Fireday - Firefox Extensions for November 17, 2006

Friday, November 17, 2006 6:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 0 | View blog reactions

This Week: Firebug, bioFOX, and MediaPlayerConnectivity

Hey, Firefoxers! Sorry about last week. I was suffering from some technical issues and I wasn't feeling very well. Now, everything is rocking right along and we are on the lookout for some new extensions.

Here we go...

Firebug 0.4.1

Rating: 5/5

Loooong ago, I talked about a new Firefox extension called Firebug, but looking through my Fireday archives, I realized that I've never reviewed this extension fully, so why now? Because this week, I'm talking about 0.4.1 and next week, I'll be focusing on Firebug 1.0 beta.

If you've never heard of AJAX by now and you're a web developer, you might as well sit this one out then. The Firebug Firefox extension is not just for AJAX. The features included in this amazing extension are vast and very handy to have around when debugging web pages, especially with AJAX.

Once I installed the Firebug Firefox extension, it was located in two locations: in the View pulldown menu and the Tools pulldown. Enable the Firebug option or press the F12 key to activate the mini-IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and it appears below your main browsing screen. This is your workarea.

The three tabs in the middle represent the entire make-up of the IDE, but they contain a lot of functionality.

The Console tab provides feedback on what is happening on the current page and where the problems exists complete with a line number. Firebug provides a list of options to log which include Show JavaScript Errors and/or Warnings, CSS and XML errors, display any errors in the Firefox chrome, display console errors, show stack trace errors, and, my favorite, show XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX) errors. Pretty thorough. You also have the option to clear the log entirely.

If you need to dig into the JavaScript side of things, click on the Debugger tab to start viewing the source code. You can add breakpoints and trace through the JavaScript without loading up an additional scripting debugger. Once you switched over to the Debugger tab, your options change as well. An "Enable Debugger" and "Break on Errors" check menu items are displayed instead of the lengthy console's of show errors. Since you are currently viewing Firebug, the Enable Debugger option is selected.

I know we haven't really talked about the Inspect button yet, but press it now. This automatically throws you into the Inspector tab. The Inspector tab displays an entire breakdown of the current web page's DOM and as you hover over each element on the page, the Inspector will automatically move to the code and highlight it. Very helpful when you're having problems displaying CSS issues with JavaScript (trust me, I know) ;-)

The Firebug Firefox extension is great for web developers and I've marked it as one of Firefox's top Super Extension because of its ability to turn a common web browser into a mini-IDE for developers. Excellent extension and great job Mr. Hewitt!


bioFOX

Rating: 4/5

If I saw this extension earlier in my career, I would've shunned this away in a heartbeat. However, since I worked for a bioinformatics startup company, bioFOX was definitely intriguing to me.

After installing the extension (which was easy), I activated the sidebar and started looking at how to use the extension. Granted, the extension is a little intimidating, but I was determined to see what it was all about.

The whole premise of the bioFOX extension is to take highlight Genomic Sequences in the browser or the workarea provided to us through the bioFOX extension and then click on where you wanted to send them.

For example, if you wanted to see the reverse of a particular sequence, you would do one of two things: Click on workspace at the top of the bioFOX sidebar, type in your data, and click submit. Highlight the sequence in the browser window and click on the Reverse item under Nucleotide and it'll reverse your sequence that you highlighted; and the second way is just to highlight a sequence in the browser and click where you want to send the sequence to.

These are very simple tools for a biochemist, but a bioinformatics company could take their own processes and adopt them into their own custom extension. This would allow specialized Firefox extensions for employees or better yet, potential customers or clients.

Since this extension is very specific and geared towards bioinformatics, most people will veer away from this type of extension, but from what I've seen, I think it has potential for people to experiment with it just to get a feel for bioinformatics.

 

MediaPlayerConnectivity

Rating: 4/5

There are a lot of streaming file types out there: ram, rpm, wmv, wm, wma, asx, asf and many more. The MediaPlayerConnectivity Firefox extension seems to stream everything and redirects it to the proper application, whether it be RealPlayer, QuickTime or Windows Media. The MediaPlayerConnectivity provides enhanced streaming detection integrated into the browser when dealing with streaming media. The extension even supports MP3 Playlists.

Installation was simple and provided no lock ups at all and integrates nicely into the browser. The MediaPlayerConnectivity is installed into the Tools pulldown menu and in the View/Sidebar menu.

When media is detected in the page, select the sidebar option and the MediaPlayerConnectivity extension will display the entire list of media files on the page, allowing you the option to run them immediately.

There are two cool things about the MediaPlayerConnectivity extension. One is that there are the multiple languages this extension provides. I've never seen such a long list of countries that an extension supports. Secondly, there is also a configuration wizard that will lead you step-by-step to connect the stream type to the proper application.

In my opinion, I've never run into a problem with streaming files in Firefox. The innate abilities of Firefox can handle streaming adequately, but if you need a little more of an assist, I would recommend MediaPlayerConnectivity.

 

Have a great weekend everyone! If you have any comments, please post them below or Contact me directly.

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