Tools of the Trade

As a developer/designer I spend far too much time trying to reconcile the differences between the Firefox and IE rendering engines. I’ve picked up a few habits that make it less painful, but until there is a Firebug for IE, it’s still a long painful process.

I’ve been  using Aptana Studio as my PHP IDE for a long time now, and would love for it to have some live CSS editing abilities similar to Firebug (Aptana’s debug mode makes debugging Javascript in IE more pleasant too). To compensate, I have been looking at other tools (<sarcasm>yay, another application to use while developing a site</sarcasm>) that will provide the functionality I require. The only one I have found so far is Stylizer, now its not perfect and the license price is a bit high, but at least it does what I need it to. What I would really love is an extension for Eclipse/Aptana like Stylizer that allows me to have a page preview pane beside a CSS edit pane, a switcher for the render engine of the preview pane, with live update of the preview as the CSS file is updated.

The other tool I use on a daily basis as a developer is SQLYog. Couldn’t work with MySQL without this tool.

What applications do you use for development/design?

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Published:
30 Dec 2008 at 14:54
Category:
Code, Geek, Software
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