When using phing from a Mac terminal command line you might notice that its output is not displayed correctly, unless you triple click the output area.

To fix this the phing scripts needs to be fixed.
Locate the script with:
which phing
edit the script to replace the line:
-logger phing.listener.AnsiColorLogger
to
-logger phing.listener.DefaultLogger

Nice video about how to start with Scrum:

Creating Selenium tests you often will find yourself fiddling around with (hopefully not too complex) XPaths. If you are having Firebug installed you can use one of its lesser known features to speed up working with XPaths.

Little example ?

Open up Firebug for this page, select the Console tab and enter the following command into the Firebug command line:
$x(”/html/body/div[2]/div/h1″)
Result:
[h1]
Note: Hover the mouse over the h1 and you will see the corresponding element highlighted in the page.

Even better – to have a look at the inner HTML of the headline element enter:
$x(”/html/body/div[2]/div/h1″)[0].innerHTML

Screen sharing between Macs is very easy as long as they are located in the same local network.
Once the are in different networks it gets a little more – no not complicated, it’s just not that obvious.

Looking for a solution I found a great article “Remote Control: Screen Sharing in Leopard” by Ryan Faas on Peachpit.
Here is the part (see article page 3) that helped me out:

“You can, however, connect to computers on other network segments if you know their IP addresses.
…
To do this you’ll need to launch the Screen Sharing application manually. The application is located inside the Core Services folder along with several other Mac OS X components that are normally launched as part of operating system (including the Finder).

This folder is located at the following path (beginning at the root level of your hard drive): /System/Library/Core Services.”

For quite a while I struggeled with testing autocomplete fields (like the one from the script.aculo.us library) using Selenium tests.

As you may already know – the “type” command does not trigger the autocomplete to look for suggestions. You rather have to use the keyUp/keyDown/keyPress command. Unfortunately their behaviour with autocomplete varies between different browsers. All this makes it a real mess (and complicated looking tests) to test a simple autocomplete field.

The solution I found out about recently is to use the “typeKeys” command which seems to be a new comfort feature of Selenium. It triggers all the above key handlers for you.

However – I noticed that sometimes it is helpful / necessary to use “typeKeys” in combination with the “type” command – to get working results. For now – I am using “type” to enter the field value leaving out the last character to be inserted by “typeKeys”.

Recently I got an email containing a signature which made me wonder. This signature said:

“Please check if this mail needs to be printed.”

So there must be people printing (all) their emails. Strange!

How many browser tabs do you work with on an average base. And how many of them stay open from the time you log on to your machine until you drag away yourself to get a break ?

Too many – you think ? Well – that was the case in my work place as well.
Not that modern browser lack features to support this. But things just tend to get confusing.

But thanks to Fluid that problem has been solved.

This nice little (Mac only) application lets you create SSB applications for the web applications you use on a regular base.

Sounds interesting ? Give it a try:
Todd Ditchendorff (developer of Fluid) has some screencasts available which demonstrate Fluids features and there is a Flickr Group which collects nice icons for the most popular web applications.

If you are looking for a tool to create website screenshots have a look at the Firefox extension FireShot.

Besides taking screenshots from the visible part of a web page it can also create images of the complete page, which is what I was looking for.

I stumbled across this extension in Stuart Herberts blog post about 40 Firefox extension for web developers, which contains many interesting extensions – some of them have been mentioned here earlier.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, FireShot is not available for Mac OS X.

UPDATE 2: Looking for a solution running also on the Mac I found Screengrab!

Bodo Wartke beschreibt besingt in seiner MacLife-Kolumne eindrucksvoll und unterhaltsam die Vorteile eines Macs.

Hilarious !