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Aug 13

Hacking Safari’s Inspector

By Mike Wilcox on August 13, 2009 12:05 am

Recently the long-anticipated Safari 4.0 was released. The earlier WebKit was already fast, but this version performs just insanely well. Reloading a page on your local host takes milliseconds as I showed in my last post. Even more importantly, Safari 4.0 comes with a new inspector which includes all the functionality of Firebug, although it’s still not quite as good as Firebug. It doesn’t have the error handling ability, especially for the in-memory Dojo JavaScript files that are initiated with XHR eval. I still use Firefox primarily for development, but I find myself using Safari more and more often, as I just can’t resist the almost instantaneous refreshing of the page.

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Jan 27

Debugging Adobe AIR Applications Using The Dojo Toolkit

By Mike Wilcox on January 27, 2009 12:01 am

In a previous post I provided the steps to get you up and running with Adobe AIR. I’ll continue with the debugging features available in AIR and the Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR (dAIR). The Adobe AIR Introspector is a Firebug-like console that logs messages and has code inspectors. Its logging capability is good, but it’s made even better with code in the dair namespace.

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Jun 2

Firebug Lite and Dojo: Not Just for IE

By Mike Wilcox on June 2, 2008 12:05 am

Recently improvements have landed in Dojo Toolkit version of Firebug Lite. These improvements have taken it beyond the desperate need for logging in Internet Explorer to a very viable alternative. In fact, the reasoning behind some of the improvements I have implemented is to develop on Safari, which is so fast you sometimes forget you’re coding an application for a browser.

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May 14

The Devil’s in the Details: Fixing Dojo’s Toolbar Buttons

By Sam Foster on May 14, 2008 12:15 am

The 1.2 release of the Dojo Toolkit is focused on the overall Look and Feel. Patches have been landing thick and fast to tighten up the visual polish. Most you might be hard-pressed to notice at first glance, but the devil is always in the details, and for a toolkit with the promise and scope of Dojo we have to sweat the small stuff.

Take Dijit’s toolbar buttons. In the editor, you have a row of graphical buttons for bold, italic, etc. For some time the rendering in Firefox has been inconsistent with the other browsers – there’s some extra space around the buttons. The result is that the toolbar is a little wider, and it’s just not tight.

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Apr 3

Advanced JavaScript Debugging Techniques

By Mike Wilcox on April 3, 2008 1:53 pm

The purpose of this article is to provide a list of advanced debugging techniques that are not easily found elsewhere on the web. Using Google to search for JavaScript debugging just gives you hundreds of articles about using alerts and how Firebug works. We all worship at the altar of Firebug, but there are things that can go beyond a console.log(). The following is a list of methods that every developer should have in their toolbox.

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Mar 18

JavaScript Metaclass Programming

By Neil Roberts on March 18, 2008 7:49 am

I was first exposed to metaclass programming through JavaScript, though I didn’t realize it. When I started digging into the guts of Django’s ORM system, I learned how metaclass programming in Python worked and discovered I’d been doing something similar in JavaScript for a while.

So what is it? Some great articles on metaclass programming turn up in Google and are worth a read. But for those of you that would rather just get down to business, I’ll try to summarize the idea really quickly, focusing on what we’re going to be able to do with Javascript.

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Mar 13

Analyze your code, errors, interface, and marketing effectiveness with dojox.analytics

By Dustin Machi on March 13, 2008 4:14 pm

It’s not very often that I get to work on some software that has the potential to appeal to developers, testers, designers, and the marketing team all at once. And of course when I do get to work on something like that, it usually means there is a significant amount of pressure to get it done and done quickly. My work on dojox.analytics has been one of those rare instances when I’ve been able to work in peace on writing simple and useful code that can entertain a wide variety of use cases.

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