Another JavaScript Tool

A lot of us have already blogged about a bunch of different JavaScript libraries and tools, but I found another tool which looks quite intriguing and I thought I'd blog about it to share my findings with the rest of you. After speaking with quite a few people from our class who have very limited or no prior experience with JavaScript, I decided to look into more helpful tools. A few different guys have told me they have found useful books teaching JavaScript which have helped them learn it better, and while the best way to learn it is to read up on it and keep practicing it, hopefully this tool, called Blackbird, can be helpful as well.

Blackbird is an "Open Source JavaScript Logging Utility" that does just that; logs information regarding your JavaScript. This tool is more beneficial for those of us who already understand JS well enough to write a decent amount of code without much trouble. Essentially what it does is places a small black window on your screen that pops up different messages related to your JS code upon execution. It is the ultimate replacement to the alert() command, allowing you to not only alert things right within the Blackbird interface, but also allowing you to choose what type of an alert it is. It offers options for 'debug,' 'info,' 'warn,' 'error,' and 'profile.' By using the different options you can quickly see what the status of a message is and even toggle between the different categories to show only certain messages at a time.

To add Blackbird to your page, all you have to do is download a JS and a CSS file from their site, upload them to your server, then include a reference to them in the head of the page you want to use Blackbird on, like in the image below.



Blackbird also has some neat features built into it that allow you to position it in different locations throughout your page as well as allowing you to toggle it on or off. As you can see from the site, it is compatible with nearly all the common browsers, including Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 2+, and Opera 9.5. Check it out!