Web Developer for Firefox 1.2 Beta 1—a preview release of the next version of the Web Developer extension for Firefox—is now publicly available. This release is for testing purposes only—for a fully supported version of the extension or localized builds please see the latest official release.

A few notable changes in this release are:

• A new theme on OS X
• A number of new features including ‘Reload Linked Style Sheets’ and ‘View Responsive Layouts’
• Keyboard shortcuts can now be assigned to any feature
• Syntax highlighting and line numbers when viewing and editing code

And of course there are many fixed issues. For the full list of changes in this version please read the release notes.

Feedback

As a beta release this build is not guaranteed to be stable. The idea behind this beta release is to give people the opportunity to provide feedback about this next version as well as report any bugs. Please report any feedback or issues in the beta forum or via the contact form.

Note that the forums on chrispederick.com have been upgraded as my self-hosted version of FluxBB was having more and more problems recently. Therefore I have upgraded to a hosted Vanilla Forums setup.

Unfortunately as part of this upgrade the existing forums data including user accounts and posts could not be easily migrated so you will need to re-register if you had registered previously.

Let me know if you see any problems with the new forums by posting in the forums or via the contact form.

The updated ‘View JavaScript’ output in the next version of the Web Developer extension including syntax highlighting and line numbers.

A preview of the redesigned and streamlined options dialog for the next release of Web Developer.

A month ago I posted on Twitter that I wanted to try Rdio, but could not because even their native OS X application requires Flash which I don’t have installed on my laptop. However—although I have not seen a formal announcement—it now appears that they are bundling a version of Flash in with the application.

So I re-activated my Rdio subscription—I had tried the service out a year or so ago—and used the application to match my iTunes music and add it to my Rdio collection.

Setting Up A Scores Playlist

At work I like to listen to movie scores as they typically contain no lyrics which I find distracting when I am writing code. So I set up a ‘Scores’ playlist in Rdio and went to start adding movie score albums to it.

The problem? Rdio only lets you add songs to playlists one at a time—you cannot add an entire album. Adding an album to a playlist one song at a time becomes very tedious very quickly and despite numerous requests to allow adding an album to a playlist, Rdio has yet to add this feature.

Therefore I created a bookmarklet that when clicked on an album page on Rdio adds the entire album—all the tracks that are available for streaming at least—to the chosen playlist.

Using The Bookmarklet

Add Album To Playlist

1. Drag the link above to the bookmarks bar in your browser.
2. Go to an album page on Rdio in your browser. For example: The Dark Knight.
3. Click the ‘Add Album To Playlist’ bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar.
4. For the first track you will be asked which playlist to add the track to and all subsequent tracks will then be added to that same playlist.
5. Wait for the bookmarklet to add the remaining tracks to the playlist—you will see some flickering of Rdio dialogs appearing and being automatically clicked—and once it has finished a JavaScript dialog will appear telling you how many tracks were added to the playlist.

Fragile

As you can tell by the flickering of Rdio dialogs when you use the bookmarklet, this works by basically automating the task of adding each individual track to the playlist. This means that any HTML or CSS changes to the Rdio site will likely break the bookmarklet.

I will be trying to keep the bookmarklet up to date and working if this happens, but I cannot guarantee the timeliness of my support. I have only really tested the bookmarklet in Chrome so let me know if you encounter any issues in other browsers. Also, note that I am not responsible for any problems caused by using this bookmarklet. Hopefully Rdio will add this feature soon and we will not need this hack for much longer.

For those that are interested, here is my scores playlist.

Update: Rdio added support for adding entire albums to playlists in the new Rdio so this bookmarklet is no longer required or supported.

When Safari 5 was released a year ago Apple followed the lead of Firefox and Chrome and added support for extensions. A number of people contacted me at the time asking if I would port Web Developer to Safari and I said I would look into the possibility.

When I looked at the Safari extension API it was clearly based on the Chrome extension API and I was initially hopeful that creating a Safari version of Web Developer would not only be possible, but relatively straightforward.

Why Web Developer Does Not Work With Safari (Yet)

My first thought was to add a toolbar button that could open an HTML version of the Web Developer toolbar just like I do in Chrome:

However, while Safari supports adding custom toolbar buttons they can only execute JavaScript and cannot open HTML popups like Chrome allows. This did not appear to be an issue since Safari extensions are allowed to create entire toolbars—something that Chrome extensions cannot do—and this would be the ideal implementation for Web Developer.

As I started to work on creating Web Developer as a Safari toolbar though, a major shortcoming became clear. Safari toolbars can only contain HTML elements and do not allow those elements to expand outside of the toolbar—expanding menus in the toolbar are not possible.

The only way to work around this limitation is to use HTML select elements—an option that extensions like Safari Developer are using:

I personally see this as a clunky solution with major limitations and poor usability. Therefore I decided to wait and hope that the Safari extension API matured to allow a better implementation of Web Developer.

Why Web Developer May Work With Safari In Lion

Cut to this week and Apple released a bunch of new information about the next release of OS X called Lion. Tucked at the end of their section detailing the new features in Safari in Lion is the following paragraph:

If I am understanding this correctly it sounds like the Safari extension API will be updated to support HTML popups being opened by custom toolbar buttons just like in Chrome. If this is true then I will once again look into porting Web Developer to Safari.

When?

OS X Lion does not have a firm release date yet, but it is due to be released some time in July and I am currently working on the next release of Web Developer for Firefox. Any development on a Safari version would have to wait until the Firefox update is complete, but I cannot give any estimate as to when this might happen. Just know that I will be investigating the possibility of porting Web Developer to Safari as soon as I have the time once Lion is released.