Head into Preferences > Advanced and choose Show Develop menu in menu bar to get this new Develop menu.

It includes:

• Open Page With (Internet Explorer, Firefox 2/3, Camino, MobileSafari etc.)
• User Agent switching
• Show Web Inspector (inspect element)
• Show Error Console (including HTML errors)
• Show Network Timeline (like Firebug’s network view)
• Show Snippet Editor
• Disable Caches/Images/Styles
• Disable JavaScript/Runaway JavaScript Timer/Site-specific hacks

Here’s the Network Timeline in action on OS X:

There are some odd drawing issues within the snippet editor and inspecting from the inspector on Windows but with this, Firebug and Internet Explorer 8′s Developer Tools we’re spoilt for choice!

[)amien
_{And no, it doesn’t pass the rather abstract Acid3 test}

The 2.1GB download contains the full XCode 3.1 environment for Mac app development but also an extra 22MB of iPhone-specific SDK goodness including an iPhone simulator named Aspen Simulator (perhaps the code-name for iPhone). Whilst most of the iPhone’s apps are absent you can still access settings, photos, Safari and contacts.

Besides the cool idea of creating real iPhone apps you can also use Mobile Safari to test your sites on an iPhone – very cool! Here’s DamienG.com in the simulator when twisted round 90′.

[)amien

Panic Sans coding font

My Envy Code R programming font isn’t great on the Mac yet so I have configured these to use the excellent but overlooked Panic Sans in 12 point which unlike Monaco is available in bold, italic and bold italic variants. (I love my comments to be italics)

To install this font you must:

1. Download Panic Software’s Coda application
2. Navigate to the Coda application and choose Show Package Contents
3. Navigate to the Contents/Resources folder
4. Double click on the Panic Sans.dfont and press Install Font
5. Panic Sans is now available to other applications too

TextMate

Download Humane theme for TextMate (5 KB)

Launching the downloaded .tmTheme file will cause it to copy to ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Themes
Select Humane from the Preferences > Fonts & Colors pane in the drop-down list box

Xcode 3

Download Humane theme for Xcode (4 KB)

Copy to ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode/Color Themes
Select Humane from the Preferences > Fonts & Colors pane in the drop-down list box

Porting themes

Until somebody comes up with an IDE-independent theme format or cool converter we’ll have to do it by hand. The easiest way I have found is:

1. Install Hex Color Picker on the Mac to allow entering hex into the standard color picker
2. Open the Visual Studio theme .vssettings file in a text editor
3. Open up the Fonts & Colors preferences pane up in your Mac IDE
4. Go through each one and choose the nearest match in the .vssettings
5. Transcribe each color by reading the VS colour pairs backward, e.g. 00631409 becomes #091463

[)amien

Daily tools

• Visual Studio 2005 – IDE of preference despite it’s sluggish behaviour
• SQL Server 2005 Management Studio – Took getting used to but it’s an improvement on 2000′s Enterprise Manager
• AnkhSVN - Subversion support inside Visual Studio 2005
• .NET Reflector – Searching .NET API or to find out what it’s doing
• Web Application Projects – Stop using VS’s web sites and start using web applications!
• Web Deployment Projects – Deploy to dev, test or live servers as easily as building a project

Not quite daily

• CodeSmith – Need to get to grips with v4 to build our whole database layer in one hit
• Trac – Bug tracking, milestones & wiki with integrated support for Subversion
• TortoiseSVN – Check-in/out of non-project items (e.g. art assets)
• Web Developer Extension – Trying CSS changes on-the-fly, validating pages etc. from Firefox
• Firebug – Examining pages, the page DOM etc. from Firefox
• KDiff – Excellent 3-way diff tool that works great with AnkhSVN
• Subtext – Blogging system running here

On occasion

• Visual C# Express and XNA – Messing with 3D graphics, controllers and pixel shaders
• Ogre – Steve’s object-oriented 3D engine
• XCode and Cocoa – Still quite alien with it’s message-based calling mechanism but obviously powerful

Keeping an eye on

• Eclipse – IDE for developing Java (C++ and C# support in various stages too)
• Ruby on Rails – Interesting RAD approach to web development – Apple also supporting on Mac OS X 10.5
• Sandcastle – Microsoft’s documentation tool that already seems to have had an impact on NDoc
• SubSonic – Build-provider that generates an ORM on the fly and provides automatic developer-only db editing pages

Not used lately, still installed

• Delphi 5/6 – Borland’s great RAD tool for non-.NET development, later versions support .NET too
• JBuilder – Java development although I’d probably move to Eclipse
• Visual Studio 2003 – Still required for the odd .NET 1.1 application/testing

[)amien