TOOLS: Colorzilla

It is totally clear that this tool will help developers with something realted with colours..., for sure!!. Do you need to choose a color from a palette??, do you need to copy a color from any other place in any homepage??, do you need a Color Picker similar to ones that can be found in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro???. All this and more can be found within this handy tool.

It also allows to zoom into a homepage by 1000%!!. Strange tool but not if you want some colours in a picture!!, ..isn't it??. :)

It even analyzes all the colour in the DOM of the homepage!!. what else??

• History and Favorites palettes
• Page Pan option allows to quickly pan the page without using the scroll bars
• Displays element information like tag name, class, id, size, relative mouse position etc.
• Outline elements under the cursor
• Multi-platform - works on MS Windows, Linux and MacOSX.
• Manipulate colors by their Red/Green/Blue or Hue/Saturations/Value components.
• ....................
• ....................

And much, much more!!!

CANVAS: CopperLicht , the 3D javascript engine

HTML5 came to stay with us bringing little things as sections, articles, footer, header, dialog..., but big fantastic things as the Canvas which is used to to render graphics on the fly, such graphs, games....

Many, many projects are already using the canvas element as Raphael but the future will bring many online games which by now can only be run over flash technology.

One of the first 3D engines to appear is CopperLicht!!. If you like to work with 3D Studio, LightWave, 3D Builder, etc., you will be able to "post" your designs to the web an be accessed online because CopperLicht supports many 3D formats as 3ds, .obj, .x, .lwo, .b3d, .csm, .dae, .dmf, .oct, .irrmesh, .ms3d, .my3D, .mesh, .lmts, .bsp, .md2, .stl. and more!!.

Just before the idea of slow performance going though your mind, CopperLicht will turn all your 3D designs to small binaries file that will turn down the amount of time needed to download them!!, ..compressing them could be also a good idea ;)

Wanting to know how ot use it, Ambiera is already providing a whole bunch of tutorials after free subscribing!!.

And the jewel of the queen is the 3D Map editor, CopperCube, ..just amazing!!!.

The 3D features which brings:

• Lots of precreated materials and shaders.
• Fast, precalculated lightmap support.
• Billboards.
• Skyboxes.
• Extensible 3D rendering based on a hierarchical scene graph.
• Transparent objects: Automatic correct item ordering when rendering transparent 3d objects.
• Paths and Splines.
• Animation and Action system.
• Texture animation.
• Optimized, reusable 3d math classes (vectors, matrices, plance etc), all with collision test functionality.
• Automatic redraw reducing (optional): Instead of redrawing the whole 3d scene every frame which can be slow on old computers, CopperLicht is able only to redraw when it is absolutely necessary, for example when the 3d scene changed or the camera moved. This is very useful to reduce CPU load.
• Picking and simple click detection: Simply add a JavaScript callback function to any scene node which gets called when your scene node is being clicked. (See AnimatorOnClick for details)
• (IiP:) Skeletal character animation
• (IiP:) Particle systems
• (IiP: ) Fog
• (IiP:) Parallax Mapping

Go on, and get your hands on CopperLicht, and if not convince yet, just check the demos, ..and remember what is needed to run WebGL!!

And yes....it's freeeeeeeeeeeeeee

TOOLS: Browsercam, test you developments at any browser and OS

Everytime the compatibility of code between browsers is getting bigger and so less problems, ...javascript frameworks help keeping compatibility working and that is just incredibily helpfull, but also some new operating System and devices has come to our live in the last years, ...android, symbian, iphone, htc, nokia...and our sites need in most case need to work in most of them. Having install opera, chrome, firefox, Safari, Explorer in your computer can be achieved with no hasstle, ..but what about installing diferent versions of those borwsers and different OS combinations??? hmmmm, not an easty taks.

What is the solution to our problem??. The Browser Compatibility Testing Tools, and here we have one. Browsercam.

