Deems' Weblog » utility

Review: Browsershots

Deems — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:02:38 +0000

As a web developer I’m almost always tasked with ensuring that websites and web applications I build not only work but look good in the popular browsers for the target platform. Sometimes you may get a client with some obscure version of a browser (not necessarily Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome) and you don’t have that platform available to test it locally to try and replicate the issue and hopefully fix it.

Along comes Browsershots – a website with a very simple front-end. Type in the address to the page you wish to view (obviously needs to be hosted online already and not a password protected site) and select as many or as few browsers (and platofmrs) to test, whether or not JavaScript and/or Flash is required or not (even which version must be avaialble) and even screen resolutions and colour depths. Click the button, and sit back.

Through what I’m assuming are multiple virtual machines on their servers which are instructed to browse to the site you requested and then a screenshot is taken of that browser and added to your screenshot queue.

It will notify you of the progress, whether or not the browser screenshot will be available or approxiamtely how long it will be before your screenshot is queued and taken.

The site even allows you to download all the screenshots in a single ZIP file – how handy is that.

I’m definitely bookmarking this site for my next browser-compatibility issue resolution!

Office 2007 with Office 2003 menus and toolbar

Deems — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:02:24 +0000

This has got to be the best thing on the Internet, since sliced bread! I absolutely detest the ribbon bar implemented in Office 2007 applications. I cannot get used to it and struggle to find things.

Today I was scanning my RSS feeds and spotted a new one on The How To Geek’s site. They reviewed a piece of software called UBitMenu from the Swiss software company UBit.

Take a look at the review (including more screenshots) and try it out for yourself. Basically once installed it adds a new menu item to the ribbon bar called Menu – simply click on it to see the good old menu- and toolbars again.

Now you too can carry on working more productively with Office 2007 applications, I know I will.

Organise your desktop, with Fences

Deems — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 06:53:02 +0000

Is your desktop a little cluttered? Are there icons all over the place, sometimes not in an organised way? My desktop sometimes gets that way, especially when I work on various different projects and things. I like to keep it as clean and organised as possible, although it sometimes needs a serious spring-clean.

You should probably try out Fences, from StarDock - they’ve a number of other useful windows tool and utilities which you can see on their products page.

At the moment it is in a public beta form – their final released product, they say, will remain free. The current beta expires at the end of August this year. I’ve just installed it on my laptop and organised my desktop into categorised sections – nice!

It’s fully customizable as to how you want your fences to look by changing the colour, opacity, whether or not the borded is shown or not. Another nice feature, expecially for screencasting and/or doing demos is if you double click on your desktop it hides all the icons and fences. Double click again and they’re all there again.

If you do try it out, let me kno what you think in the comments. Note that this is a windows application and will require version 2.0 of the .Net Framework pre-installed.

[via the-How-to-Geek]