I found out about some cool tools this week:

CSS Optimizer via David Chartier
CSS Optimizer is a simple command line application that optimizes files used for web-development, such as external CSS files. It reduces the filesize significantly, 20-60% depending on your coding style, by stripping unneeded characters such as whitespace, tabs, newline characters, and semi-colons; but, it only elimates ones that are not vital to proper display of the CSS file. CSS Optimizer also converts long-hand CSS declerations to short hand equivilents to eliminate even more unneeded characters. CSS Optimizer has been tested to work under many browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and IE; currently I have not found a browser that it does not work successfully on.

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta via Mark Harrison
The IE Developer Toolbar provides several features for deeply exploring and understanding Web pages.

– Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
– Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
– Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
– View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
– Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
– Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
– Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
– Immediately resize the browser window to 800×600 or a custom size.
– Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
– Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
– Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.

 

GIMPShop via Darren Chan
GIMPShop is a free Open Source image editor that is similar to the popular Adobe Photoshop. Specifically GIMPShop is a version of the GIMP that has been edited to be more user-friendly for Photoshop users.