On a side note, I’ve been swarmed with work and not able to do any decent posts in the last days. I’ve been enjoying working at the Cowork Lisboa space very much. Lot’s of energy, great people and good environment. Best decision made in the start of this year.

I mean, I understand the need for it but maybe it’s time to make the process more easy and fun.

My suggestion:

PS: I know there’s laws involved for this. Handle with humour.

Good work guys!

On another note, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.7, the layout is cleaner, it’s faster and I’m loving it, a great release.

The aim of UX London is to galvanise the UX community in Europe and with big name speakers like Don Norman, Jared Spool, Jeff Veen, Dan Saffer, Peter Merholtz on board it’s shaping up to be a fantastic event.

UX London combines a day of inspirational conference with four half days of practical, in-depth, hands-on workshops and the registrations are already open with the Early Bird price going for £895.

The event will take place on the 15th – 17th June 2009 , Cumberland Hotel, London. Don’t miss.

So without further delays, let me present you with 10 things you didn’t know about Firebug (and friends).

1) With the inspect tool you can select any element on the screen, view it’s properties and even modify them. You can change DOM properties, like adding or retrieving values to textboxes, disabling buttons or looking out for special properties.

2) You can finally visualize the box model of a div or other element that your design teachers were always telling you about it and understand why you have a extra border that shouldn’t be there or an unusual padding.

3) You can view CSS properties, including inherited values, which is great for troubleshooting but that’s not the best part. Now you can actually change these values without refreshing the page and thus saving valuable time.

4) The Console is really neat because you can input javascript commands and interpret them with your page contents, so it’s pretty useful for debugging, testing, troubleshooting problems or just experimenting because you get results on the fly as well.

5) You can also use the help of the Console for warning you about javascript or CSS errors.

6) If you worry about performance you can install the YSlow plugin, it will complement Firebug and add a few extra tabs.

Now you can find out how long a page takes to load or which component is the heaviest.

7) Yslow also has a nifty profiler which helps you by analysing your page and giving your advices based on a set of good practices from Yahoo on how to improve your page performance.

Another companion plugin is FireCookie which let’s you inspect and manage cookies on your browser.

And that’s it, so it’s not 10 things, sorry about that.

But I bet you must be pretty excited to try Firebug and speed up your development process.

For me it became a primary tool for web development and I believe it’s very useful for designers and coders. There’s a bunch of other tools I usually use which I think are a good complement as well:

- MeasureIt (it’s a ruler, it also gives you pixel height and width, neat!)

- ColorZilla (colorpicker, page zoomer and Lot’s of other goodies)

- Aardvark (some repeated features with Firebug but lighter and faster)

- Web Developer Toolbar (a classic, Lot’s of features but most useful include resizing browser, removing images, javascript, validating accessibility, etc)