This is really cool; I have wanted something like this for HTML/CSS/JS for a while, but doing it with full code evaluation is awesome, too. And Light Table is on Kickstarter (cause your no one if you're not right now).
I was trying to diagnose a problem with an application today that only seems to be present in Safari. This lead me to think of Safari's Developer Tools, which I remembered were pretty comparable to Firebug for FireFox. My biggest problem was figuring out how to TURN THEM ON.
The Beta of Internet Explorer 9 was released today. I'm usually not excited by IE, but man, anything that stands a chance of knocking IE6 further down the road is a good thing in my book.
Ars Technica has a great article covering IE9, so I wont go into specifics, but I will say that while Microsoft's done some typically stupid things (the UI... yuck), it is a very compliant browser, and hopefully will let us really move forward with HTML5 and some advanced styling. Look for some post from me about what kind of CSS tricks we can hopefully treat as standard now that IE is "back in the game".
If you've used Sparx System's EA, you might know that its a quirky little program at times. I've come to love the power it gives me to document designs and interactions, even if I've had to give myself a crash course on UML just to get my head around it.
One thing I hate though is that sometimes things just don't work and its not obvious why its not working. When trying to create a Data Modeling Diagram to display the database objects involved in a proposed update, I found that the Data Types selection for my columns was empty: all the entries were missing. I was getting really frustrated until I checked on the table entity itself and found that Database for this table was not set. Once I changed to SQL Server 2000, my Data Type drop downs populated with the correct values.
In short, if you're using EA for a database diagram and your data type selections are blank, you need to check the database setting on the table itself.
Ok, so one more reason to hate IE: Internet Explorer fails to hold cookies when viewing URLs that have a sub-domain with an underscore. I found this when the project I'm developing just refused to hold on to a session when viewing the site from Internet Explorer. Almost all of the server-side technology I was using was new to me, so I lost a full day trying to figure out if it was ColdFusion 9, IIS7, or the ColdFusion on Wheels framework that was breaking the sessions before I found out that the IE browsers choke on underscores. FireFox and Chrome didn't care about the underscore, but IE6 through IE8 lost their session because they couldn't hold onto the cookies for the site.
So, if you're loosing your sessions in Internet Explorer, check your URL. I'm not sure if there are other characters besides an underscore that would cause the cookie loss, but it wouldn't surprise me.
In response to a blog post by Ray Camden about jQuery and duplicating form fields, I put together an example of using the Template class in Prototype. As an added bonus, I designed this example to also handle form resets and to feature a controller based design. You can click here to view a demo of the example in action. Read more to get the break down of the code.
I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.
Light Table - a new IDE