So my recent switch to mac has left me happy with a number of new applications…be they applications that replaced old “wanna-be” text editors (i can’t live without textmate) or a launcher extraordinare that brings my productivity levels to a new high that i never imagined possible. On the other hand, things like microsoft office for mac leaves me mostly annoyed, but luckily my need for applications within it are minimal. One thing that stayed pretty much identical across the platforms was firefox. My extentions carried over, and development procedures were pretty much the same…. safari sat in my dock for browser testing, but thats about it…all of my development powertools were firefox only. Until today.
First came the new javascript debugger. Drosera looks a whole lot like firebug to me, and is built into the nightly build of webkit. What does that mean? It not only works for Safari, but ALL webkit based applications like Xylescope…which has already proven useful for CSS inheritance debugging. Thats a pretty powerful tool right there. Could things get any better? I thought no…but then, i found Safari WebDevAddtions v1.0b19.
What is this, you ask? Well…take all of the most useful tools of the web dev toolbar for firefox…and bring em over to safari.
Check this out:
This first shot looks like i should be able to edit things inline on the page. I’m not sure if this is a PPC only thing, because this feature crashes my browser. No big deal, because while thats cool i dont see it being very useful.
This shot lets you pull up some cool stuff, most notably, the headers. This can be useful when strange bugs are occuring on a page due to data being served incorrectly.
This lets you turn off pretty much anything by element…with a few items that are selectable.
And my personal favorite, outline. I can’t live without this feature in firefox for XHTML/CSS debugging…and now that it’s in safari…well, i dont think safari will become my default browser but wow, it REALLY earned it’s spot in the dock today.
