Since I gave some dap to IE for getting a developer toolkit embedded into Internet Explorer 8, I feel like I should also give kudos to Opera for releasing the top-secret and closely guarded Dragonfly.  Opera annoyed the hell out of me at SxSW when they devoted an entire booth to promoting “Dragonfly”, but refused to tell me anything about it.

I’ve only had a quick look of it, but it does look like a pretty slick tool.  The main problem I see for them here, is that they are fourth in the market (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) and fourth to get a developer toolkit.  Its hard to work from a position of weakness like that.  I hope they prove me wrong, since competition is always good for what we do, and I have to say, I’ve always had a soft spot for Opera.

If you have the chance to play, please leave comments with what you think of it!  How does it compare to Firebug?  How does it compare to IE?

Ever get so wrapped up in your work that you forgot to eat?  I found an alternate source of sustenance.  My cat.

Well, I was greeted pleasantly by my RSS feeds today, it seems that the jQuery User Interface project has officially released. 

This is great news, and I have to say (I’ve been using the UI components in beta) that they are brilliantly done.

I was thrilled to see that there was an update yesterday to the CodeIgniter Textmate bundle for CI 1.6.  If you use Textmate or E-Texteditor (Windows) then download it and give it a shot.  Nice work… thanks, I’m using it right now!

A few other little utilities I’ve been getting a lot of use out of recently.  The first is the excellent clipboard utility Jumpcut.  It keep track of the last 10 (that’s configurable) things that you’ve copied and makes them available to you.

There are also handy keyboard shortcuts to get at it.  Normally not super-useful, but I’ve been doing a lot of work that has needed me to copy and paste language keys, and this let’s me buffer up a whole page worth of

and paste it all at once.  Sure faster then copy > flip page > paste > flip back > copy > flip page > paste > repeat again and again.  Its also open sourced under the MIT License.

Another great little tool I’ve discovered recently is for my mouse.  I’m one of those guys that needs and uses the 4th and 5th buttons on my mouse.  The left I use for copying, and the right for paste (see a pattern here), but in Leopard, those buttons default to… jeez I don’t remember… Expose I think.  Reconfiguring them was a bit of a pain.  Fortunately, I found the excellent USB Overdrive, which you can use to re-program your mouse buttons.  Aside from having what might be the ugliest website I’ve seen this year, the little shareware application has been fantastic, and is well worth plunking down my $20 for it (although to be clear, the downloaded version is 100% functional and remains so).

On the topic, other little known utilities that I love include caffeine (temporarily prevent your computer from sleeping) and AppDelete (gets rid of stray files when deleting a program).  That’s hardly an exhaustive list… just 2 little quickies for anyone reading this ;)