what you’ve played. (I do realise that there are applications that already do this, but this is a learning process).

So after getting the WinampCOM object working, I managed to get what I required out of Winamp, and was displaying it to the user. Then I had a mini-brainwave about people using Winamp, more specifically using it while in a full screen application, where you can’t see the Winamp window any more. I know myself I load up my winamp and let it loose on random play with my mp3’s, but if I was in a full screen app, I wouldn’t be able to see whats playing (short of alt+tabbing anyway). So I dug around some more with COM objects and then suddenly remembered about the SAPI.SpVoice object.

So 5minutes later, the application is now reading out the track names as you switch, and also reading in the ID3 tags if they exist. Not only that, but after a suggestion from Jace Arnold to make it pause the track while its talking, another 5minutes later and that was in as well! So after starting off, this is what it ended up looking like…

It also minimises to the tray, as I have a serious pet peeve about programs taking up taskbar space which could easily run from the taskbar in the background.

Download Links

Winamp Readout (906kb) – winamp-readout_setup_1.0a.zip

I’m currently mainly coding in PHP still (love live PHP!) because I find being able to mock up pages or programs quickly is a god send, especially since Rubem Pechansky created a wonderful extension called WinBinder. Which allows you to create client side applications extremly quickly, think how easy mIRC dialogs were, and then put that with PHP, and you can make some very powerful programs. Rapid client side application development with PHP *glee*. Here’s a quote from their web-site about it…

“WinBinder is an open source extension to PHP, the script programming language. It allows PHP programmers to easily build native Windows applications, producing quick and rewarding results with minimum effort. Even short scripts with a few dozen lines can generate a useful program, thanks to the power and flexibility of PHP.“