You might not know this about me but I am a web designer. I sit behind a computer screen all day (the screen is quite large so I actually do sit behind it) and play in Photoshop creating websites for clients all over the world. I do updates, make banners, buttons, and create wire frames for clients on a daily basis. I am a web junkie and I am in the process of mastering the art of HTML and CSS. (Those stand for hypertext markup language (which is the content of the website) and cascading style sheets (which is the style and look and position of those elements on the screen.))
So when I sit down to develop a site, to fix a broken site, or to just read code and try to learn what I might not already know (this is an industry that is always changing) I go right to the bottom right hand corner of my browser and select the unsightly insect sitting there. That 6 legged icon is for Firebug, a designers savior when it comes to designing and fixing a site that is broken.
To save the time of explaining what everything means and what individual tags do, I will simply tell you that Firebug is a savior to me. Let’s say that I want to change the size of the header on this page to be, oh, I don’t know, 18px instead of what looks like 22px. I can click on Firebug, select inspect, hover over that, and then edit the size on the fly. I can then change the color from white to gray, insert more padding to move it away from the logo, and change the font from Arial to Times New Roman. I can do all of this at the same time as long as I do not refresh the page, I can see on the desired web page the results.
Now, that does not change the code for good. You would, of course, have to have the file that holds the raw CSS to do any real damages. But you can play around with sites and break them, for the time being, and freak our your friends or impress your mom. It is a cool little plug in and I am glad that I have it. It truly does help me every single day when it comes to being a designer when I want to see what something looks like prior to changing the code.
I would suggest you download it yourself. It is pretty self explanatory and you can not really break anything by using it. It has some cool features and if you really do like it you might find a calling in web design and development.
The application is free and you can download it in a matter of minutes. It takes very little space on your hard drive, and you can have fun for hours. I feel like I am trying to sell you a slinky or something. Anyway, check it out and have some fun. And find an ounce more appreciation for what us designers go through on a daily basis.
That’s an awesome application. I had no idea there was something like this out there, and now I do. I learned something today. Thank you.