Like WordPress, Firefox became the powerhouse in market share it is at this point because of the plugins extensions (and getting an early jump on the tabbed browsing trend didn’t hurt).

I’m currently writing this post from ScribeFire, a badass little plugin extension that allows me to post directly from the browser in a rich text editor without worrying whether I’m online or not. I use several other plugins extensions every day. Most notably of these, as a developer, is of course Firebug. While the source of some of the aforementioned memory leaks and random crashes/misbehavior, it’s well worth the cost for the benefits of a true debugging environment for my JavaScript, an unmatched HTML inspector and the best analysis-and-live-tweaking CSS toolset on the planet. Nothing else matches it, on any platform. Webkit has Web Inspector and Drosera, which are fine, I guess. IE has various JS consoles (including Firebug Lite and several bookmarklets you need not include in your pages), DebugBar and maybe one or two other commercial tools, but nothing with the integrated firepower of Firebug. I also rely heavily on Web Developer toolbar for quickly enabling/disabling JS/CSS and launching validation checks when I’m bug hunting.

More bitching and moaning after the jump!

There are a number of other plugs extensions I use (Google Browser Sync, Server Switcher, YSlow, Colorzilla, MeasureIt get the majority of use, though I play with OneClick for WordPress now and then) which at this point do not yet work in Firefox 3, which is currently at Beta 5. Web Dev Toolbar, ScribeFire, Firebug all do. Or do they…?

Firebug has recently seen some leaps forward in version numbers after a long period of inactivity (save for a scarily bad-looking little site for FireClipse). With several versions now vying for my attention, which am I to choose? Currently, I’m running Firebug 1.1.0b11, but I’ve tried 1.2 alpha. Not going there again till it’s in beta. Complete fail. Won’t need to play with ChromeBug unless I ever get round to developing some extensions myself, which I don’t see happening any time soon.

What drove me to write this post, however, wasn’t the terrible experience with Firebug 1.2a. No, it was my burgeoning crush on Firefox 3b that triggered this rant. That’s what bit me tonight.

Firefox 3 runs immensely faster than FF2. Startup time, page load time, JS execution time, all seem much faster. I credit much of this to Mozilla handing off much of the work of the browser to native API for drawing form controls and for similar tasks. FF3 will fill the whole screen of my MacBook when I click the little green button, something FF2 never did, the bastard. FF3 respects my wishes when I ask it to go away, instead of struggling to stay afloat like a drowning cat who just won’t stop mewling no matter how many times I dunk the bag in the frigid water of Quit. Pretty soon I’m just going to have to let the cat out of the bag entirely (except for testing backwards compatibility) and start playing with a new pet.

Anyhow, with all of the good things to say about FF3b, there are a few bad ones. First being that I’m lonely for plugins extensions. I’ve read about an about:config hack for running FF2 plugs extensions untested on FF3 and may try that, we’ll see. Next up, they keep breaking things. I tried upgrading to FF3b5 which came out… I dunno yesterday maybe? and suddenly Firebug ceased doing a damn thing. Retro’d my ass back to beta 4 real quick, tell you what. Tonight I tried connecting my MacBook to my secondary monitor and Firefox 3 just wouldn’t let me drag it to the other screen. What gives?! The mouse cursor simply slid off the top of the app no matter how hard I leaned into the mouse button. FF2 worked just fine.

Enough getting worked up over bull shiz. Time for me to sleep.

Cake’s bake utility is vaguely useful if only for the fact that I don’t have to memorize 3 lines of code. I’m much more interested in learning how to use the Cake console, as that’s one of my most-frequently accessed parts of Rails. Any time I need to learn something, I dig through mysql to find out field names, and dig through console to quickly see exactly what format data will return in, etc.

I’m glad Cake uses associative arrays rather than simple argument lists, that’s for sure. However, the 1.2 validation, though more complete than pre-1.2 validation, seems to be one of the more unnecessarily complex pieces of Cake functionality. It can be treated more simply, though, which is great.

Next up on the Cake learning plate: caching, testing, and ACL.

The first makes sense as I’ll be serving up images from there for some time at this point. The second is a temporary concession; I need to make a local copy of the link image eventually and stop retrieving images from there, and the third is more interesting.

