FireBug 1.0 Beta released.

by Khaled on December 5th, 2006

As you all now I am a big fan of FireFox mainly because it is modern, standards compliant, and very extensible and useful for New Media developers and Web designers. One great Add-on for FireFox is FireBug.

FireBug is a noteworthy add-on for Mozilla FireFox, I’ve been using it since a couple of months now and I think it is an outstanding tool for web developers and programmers. Now that version 1.0 Beta was released it’s become a “must have” extension.

With FireBug you are able to inspect, modify, debug and edit CSS, HTML, and JavaScript of any page you want. Now you can open FireBug in its own separate window, you can change the CSS of your page and see it work immediately, the FireBug DOM inspector’s CSS tab displays all the CSS rules for all of the page elements, it even shows the inherited CSS properties. Moreover, if you have CSS boxes that are not lining up correctly you can use the rulers, the guides and the shaded boxes of the layout tab to inspect all the margins, borders, paddings… and this is really great and time saving.

The FireBug JavaScript debugger is very powerful, yet it is very handy and easy to use. With this debugger you can pause the execution of the script at any time in order to monitor what’s going on. On the other hand the FireBug JavaScript profiler is a wonderful tool to inspect performance, tweak it and catch bottlenecks.

All in all it is a wonderful plug-in for Firefox, that helps you to improve you productivity and your work flow, it reveals detailed reports about all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and even XML errors. But the best thing is yet to come… FireBug is FREE!! Joe Hewitt, the man behind this fabulous bug, was thinking that the 1.0 release will be a commercial product, unlike the previous versions, but he finally dropped that idea and decided that the FireBug extension “will remain free and open source” and will be released under the same tri-license used by FireFox (MPL/GPL/LGPL).

Thanks Joe! If you like FireBug (I am sure you will) don’t forget to donate to the project to keep it running and alive. Go and Donate!

How The Mozilla Mascot was born?

by Khaled on December 3rd, 2006

Today, while browsing the net as usual I’ve stumbled on this article written by the famous illustrator Dave Titus. This article was written back in December 2002 and explains the history of the original mozilla mascot creation since 1994, that green fella dinosaur looks really more friendly than the red Tyrannosaur Rex mascot/icon used today by Mozilla…

Also don’t forget to take a look at the work of Dave Titus here! it is just awesome.

No relation Blog as a tag graph

by Khaled on December 2nd, 2006

Thanks to this little Java Applet , the HTML Graph Applet, devoloped by Sala you can view any website as a tag graph. For instance this is the tag graph for my blog. This a Java Applet so you need to have the Java plug-in installed, also it may take some time to load. Go ahead try it!

Netvibes!!! get on the Vibe

by Khaled on December 1st, 2006

I was first introduced to this Web 2.0 Homepage solution thanks to Mr. Khaled Koubâa ( president of the Intetnet Society OC tunisian chapter) and Mr. Mondher Laâbidi. Netvibes.com was created as a start-up company in Paris during the year 2005 by Tariq Krim et Florent Frémont. It was meant to be an Ajax-based custom made start page that is quite similiar to google’s personalised Homepage.

At first I created an account, tried it then left on the shelf. I am a user of Fizzle which is a Firefox extension that enables me to read the feeds I’ve ever needed, and I was thinking it was probably the best RSS/Atom Feed Reader around. Then I took a step back to take a deeper look on Netvibes.com, it was a free to use service, it doesn’t only read the feeds you want (like Fizzle does) but it helps you create a page that almost covers all your needs and that gathers a lot of the info you require on the same page, you can check your Gmail, yahoo, hotmail e-mail accounts, you can create web notes, to-do lists, you can use flickr, meebo or MySpace modules…all this with a very simple interface that is yet very easy to customize thanks to Ajax…You can choice your main language, create tabs with different contents, customize the look (I loved the Halloween Theme)…Of course you can access your page from any place around the world, just log in …

Now I am a faithful user of Netvibes, I just love it, I am reading like 30-50 blogs and portals posts daily and Netvibes was of a great help…. So Just try it and you will see by yourself guys …Mr. Khaled Koubâa, Mr. Mondher laâbidi… Thanks again.