The Lair

Desktop TD 1.5 was released a couple of days ago. I’ve been obsessed with that game for a while now - it’s taken the place of Tetris and a few other games that I play to switch jobs for short sharp spurts. A bit of background, the creator recently left his real job to focus on online games. As such, I realized that some degree of commercialization was inevitable - but I was optimistic about the gameplay being mostly unaffected.

I think I was wrong. There has been a mini-furore about the over-commercialization of the game. Personally, I don’t care about the tiny Ks floating around the screen or the rather ostentatious kongregate pass on the desktop background. What annoys me the most is that offline play (that is, downloading the swf and playing offline) has now been disabled. I’m going back to 1.2b.

In other news, I’ve written recently about downloading Safari - the browser formerly available only on Apple’s own Mac OSX. I have to say that my experience so far has been surprisingly positive. It’s quick to load and minimalistic; two useful traits for an application which would spend a lot of time on my desktop. Unfortunately, Safari 3.0.2 beta horribly mangles proxy support (again!). So I looked around a little bit and found this nifty Webkit Nightly Download site. Another great reason to run a nightly build instead of the beta - a new web inspector which looks very tasty indeed.

And completely randomly; it was Paul Gallico who spake thusly - “No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute. (NY Times 14 Jan 1962)”. So why is the British government now deciding on the opposite? Quite apropos, last night’s Balderdash and Piffle featured the earliest sightings of some interesting putdowns and insults (plonker, wassock and tosser among them). This reminds me a bit of the fuss over the Seven Sins of England last month.

Yes, I recently hopped on yet another bandwagon as some of you may well know. I decided to check out what the huge fuss was all about - I started poking around the Facebook API and wrote an application.

Is it a big deal? I rather think it is . There are reports of teething troubles aplenty and I discovered some limitations in the documentation - but overall, I really like the concept of being able to wrestle with the innards of a social networking application. It was fairly frustrating to figure things out, but ultimately it is an interesting experience. I’m still coming to grips with the possibilities.

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A bit of a nothing post, really - but I thought it would be moderately useful to document the development tools for the three four major browsers that are available in the Windows world.

Firefox - use Firebug. Nuff said. Honestly, this is pretty much all you need. It allows pretty much everything that you’d need for JavaScript, CSS and general mucking around with pages. Perhaps Web Developer comes close; but nothing else does. There are lots more development extensions related extensions for Firefox; Google should reveal the more obvious candidates.

Internet Explorer - use the Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer. It’s by Microsoft, it’s free. Not great, but it does the job. Non-free but closer to Firebug in functionality, IE Inspector offers a couple of tools which function as Internet Explorer addons. The debugger is sort of weird, but it works. IE is still inscrutable to me though. No browser gives me as many headaches with layouts.

Opera - there are plenty of tools for developers in the Tools Section - I actually like the DOM tool implemented by Opera more than I do the equivalents in other browsers. That’s purely a matter of personal taste, though.

Safari - just enable the debug menu. It is disabled and hidden by default, but enabling is just a matter of setting the right preference. On the Mac, however - you’d need to use the defaults utility - on Windows, you’d need to edit the Preferences.plist file as explained here. The debug menu on Windows contains a user agent switcher, a JavaScript console and couple of other features (Snippets? Site Specific Hacks?) that I haven’t quite worked out yet. The JS console is pretty much essential of course - the Webkit JavaScript implementation is somewhat strange (and has never worked for me, despite targetting KHTML/Konqui).

I still think Firefox edges it for sheer breadth of development tools available, but the more you know eh?