Another topic discussed in High Performance Web Sites is the maximum # of parallel downloads per domain. By the HTTP 1.1 standard this is 2. Browsers can choose to ignore this but by default they obey like Andre. However, a way around the 2 simultaneous download limit (without resorting to a true CDN) is accomplished through mirroring. The browser believes the source files (in this case a few scripts and a .swf) to have come from another site, though the files are located in the same structure. Brilliant, and as cheap a solution as any that can potentially double my # of downloaded components at a time.

Grade attained, I can finally sleep. Well. Soon.

And it does. I’ve barely read a lick of manual (really just a couple of the included interactive tutorials which are tres cool in their own right) and am already kicking out loops that are easily on par with my Cubase/Bhajis business.

Soon as I get the hang of arrangement vs. scenes and get used to all the new keyboard shortcuts, I think I’m gonna be in heaven. It already starts/runs/quits so much more gracefully/quickly than Cubase did. And while it seems a little lacking in audio/MIDI editing compared to the latter, I don’t necessarily need complexity, not yet. Maybe when it comes time to record vocals if it’s no fun I’ll have to use Audacity or something. Boo hoo.

Anyhow, I’m considering trading in my MPC1000 (with JJOS!) for an MPC500, simply for the size/battery poweredness…

I know the 1k is worth about twice as much (more, considering the JJOS and internal HDD) but I honestly need to get real and make some music instead of just being a power user all the time and bullshitting like I ever even work on stuff anymore. So a 500 would give me the MPC style sequencing I’m used to, allow me to step away from the computer for a minute, work on things in places I might not feel comfortable opening a 17″ laptop, and allow me to control a single piece of MIDI gear vs the whole shebang. In all honesty I very rarely connect more than one external unit anyhow. And I also more often than not simply record individual stereo sets (drums, bass, percussion, melody) vs individual outs. (kick, snare, etc) If I need to tweak further I tend to mashup and slice and dice in Cubase (now Live) which I find faster than reworking in the MPC itself.

Anyone have any experience with an MPC500 (who isn’t terribly biased) who’d like to share? What’s battery life like? How well’s it sample from vinyl/mic/line out on battery power vs wall current? How useful is the Q-link on it? I’m assuming chop shop is gone… I should really read the Akai page, huh.

So let’s hope I stick to making music this time!

In the new release they’ve got IE debugging, (sweet!!) SFTP/FTPS, a dedicated JSON editor, (though I’m not sure how this differs so much from the reg-ass JavaScript editor) Project Reporting tools that I assume sift through all the goodies in your project to generate regular reports for management-types. And then priority support on forums. I suppose this last is mostly what you’re paying for, along side the impressive IE debugging.

I hope the Aptana folks make a huge splash. To me, they’ve got the most impressive, well-polished Eclipse distro ever, and I’ve really gotten some mileage out of it, both on the job and off. It’s a great set of features and some great people driving them, and I’d hate to see their product die off.

Is it worth the money for the Pro version? I don’t know. It’s still a moving target. It’s definitely got some bang to it, and is certainly more intuitive/more stable/more easily customizable/prettier than Dreamweaver on my last usage of that product. DW goes for a little over $400, Aptana will be $200 once the $100 discount daze ends. I’ve got a year’s Pro license for free because I was a beta tester. If I get addicted enough to the new features… I think I’d lay down the money. I paid almost a quarter of that for TextMate. I’ve certainly paid more for other software – Cubase, some day I’d like to pick up Ableton Live… Let’s not even talk about video games. (I just got Guitar Hero 3 on Wii, online play is sweeeeet!)

Regardless of what the future holds for them, the Aptana crew has made a major impact on me, personally. They’re a great example of an open source project done right. They’re responsive, they’ve scaled staff well to accommodate the rise in number of users, and have taken on new products/features as well. (RadRails/RDT, PHP, IE debugging, Visual ScriptDoc) It’s also, as I’ve said before on their forums, the first example of a Java product I’ve felt compelled to install on every machine I use. Normally Java to this day seems slow and unworkable to me, but Aptana feels almost native-fast to me.

Good luck, Aptana.