Tools
Developer tools I've built
Not so long ago I developed an interest in building add-ons for Firefox. Pretty soon that interest had extended to Opera widgets, Dashboard widgets, even Adobe AIR applications.
See, there's an adage in software development, that the best ideas are the ones that solve your own problems. And that's what inspired me here — I built these tools because I needed them!
- CodeBurner
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CodeBurner is a suite of tools for web developers, that provide reference material for HTML and CSS, and are integrated with a range of popular development environments.
CodeBurner provides a range of tools for accessing the information in different ways. There's a text-based search that matches elements, attributes, properties, selectors and at-rules as you type, a DOM view for looking up elements and attributes from the source code of any page, and a CSS view for inspecting the style sheets associated with the DOM view page. CodeBurner also provides syntax-highlighted code examples for all search results.
- Dust-Me Selectors
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Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox add-on that finds unused CSS selectors.
It extracts all the selectors from all the stylesheets on the page you're viewing, then analyzes that page to see which of those selectors are not used. The data is then stored so that when testing subsequent pages, selectors can be crossed off the list as they're encountered.
There's one older tool that I'm listing here, even though I'm no longer actively involved in it's development, simply because it was such a big part of my life for so long, and remains a useful showcase of my skills in the area of accessible JavaScript development:
- Ultimate Drop Down Menu (UDM)
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Ultimate Drop Down Menu (UDM) is a sophisticated, standards-based and accessible JavaScript menu, that provides useable content to all browsers - including screenreaders, search-engines and text-only browsers.
I developed and maintained UDM as a commercial API between 2003-2007, before selling the rights to a US developer, who continues to maintain and support it.
