Ajax Bestiary » Tools

Simplify Your Workflow with GuiMags

Don Albrecht — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:24:05 +0000

Let’s face it, prototyping and mock-ups are a pain in the rear. I’m always looking for ways to streamline the early phases of the design process. Today I found one that is simply brilliant.

Meet GUIMags: Simple, whiteboard magnets of common UI components.

Now you can do mockups on the whiteboard with high fidelity symbols that photograph well. Instead of sketching out the entire design for each iteration, you can simply rearrange elements and erase / rewrite labels as you collaboratively work through a design. When you’re done. You can simply take a picture of the whiteboard and start coding your mockup.

You can find GuiMags here:

http://www.guimags.com/index.php

Expand your debugging aresnal with pi.debugger

Don Albrecht — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:28:10 +0000

pi.debugger is a new debug console that acts as a graceful counterpart to firebug. I’ve and Firebug is an awesome tool for debugging, hands down. Unfortunately, it is Firefox specific and has to be installed on the clients machine.

Firebug lite is great, but it is extremely limited and provides little more than a logging console. pi.debugger sits somewhere in between. It’s not as full featured as firebug, but it does provide the ever useful evaluation console as well as a DOM browser.

Check it out here:

http://code.google.com/p/pi-js/

And test drive it here:

http://kodfabrik.com/app/pi.debugger/

Blueprint Layout Tool 0.4 New URL, Significant Polish

Don Albrecht — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:33:33 +0000

I’m pleased to announce a preview release of Blueprint Layout Tool 0.4. This version marks the migration of BLT to its own site at http://www.blueprintlayouttool.com and a focus on dramatic improvements to the source view. Unfortunately, the current development version only supports Firefox, IE, Opera & Safari support will be coming soon.

Key Features:

Improvements to style and polish of the interface
Dramatic improvements to source view (Powered by CodePress & PHPTidy)
- Generated Source is well formatted and polished
- Generated Source is Syntax Highlighted
- Generated Source is cleaned of most extraneous markup

Known Issues:

Source View does not work in Safari and Opera
Formatting is off in IE
Generated source contains several Mozilla specific tags that still need to be cleaned.

I would also like to take a few moments and draw your attention to Christian Montoya’s Blueprint Constructor application. He takes a different approach to the interface and design of the Layout Tool and has created something quite useful and fun to use. We will be working together to try and achieve similar conventions between our apps.

Check out Constructor at http://lab.christianmontoya.com/construct/

You can read about his design process on his blog at http://www.christianmontoya.com/2007/12/08/construct-01-alpha/

Simplify Debugging With Firebug Lite

Don Albrecht — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:37:31 +0000

Most of us are familiar with Firebug, the powerful & straightforward debugging extension for firefox. You may not be familiar with it’s little brother, Firebug lite.

Firebug lite is exactly as it sounds, a light-weight firebug console for any browser. Simply include the firebug script tag in any page and you’re console.log(); operations will work on any browser (IE, Safari, Firefox & More). What’s more, if Firebug is installed in Firefox, it logs to the full Firebug console. You can pull up the console by hitting F12 or CTRL + SHIFT + L at any time.

Don’t want to bother with hitting F12 every time you reload? Just attach a debug=”true” attribute to the html element ( ).

But wait, There’s more.

Firebug Lite has an even littler sibling called Firebugx. Replace the call to firebug.js with a call to firebugx.js and you neutralize any console calls in your code without having to hunt them down or find / replace. Something that would have saved me a whole heap of trouble with the last BLT deployment.

Download Firebug Lite at:

http://www.getfirebug.com/lite.html

Blueprint Layout Tool 0.2.1

Don Albrecht — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 05:30:49 +0000

I’ve posted a bug fix release to the Layout Tool.

Changes:

Dramatic improvements to selecting
Fixed script error for IE 7.

Known Issues:

There are still major issues with IE 7 and it doesn’t work well in IE 6 yet. If anyone has a clue why the color of the div gets progressively darker in IE 7, I’d appreciate it.

You can testdrive the new version at:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/BLT2/index.htm