What are you waiting for? Get Firebug now.

One year and twelve days later I am happy to announce that the leopard’s growl has been quieted to a purr, clearing the path for the final Firebug 1.0 to make its way in the world.

If you read this blog, that won’t mean much to you personally since you’re probably already using 1.0 beta. However, there are still tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people who are still using 0.4.1 and are going to get a very nice present the next time they restart Firefox.

Thanks to all the people who have supported Firebug during its infancy, especially those who have contributed new ideas and donations to the project. We’re just getting started here! If nothing else, I hope Firebug inspires the makers of other browsers to invest more time in development tools. The web development paradigm wants to evolve, but we can’t build the future with yesterday’s hammer.

via ajaxian:

…What are you waiting for?? Go watch this short screencast (direct link to the mov file) of the 1.0 beta to see some of the power, and then get it.

One of my coworkers today had firebug installed but didn’t seem to be really using it to its full potential. I think Dion almost fired him on the spot. Its so far ahead of any other web dev tool that its not even funny.

Google has released its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the Mac. Version 1.2 now works on OS X as well as Linux and Windows.

I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t really attest to its capabilities. Basically, though, it allows you to write and debug AJAX web apps in Java and compile them to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

As they phrase it on their site, GWT “makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.”

There’s also a Google Web Toolkit blog where you can follow the Toolkit’s development progress.

PS> This is my first post to Clientside since it went public to the world, so I thought that I should, like Aaron, also throw out a “hello world.”

I’m Mark Bult, an Art Director at CNET Networks, currently working on redesigns of Webshots.com, UrbanBaby.com, and Consumating.com, three of CNET’s community and lifestyle properties.

I also blog about Mac and graphic design stuff (and personal stuff, so you’ve been warned that a lot of it’s boring) at enews.org.

via Ajaxian. I know that Valerio over at Mootools has a similar application that he has working in Mootools but hasn’t released yet.

Lars Huring and team have created SWFUpload, a small JavaScript/Flash library that tries to re-make the way file uploads works on the internet.

It works by replacing the contents of a div with a small transparent flash that handles all the upload-frontend, javascript for configuration and callbacks and html/css for styling/looks.

This allows:

* Specify what filetypes are to be displayed in the upload dialog
* Upload multiple files using normal ctrl/shift-click to select multiple files
* Get file size and other info before upload starts and report that information back to the page.
* Style upload buttons any way we want using html/css and more…

It will degrade to a normal html upload input-field if flash/javascript isn’t present.

mmSWFUpload.init({
                upload_backend : "../../upload.php",
                button_image : "images/custom_button.png",
                button_mouseover_image : "images/custom_button_over.png",
                width : "258px",
                height : "82px",
                target : "SWFUpload",
                allowed_filetypes : "*.gif;*.jpg;*.png",
                upload_start_callback : 'uploadStart',
                upload_progress_callback : 'uploadProgress',
                upload_complete_callback : 'uploadComplete',
                upload_error_callback : 'uploadError',
                upload_cancel_callback : 'uploadCancel'
        });

Want several copies of IE running side by side? Want to test out IE 7 but don’t really want to zorch your IE 6 that you also need to test? No problem.