Daniel Eneström

I guess I’m not the only one who’s been searching for an IE equivalent of Firebug. Being a Mac developer using Visual Studio simply to be able to debug my web sites in IE has never really been an option and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is too simple for my needs. I want to be able to debug JavaScript, not just CSS and HTML DOM. Long have I pulled my hair trying to find out why the h*ll something is working fine in Firefox/Safari but not in IE.

The other day I came across the DebugBar by the French Toulouse-based company Core Services. It’s excellent! Well, not as simple, clean and accurate as Firebug, but still way ahead of all the other debug solutions I have found for Internet Explorer. And it also has some good features that Firebug is missing.

Vive la France!

A year or two back I was in a real need of a lot of sample data for testing a web tool I was working on, so I wrapped up a small tool to generate sample data by defining a few parameters and choosing how many rows to add, using Flex 2 (or perhaps 1.5, don’t remember). Well today the need arose again, so I went through my old backup files and found it again. I thought I’d put it up on the web so as maybe someone else could be helped by it. I know it’s not perfect and only spent a few hours creating it, but if you have any suggestions on how to improve it please write a comment and let me know what you think. I would be glad to update it and eventually make it a really useful tool.

Go to the MySQL Sample Data Creator 1.0

Update Jan 24 -09: The Flash Tracer that works with Firefox 3 has to be downloaded from the creator’s own site. The one at Mozilla Addons doesn’t work with 3.x (yet). In the instructions below I have therefore used the link to his own site.

If you’re developing for Flash/Flex the FlashTracer can be quite a nifty plugin. It lets you see the flash player trace output directly in a sidebar in you browser. Outputting debugging info is something I use all the time while developing and I have tried several times to get FlashTracer to work, but haven’t managed, so I usually have a textarea inside my flash/flex project with a custom debug output. I guess I have been too impatient before but today I sat down and read through some posts about it. This is how I eventually got it to work on my Mac:

1. Make sure you’re using the latest Flash Player Debug version. Download it here

2. Install the plugin (of course)

3. Open the FlashTracer sidebar in FireFox. Click the Preferences button.

4. Under the area named “Select output file” click browse and point the plugin to the flashlog.txt file your debug player outputs. In my case (being on a mac) it was here:
/Users/{username}/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs/flashlog.txt

The plugin will ask if you want to replace the file, which is stupid because you will want to read from the file, not write to it, but that’s just how it is. Don’t let it scare’ya.

5. Save/close preferences.

6. Restart FireFox.

That should do it.