The new version of Firebug is awesome. Joe revved it to 1.0 beta and there are a ton of new features and lots of nice improvements. If you write or debug Javascript (AJAX include), CSS, or HTML, Firebug is a must. I can’t find the release notes, but here’s a list of what I think is new after a few minutes of testing:

• New font (smaller and more readable)
• The breadcrumb of the selected dom item (during inspection) is now interactive. You can highlight and select any ancestor of the currently selected item.
• The inspected item now has a graphical depiction of its box model (‘layout’ in the right pane).
• All CSS lines in the CSS tab and the Style tab of the inspected item can now be toggled on and off just by clicking them.
• Editing the CSS and HTML now seems smoother somehow – before the feedback didn’t seem as immediate.
• The net tab gives a graphical representation of requests to the server. And it’s not just XMLHTTPRequests anymore – it’s everything.
• You can turn firebug on for one site only, now, rather than for everything. Nice.

I’ve been working with Dojo on a low priority project for the past several days. Here are my thoughts so far:

• This discussion list archive is extremely helpful.
• The tests are often more useful than the documentation.
• Dojo.Select is a very cool alternative to the HTML version, but I can’t find a way to set it’s value programmatically if the options are coming from a dataURL AND the option text is different than the option values.
• Whenever you have a problem recreating something you saw in an example, run that example against the version of dojo you are using. It MAY be that the latest dojo code is not compatible with the code you saw in the example.
• The dojo blog is fairly active.
• I’m having a lot of trouble with FormBind (the dojo AJAX mechanism used to post forms to the server), but I’m sure I’ll work it out. It probably has something to do with the fact that I have many forms on the page, not just one. UPDATE: Solved my issue and logged a bug about it (FormBind gives no feedback if the form’s action url is a 404.).

Gordon’s Rotoscoping Filter is coming along nicely!!