charles proxy is way cool
On the recommendation of a friend, I tried out the Charles HTTP proxy for debugging… web stuff. It’s nagware, and the nagging is really annoying. Despite that, it was obvious within the first two hours that I was going to buy it. It made it very, very simple to diagnose a number of problems that Firebug and Safari could not sort out. (They both seem to clear their logs fairly aggressively during redirection, for one thing.)
Once I’d sorted out my first bug, I (work) bought a license. A few hours later, I used it to solve another problem. Then two more. Seriously, it’s really, really useful, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. If you have to deal with the web as a programmer, check it out. I think it’s probably already saved me $50 worth of work time.