Netbeans PHP Integration – I’m impressed
We often keep hearing about some PHP integration at some level or the other in all the major open source IDEs. But frankly, none of them seemed much useful to me. I somehow never liked PDT from Eclipse (and for some reason I don't like Eclipse at all :S). Now the latest milestone release of Netbeans has a cool addition: PHP Integration that really kicks! Just to mention a few highlights: great intellisense for both the builtin library functions as well as our own, full support for class browsing and intellisense for object oriented PHP as well, integrated debugger, live error checking and much much more. Do check out if you are a PHP developer! You might no longer need the expensive Zend studio to have a smooooth PHP development experience.
YUI saved the day!
Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Library is really a wonderful package to have. It's free and amazingly useful and powerful. Today was one of those days when I was stuck at something, some spooky little thing that just wasn't coming up right. Here comes YUI, I scanned through the wonderful YUI developers site and found the right component for my use.
Yahoo has some excellent people working for it and tools like YUI are, well no surprise given the amount of talent this company has inside.
Thanks Yahoo, your awesome library made me happy today 
Cross Browser Design Tip: Use Internet Explorer Conditional Comments
There are some things which you really want to remember all your time while designing web pages that look the same in Internet Explorer and other browsers. Such experiences come in handy when you need them the next time.
One of such things is the Internet Explorer's conditional comments. IE's conditional comments allow you to insert markup within your code that is rendered in IE but NOT in other browsers. How? This is simple:
<!--[if IE 6]>
Your IE specific stuff here
<![endif]-->
Now, the above chunk gets past the eye of all the other browsers since they act as simple HTML comments in those browsers. Internet Explorer identifies that special [if IE 6] thing and renders the comment block as if it was normal markup.
This also works with other version of IE. You just have to use the appropriate IE version number (it works from IE 5.0 and onwards) such as IE 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0.
IkJample:
Suppose there is a DIV in your code that renders just fine in Firefox but it is appearing to be about 5 pixels above where it should be in IE. You can do the following to get it right easily using style sheets and IE conditional comments:
<style type="text/css">
.myDiv {
padding-top: 10px;
}
</style>
<!--[if IE 6]>
<style type="text/css">
.myDiv {
/* Now we add an additional 5 pixels just to */
/* make sure it also looks fine in IE */
padding-top: 15px;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->
Hope this is useful to me and to some other readers in the future
Cya!