Call me a stick in the mud but I have never really used it since its introduction and on a few sites it has even gone as far as breaking the appearance of the template.

Luckily with a bit of research I found its not that hard to remove the admin bar completely, simply add the code below to the functions.php file of your theme and the admin bar should disapear forever.

Source code

add_filter ( 'show_admin_bar' , '__return_false' );
add_action ( 'admin_print_scripts-profile.php' , 'hide_tool_bar');
 
function hide_tool_bar () { ?>
        <Style type = "text / css" >
                show-admin-bar {display: none;}
        </ Style>
<?php }

Enter the Pencil Project released under the GPL licence as a Firefox plugin to quickly create wireframes and application prototypes, its free, cross platform and very easy to use. Only problem is it doesn’t work with Firefox 4 & 5 (seriously who still uses 3?), fortunately using the XULRunner package Pencil can be run on its own as a stand alone desktop application.

Below are some instructions on installing Pencil on a Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (11.04) system, but realistically it shouldn’t be a big issue to get it working on any recent Linux distro.

First download the Pencil app from the the website to the directory you would like to install the application, in this case I am using ~/software/pencil.

wget http://evoluspencil.googlecode.com/files/Pencil-1.2-0-linux-gtk.tar.gz

Uncompress:
tar zxvf Pencil-1.2-0-linux-gtk.tar.gz

Update your systems package repository:
apt-get update

Install the XULRunner package to run Pencil as a standalone program:
apt-get install xulrunner-1.9.2

Now you should be ready to run, to get started with Pencil simply execute:

xulrunner application.ini

After install a shortcoming I found, is that I needed to install an extension to support exporting my prototypes as a HTML document. This was fixed by downloading the plugin:

http://evoluspencil.googlecode.com/files/DefaultHTML.zip

Then in the application select the the “tools” menu and the choose the “manage export template” option then browse your file system select the plugin zip file to install

Pre Firefox 4

Firefox 4

As developer my life revolves around the refresh button, sure I can use the F5 key but its not the same, when I change application focus between my IDE back to the browser, 9/10 times I am already using the mouse and with multiple screens its just easier to have the refresh button on the left.

Luckily its pretty easy to achieve, in order to reposition the refresh button simply select “view->toolbars->customize” in the applications top menu. You should now see the refresh and stop buttons have left the location bar and are sitting to the right, simply click and drag the refresh button to you preferred location and click done to save your preferences

To get started open a terminal and enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

Potential Issue: depending on your network, corporate firewalls often block Port 11371, which is used to communicate with the key server causing timeouts. If this happens to you the key can be downloaded over port 80 using the command:

sudo gpg –keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 –recv-keys CE49EC21

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Close Firefox if its currently running and open again and enjoy your new look browsing experience.

The 2.9.0 version of WordPress has been released some of the main new features include:

• A “trash bin” feature, allow the restoration of deleted comments or posts.
• Built in image editor, forget Photoshop! You can now scale, flip, rotate images directly in WordPress.
• Easier embedding of video, just post the URL and WordPress will generate the embed code on its own.
• Multiple updating of plug-ins, forget the days of having to go through and update each plug-in one by one.

Plus much more the 2.9 release of WordPress incorporates over 500 tickets for bugs and enhancements.

So what are you waiting for download it now here!

A painfree tutorial on installing the XAMPP bundle to ease the development and testing of your web applications.