I recently moved from doing full-time Java & Oracle PL/SQL in a Windows environment (with Rails development in my free time) to doing full-time Rails development on Mac OS X.  This post lists a few helpful little tidbits that I’ve found along the way that I thought someone on the Interwebs might find useful.  I call it Part I not because I’m holding back on you, but more because hopefully it will encourage me to post some more on this subject in the future.

If you’re on Mac OS X and you want to grab the color value of something else on your screen to use in your website, there is a tool that comes with OS X for just that purpose called DigitalColor Meter.  Do ⌘+Space and type “Color” and select the DigitalColor Meter to bring it up. Check its menus for more features, such as copying the current color value to the clipboard.

You can log javascript objects directly to the Firebug console with console.log. Then you can drill into your object in the console and see all its properties in Firebug, rather than pushing a bunch of strings into alert();. This even works with Facebook apps.  More information here: Firebug Console Object

In the main Firefox Tools menu, there is an “Error Console” item.  It is apparently not part of FireBug, but Firefox itself.  This thing is awesome. It shows you JS and CSS errors and warnings, and it doesn’t lose them when you redirect to another page.

A few people have been surprised when they’ve seen me do this, so I thought I’d throw it in.  Firebug has a little button to tell it to run in its own window which is especially helpful if you have two monitors.  You can do this with the little round “^” button in firebug, shown with the smudgy red arrow below.

Well, that’s all the tidbits for now. What are your favorite tidbits?