BrowserCam is a paid service that lets you test multiple URLs in a huge number of browsers, which of course you would be able to test before paying a cent. It provides all these possibilities:

• Internet Explorer
• Mozill
• Firefox
• Safari
• Konqueror
• Opera
• Netscape
• AOL
• Camino
• Chrome

and OS Systems as:

• Linux
• Mac OS
• Windows 98, vista, 7......

Not bad, ehhhh?, ..and also different browser versions, ..for example with explorer you can test for 4 , 5 , 5.2 , 5.5 , 6 , 6.02, 7 , 8!! .

And waht about devices??. no problem, blackberry (cruve, storm, pearl, 7100g...), Iphone, Android, windows mobile...

How does it work??, easy!!, enter your URL(s), browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, and other capture details in our Screen Capture Wizard and BrowserCam creates screen captures!!. Check it out!!

TOOLS: Adminer, The Alternative to PHPMyAdmin

Sometimes it appears a tool which covers the main coding and working neccesities for us, for example apps to manipulate DBs Servers. I still remember the first time I used Toad to manipulate Oracle/DB2 data and tables , and of course my frequent visits to MySQL with PHPMyAdmin. This tools are so used that no competitors seem to appear!!, ...but the guys who started with PHPMinAdmin have continued their nice work ending up with an easy-to-use app called Adminer.

What does Adminer offers??. Well, to be sincere not many different functionality from which PHPMyAdmin offers, ..actually PHPMyAdmin is more complete and comes with better User Experience, from my point of view besides of being translated to mny more languages (57 translated into in PHPMyAdmin against 11 in Adminer). But as a good point, ...can you imagine bringing and only file to your PC and have a whole DB client??, well, stop imagining, its name is adminer!!.

Ant not an only file is the best of Adminer, but also the size of the solution, almost half of PHPMyAdmin. This minification code is based on a work of David Grudl who uses it for his brilliant libraries Texy, dibi and Nette, and get adminer more than 15 times smaller than PHPMyAdmin.

It works perfectly wit MySQL 4.1, MySQL 5.0 y 5.1. PHP 4.3 and higher compatible as with PHP 5. TRy Adminer, ...it is really faaaaast and light!!!.

TOOLS: Tuning your website!!

Is your web app slow??. ..and you want a web app which roncks with great performance and fasteness!!. The answer has 2 names, Amy and Thomas. They have writing a serie of there books which will work most surely to make your web faster than ever.

Those 3 books are:

• Part 1. Understanding & Measuring performance.
• Part 2. Loadtime.
• Part 3. Runtime.

The total pages are about 270 pages, but believe me than this could be a little "javascript bible" or "javascript Quixote" and betters other books with triple the pages!!.

Unfortunatly all this is not free, but paying just a reasonable price of $39 USD, misses just a nice dinner one day for having a nice knowledge for whole year long....

Where can you get them??, ...click here!!

TOOLS: Xampp, The Server package

I presume that most of you already work with an installation of a web server, a apps server, a DB server...., but what about if you are newbie or just tired of having to integrate all this tools together??. The answer is called XAMPP, ..actually the one I like to use!!. XAMPP is an integrated server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and Perl (the AMPP in XAMPP) that all run from a removable drive. Everything is pre-configured and ready to go just by unzipping or installing it.

Actually not only this important servers are installed, but the package include all this:

• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• MiniPerl
• OpenSSL
• phpMyAdmin
• XAMPP Control Panel
• Webalizer
• Mercury Mail Transport System
• FileZilla FTP Server
• SQLite
• ADODB
• Zend Optimizer
• XAMPP Security

..and if you do not have enough then the add-ons will do the rest!!:

• Tomcat 6.0.20
• Perl Add-On

The installation of XAMPP is very straightforward, mainly if use the self-extracting archive, and it will take less than 10 minutes!!. The of course you can enter to the typical apache configuration file to create as many sites as you wish!!. The delightfull of powerfull phpMyAdmin will let you control all your DB contents, although you might like to work with Adminer....

Thanks to the XAMPP team to make our life easier!!.