Here’s a list of some small developer tools that I use, I won’t go into much detail on each tool—these are just some quick pointers to things I hope you might find useful. My main development environment is Visual Studio on XP Pro with two whacking great 1600×1200 CRTs and an array of virtual machines running legacy browsers, but here I want to focus on some of the smaller bits and pieces I find useful:
ZoomIt is a small neat program that will magnify your desktop. I find it most useful when trying to get things perfectly alinged across browsers with CSS—quickly zooming in to 800% can really save a lot of squinting. It’s free.
This will spider a website and produce a report that details every url. Good for checking for broken links and missing images. It’s quick and free.
Being web developers we all have super fast adsl lines and don’t need to think about dial up users any more. Wrong! As of last February 2007 20% of UK internet connections are through dial-up modems. Service Capture allows you to simulate a 56k (or faster) connection as well as reporting details of the HTTP traffic. Indispensable for testing how sites behave on slow connections. If you use Ajax in your site you really need this to test with as the user experience can be radically different depending on the connection speed. Not free but cheap.
“A graphical tool that enables Web content providers to rapidly and accurately measure client side performance of Web pages.”
Use this to show you how you can speed up the loading of you web page. It’ll display graphs of all the HTTP requests showing how long they take and in what order they are downloading. Look! Dull HTTP requests are now pretty colours and much more interesting. The graphs allow you to see which elements are taking too long and how you can clear out those bottle necks. It’s free.
Consolas is by far the nicest typeface to write code in (as long as you have Cleartype on). Ditch Courier now and use this. Designed by Lucas de Groot. Free.
What can I say? It’s essential. It shows what the CSS is doing, which rules are being inherited from where, and what the box model of each element is doing. It lets you change the DOM in browser. It also has a JavaScript debugger. Don’t build a website without it.
It’s like using view source, but it shows where your HMTL is broken. There’s various features to clean up your HTML which can be useful when looking at legacy site’s source.
Save a few mouse clicks and use this to open your current page in Internet Explorer. I wish there was the plugin for IE that did the reverse.
Another essential. Far too many features to go into here. The features I use most often are outline elements, disabling browser cache, disabling JavaScript and viewing the generated DOM source. If you’ve not got it already, go and install it.
A plugin for an add on (firebug). Y-Slow plugs into firebug and gives some insight into the HTTP requests from your web page.
Not quite a development tool, but I when you’re working on a site that has some really irritating adverts or flash being able to easily block them can keep you sane.
Available for IE6 and 7 and provides many of the features of the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug (not quite as good, but this is IE). Inspect and change the DOM and CSS, change the browser’s settings etc. Essential for seeing how these major browsers behave. It’s free.
Hmm… I didn’t really take to this one, but others might. It’s got a lot of features and is worth checking out. It’s not free for commercial use, so it could be that I just haven’t used it enough for it to get into my workflow. It has lots of information about the HTTP requests, JavaScript debugging and DOM so have a look and see if you find it useful.
This is a funny one. A cross browser(ish) peice of Javascript that lets you select elements and see information about it. A great peice of engineering by Westciv but I find it’s overshadowed by proper browser plugins. Useful for getting a (rare) insight into Safari.
Westciv are making some interesting things and Style Master would be my favourite CSS editor if they could sort out a few glitches that make it unusable with .NET.
I think that covers most of the tools I use in my day to day development work. It’s an ever changing list as I find new toys and better ways of working.
What tools do you find useful?
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