I was looking for a plugin for eclipse to replace a feature that "went away" when I upgraded Aptana//Eclipse to the latest version and I noticed an "Install button". I moused over it and got the pop up dialog below.

And you know what? I dragged the link into Eclipse and it worked like a charm. It brought up the plugin installation dialog and checked for any missing dependencies and installed the plugin. Easy peasy.

I mean how cool is that? Compare that with Microsoft's web platform installer that installed SIXTY FIVE separate programs just so I could make web apps with their stack. Java/Eclipse is bloated as hell but that is nothing compared to MS.

FOSS FTW!!!

As a follow up on my last post I ran into kick ass admin template for Twitter Bootstrap. I played with this last night and I was blown away. This just completed my admin tool kit. 

http://usman.it/free-responsive-admin-template/

It has just about every UI/Admin widget and tool you will ever need. It is worth looking at just for the icons. All you need to do to instert an icon is <i class="icon-search"></i>. I mean how cool is THAT?

It uses http://glyphicons.com/ which are sweet.

I have a very finicky and non trivial CSS based layout that I have finally worked all the kinks out of. Actually it is only finicky in IE. Now the powers that be want to add drop down menus (tabs) the top nav bar that use the sliding door rounded corner technique.

I have tried a bunch of menuing systems: Dynamic Drive menus, Spry, some jQuery plugins, Massimo's hiermenu and a bunch of stuff I found off of the Google and all of them have problems of one sort or another. I can't position it correctly, it trows off other page elementsm the drop down columns are mis-aligned etc... forever and ever, world with out end. Amen.

I posted this to CF_talk a few months back (the site got shelved since then and it is back in production) and though I would hit up the blogosphere.. Has anybody out there had any luck with this and can recommend a tabbed menu dropdown solution?

The primary requirement are:

• It can have sub menus
• W3C XHTML compliant.
• Allows for text based links

These are the Menus that I have tried so far:

• Spry Menu bar
• Massimo's hiermenu Hiermenu 1.1
• CSS menus
• tigra menus
• AnyLink CSS Menu (Dynamic Drive DHTML)

Pleas leave a comment below. Many TIA!!!

I used to look at FOSS as a means to get free software: MySQL, Apache, Eclipse etc... FOSS is part of my day to day affairs and I dare say the best thing to ever happen to software and software developers.

But for me, FOSS is the best programming howto guide there is. It is like a living text book that is always getting better. I have learned more from reading other peoples source code than I have from any book, blog post or article. Being an autodidact, reading source code makes much sense than reading the English words used to describe the programming concepts.

Just this week I was asked to R&D a bunch of stuff and I found solutions for all the CF stuff by going to either CFLib.org or RIAForge.org. (Mad props to Ray Camden for making those sites. You saved my ass twice this week dude! Rock On with your bad ass self!)

Those sites are gold mines for CF programming knowledge. I have been turned on to so many new ideas and concepts by the folks that have shared their work that I want to give a shout out and thank you to y'all.

Thank you!!

When I work on a site with CSS that I am not familiar with I find this little widget to be very handy. I simply took Shlomy Gantz's viewCSS() function from CFLib.org and pointed it to my CSS files and voila I have a visual representation of all the CSS styles for the included style sheets. It is far from perfect and works best with text related CSS but the only real problem so far is that it tends to barf on /* CSS comments*/. But that is a pretty minor issue. Here is a zip file with the code.

Here are the Styles for this site

The code is ridiculously simple

This is a handy tool for figuring out what font is used in a graphic. All you do is upload an image that contains the font and it asks you to identify some highlighted letters and it will give the closest matches.

http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

It doesn't provide the font for download but if you Google the font name there is a good chance you can find a free version (or a free knock off version).

Download Google Chrome Portable

Google Chrome has some AWESOME debugging features including my favorite, Right Click >> Inspect Element. I would seriously recommend taking a look at Chrome for CSS debugging.

I looked at the user agent and it is nearly identical as Safari. It had almost the same build so (I would assume) they are essentially the same browser.

HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.42 Safari/525.19

I am a huge fan of portable apps. I like being able to drop an app in a folder and not have to install it. You just put them on a portable or thumb drive and you are good to go. Actually I have a version of almost my *entire* dev environment (sans MSSQL, that is next) on a thumb drive. I can literally set up shop anywhere (on a Win box).

Any who, I needed to test a design against the WebKit browser, the engine behind Chrome, Safari and (I think) it is used by DW for it's Live View feature. So here are links to versions for both Mac and Windows:

"http://www.thindownload.com/app-download/47/Safari-Browser (Win)

http://osxportableapps.sourceforge.net/p_safari/ (Mac)

One of the biggest pains in the arse when dealing with some FOSS apps (LAMP especially) is dependency hell. If the app you need is not part of the package manager you can get into a day(s) long hunt for dependencies.

The same is true for Eclipse (to a lesser degree). Or rather it was.

Someone on CF_talk was having problems with installing CFEclipse on the latest version of Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede). In the past a few people recommended Pulse (myself included) to deal with Eclipse's dependencies. Pulse is a great app that resolves dependencies (most of the time) when building Eclipse Distros. Pulse is an excellent product but has a bad habit of downloading a gig or more of files (in my case) to its plugin cache (depending on your builds).

Another option, and in my opinion a better option, is yoxos.com's On Demand website. http://yoxos.com/ondemand/

Yoxos.com's On Demand website is an online tool for building custom Eclipse distros/installs. This site is one of the most amazing web based apps I have seen to in my life. The front end is damn near that of a desk top app, and the back end is even more impressive. It allows you to pick and choose from hundreds of plugins and automatically resolves dependencies so you can create custom Eclipse installs that you can save, merge and share.

I started messing around with the various plugins and found some of the most amazing tools like editors for PHP, SQL, CSS, (X)HTML, JavaScript and XML with support for Adobe AIR apps, all the major JS/AJAX libraries with code assist and inline help; wussywig HTML editors, JavaScript debuggers, XML schema editors, JavaScript/CSS/html function/property browsers, Database development tools and editors, snippets etc. etc. Not to mention Eclipse is the defacto standard for Java development and supports most of it's tool kits as well as having plugins for just about every language under the sun.

And keep in mind that a lot of the above editors are not just text editors with color coding and rudimentary code complete but first class, full featured tools/IDE's like the ones that we used to (and still do) pay hundreds of dollars for.

Oh yeah. It is all FREE!!! FOSS, me love you long time!!