Following up my last post on IE tester, I’ve been using it most of the day in my ordinary development activities, and I’ve drawn the following quick conclusions: this app is excellent for quick, visual QA of an application, but, until toolbars are supported, won’t quite cut it for development.

There are still times when you need the MS IE Developer Toolbar to muck with the DOM or modify styles, and that’s not supported here. If toolbar support makes it in, this could be a really great product, especially if modifying the contents of one window was reflected in all the others, kind of like cascading changes.

Still, this is an early-stage piece of software that already should cut down QA cycles a bit.

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.

My DebugBar | IETester / HomePage

Side-by-side IE6, 7, and 8 is fantastic. Looks like there’s a few minor bugs, but I’ll try it out, if only to get rid of the 7 versions of IE I have installed here.

Tags: ietester, cross-browser, ie

Published over on Molecular Voices and mirrored here.

If you’re like me, you remember when (Hot)Wired’s Webmonkey was the source for tutorials, articles, and ideas on building the web. Ah, the good old days of the late-ish 90s when you had to learn why your <marquee> tag wasn’t scrolling, then visited a site like Webmonkey and learned that you shouldn’t be using <marquee> in the first place. (Before web standards were even conceived, places like Webmonkey and even eVolt started the push.)

Good news then! Conde Nast/Wired.com’s brought Webmonkey back, redesigned it, and wiki-fied it.

Why should you care? Though the content skews towards the basics, it’s still a good place to get up to speed on some stuff you might not know, learn new a few new tricks, and, most importantly, share your knowledge a bit. Here’s a place to put your gigantic wealth of knowledge for the benefit of all web-development kind: you were a kid just starting out once, and you have to remember that, without resources like these, you would never be where you are today.

Plus, they still have the logo of the monkey with the wrench (one of the classic emblems of Web 0.5). Welcome back, old friend!

IE6 in SP3 has the same version of jscript (@_jscript_version) number as IE7. (5.7 in this case). If you’re using jscript to target conditional compilation, heads up.

Tags: ie6, ie7, conditional compilation

Ever since Awesomebox closed down, I’ve been looking for a YUI-based lightbox script. Looks like I found it in Shadowbox. The best part: it’s completely library agnostic: you can use adapters to run it off any of the big libraries (YUI, jQuery, ext …).

It also aces the "hot lightbox opening animation test." Nice!

And on the side, a libary-agnostic app like this? About time! When are we going to stop seeing a billion different plugins in a billion different libraries and instead see one or two really great plugins that can run anywhere? I guess the limiting factor is the amount of time plugin authors can spend here. Wouldn’t a JavaScript library common architecture be something worthwhile: write it once, follow the plugin standards, and run it anywhere? How about it, library people???

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, but was waiting on a couple post-launch releases that added some “extras” that I liked.

NikonUSA.com was re-designed and re-built by my company, Molecular. We launched in late February and this was a total overhaul: new CMS (Interwoven LiveSite/TeamSite), new design, and plenty of custom code. I built the entire front-end here, from the overall architecture to writing XSL to build HTML to build pages.

There’s lots and lots of custom stuff I wrote from “Quick View” overlays to DOM stylesheet manipulations, and plenty of YUI, awesomebox, and yCarousel to go around, too.

Cool stuff to look for:

• “Product Detail” page— This one mashes up YUI’s tab component, custom flyout code that I wrote, ycarousel, awesomebox for lightboxing images/swfs/video, and all kinds of loading magic. The D300 serves as a nice example. Take a look at that “Media Bar” right there! Plenty of jazzy stuff.
• Pages I designed: the low-bandwidth homepage and search results page.
• JavaScript-to-XML-to-Flash (built by Alisdair Mills) on the homepage.
• Product views, sample photography, and other images being cranked out by ImageMagick scripts that I wrote (ah, Perl!).
• Liberal uses of iepngfix for good old IE6.
• Plenty of tricks (view source) to add in browser-specific stylesheets and extra print media targeting.
• The CSS-only top nav. Tried and true but always nice to show as cross-browser.

I’m most proud of being able to wrangle some nice, semantic HTML in there. The “AJAX” features feel natural, too, something I always like to do in an app: the lightboxes and carousel presentation makes sense and feels right in context; it doesn’t feel “bolted on”, like these flashy bits sometimes do. I can also now give dissertations on Flash/DHTML layering, ImageMagick, and many other cool things.

I may add a few posts describing bits and pieces of functionality in the future; the front-end here was huge, and I built a lot of stuff (and trained users, and designed pages…). But, it’s still a launch!

Tags: nikon, nikonusa, design, build, launch, javascript, html, flash