I'd love to see something that helped me with CSS layout- a way to put big bright borders around divs and highlight their containing blocks, etc.
The test_styles bookmarklet might fit the bill - it pops up a little window where you can type in CSS rules and have the page you triggered it from dynamically update based on the rules you enter. I put this bookmarklet into my Personal Toolbar Folder in mozilla, so it's just a click away.
There's HEAPS of useful bookmarklets linked off that page too. The javascript shell is amazing.
i've had the misfortune of having to maintain a self-taught programmer's code in my current job - it's a nightmare. zero comments (that's not an exaggeration), no indentation[1], bad variable names (myInt1, myInt2).
i've learnt more about how to structure code to be readable and maintainable by having to do it to this guy's code than i ever did from people saying "indent properly, comment but not too much, meaningful vars".
even going back over old code you wrote can be benefical - seeing the things you used to do before you knew better, if you can actually follow your own logic, if your var names make sense. i agree with the "read code" comment - but reading *and maintaining* is more important, i think.
[1] which is particularly funny because the editor he used indents automatically - so he would have had to manually defeat the indentation
...Television, meanwhile, continues its long reign as Americans' most beloved and comprehensible technology. In fact, for years TV has not gotten its due as one of the monumentally successful technologies of all time -- cheap, reliable, easy to use. More than 80 percent of respondents across the country understood how to work a TV better than a computer, something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard.
no it's not "something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard", and this is why - a computer has about a billion billion different possible functions (though we may only use a few) - a TV has one function. ONE. ("show sequences of images from a designated source".) it's simple to use because its function is simple.
it's not hard to design a good (simple) UI, physical or virtual, when the functionality is so limited (and simple).
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There's HEAPS of useful bookmarklets linked off that page too. The javascript shell is amazing.
...and maintain (someone else's) code.
i've had the misfortune of having to maintain a self-taught programmer's code in my current job - it's a nightmare. zero comments (that's not an exaggeration), no indentation[1], bad variable names (myInt1, myInt2).
i've learnt more about how to structure code to be readable and maintainable by having to do it to this guy's code than i ever did from people saying "indent properly, comment but not too much, meaningful vars".
even going back over old code you wrote can be benefical - seeing the things you used to do before you knew better, if you can actually follow your own logic, if your var names make sense. i agree with the "read code" comment - but reading *and maintaining* is more important, i think.
[1] which is particularly funny because the editor he used indents automatically - so he would have had to manually defeat the indentation
no it's not "something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard", and this is why - a computer has about a billion billion different possible functions (though we may only use a few) - a TV has one function. ONE. ("show sequences of images from a designated source".) it's simple to use because its function is simple.
it's not hard to design a good (simple) UI, physical or virtual, when the functionality is so limited (and simple).