Showing posts with label development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label development. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Firefox DevTools: To theme or not to theme


While I don't find myself going into Firefox's 'Toolbox Options' that often.  I found a pleasant surprise yesterday when I discovered that my version of Firefox supports a Dark Theme in addition to the Light Theme.  I prefer the contrast of a dark theme and have been using most of my editors in dark themes. e.g. WebStorm, Sublime. If you haven't already, I suggest you experiment with using a dark theme. It may take a few days of getting used to the colors, but I find it is worth the effort.

Chrome users shouldn't feel left out, as you can download themes for your Developer Tool usage.  That being said, buyer beware as these themes may not work with future releases of Chrome Tools.
 

Steps to configure

  1. Launch Firefox
  2. Open the Web Console by pressing the keyboard shortcut:
    1. Control-Shift-K (Windows)
    2. Command-Option-K (Mac)
  3.  Select the Toolbox Options i.e. gear icon, should appear to the left of the Web Console.
  4. Under Choose DevTools theme, select Dark theme or switch back to Light theme to revert.
  5. Enjoy!

Dark Theme

image of Dark Firefox Theme

Light Theme

image of Firefox's Light Theme

I will share some of the not so obvious developer tools that I stumble upon.

Do you have some interesting tips for dev tool usage?  Please share in the comments section below.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Explorations in JavaScript Tooling Can Improve your Day Job


Elijah Manor @elijahmanor has a great article on his blog titled Angry Birds of JavaScript Series.  In an interesting format, he describes how a "flock of birds" fight some pigs to get their front-end JavaScript architecture back.  Elijah has in-depth coverage of the material on his blog, which I highly suggest you read.  O'Reilly recently posted a video where he recapped slides within about an hour (video embedded below).

Elijah describes many options and pros and cons of some popular tools.  I created this short list of tools for quick reference in the future.  Now to integrate these into a CI tool such as Teamcity or Jenkins. 

Quick List

  • Help write clean consistent code and detect errors or problems
  • MV* Application Structure, Templates & Patterns
  • Mocking & Testing
  • Automate all above and more
    • Grunt - task runner to run above tools in build system

Video