What's 'Appening?

Developing websites is no easy task at the best of times. I realized how much you actually learn over the years when my friend was given the task of creating a website for his father's business a few weeks ago. All the small tricks and, dare I say it, hacks that I have picked up and have become accustomed to seem like mountainous tasks to him, being so fresh in web design.

My point being, we need things which make our lives a tad easier, and cut to dev time down as much as possible. This is where Firefox comes in and rocks our world. There are so many cool apps you can download that it's sometimes hard to know which ones are truly useful. However, for our application article we're not going to concentrate on just Firefox, but also applications we use for other programs...

1. FireBug Console by Joe Hewitt, Justin Dolske & Others

Firstly and most importantly (for me) is the FireBug Console. For me personally it's imperative when I'm writing Javascript and AJAX applications as it pinpoints your scripting errors quite accurately so that you can get to the route cause of your problem and not use guesswork (like the when using IE.6) when correcting your errors. Check it out here.

2. English (South African) Dictionary by Dwayne Bailey

Self explanatory really, it not only tells you when your word's have the wrong spelling, it also gives you a list of correct words from your dictionary, kind of like MS Word, but more simple (no thesauruses and synonyms). Get it here.

3. Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick

This is an awesome App, one we use everyday - especially when viewing the source of pages to double check that they have reloaded correctly. In fact there are so many useful features that we can't even begin to list them here, you're better off just visiting their website for more information.

4. HTML Validator by Marc Gueury

The HTML Validator is a cool inbuilt validator for Firefox, which outputs all the html warnings and errors from your page, so that you can get to the task of making it squeaky w3c clean. Check it out here.

5. The Kettle by Sholom Borgelman

Some people will tell you that they were brought up on their "Mamma's Cooking", well we were brought up on Tea, and while a kettle is not strictly an App, it sure is useful!

6. SEO Quake by SeoQuake Team

How Popular is your website, and sites linked to it? SEO Quake provides ranking from multiple different sources and is a very useful tool when it comes to search engine optimization. Get optimized and get ranked here.

7. IE Tab by PCMan (Hong Jen Yee), yuoo2k

IE Tab provides a quick link to what your website will look like in the 'other browser', the commonly (unfortunately) used Internet Explorer, not like this is enough - IE 6, IE 7and IE 8 all display sites differently - but it is still a huge help. Get it here.

8. TwitterFox by Kozuho Okui

Twitterfox is a live Twitter feed nested snuggly in the bottom right corner of your browser window, with separate tags for your common feed, replies and Private Messages.

9. Netlimiter 2 by Locktime Software

This is more useful for people who pay silly amounts for their connection or have Bandwidth Caps, like us here in the Good 'ol South Africa. Netlimiter is a bandwidth shaper that gives you your total upload and download amounts independently for all your open applications; nice! Start being pedantic here.

That's a wrap, 9 useful applications which we couldn't do without! What are yours?