Gives a growl like popup if a page has an error. Useful under development.

Growl-like popup on JS error.js

 
-if RAILS_ENV == 'development'
  :javascript
    $(function() {
      var notify = function(icon, title, body) {
        if (window.webkitNotifications.checkPermission() == 0) {
          var popup = window.webkitNotifications.createNotification(
            icon, title, body);
          popup.show();
          return true;
        }
      }

      //Bind the popup to window.onerror
      window.onerror = function(str, url, line) {
        notify("", "JS Error", str+'\n'+url+':'+line);
      };
    });

There may be a better way to do this, but:

When writing JS I often make a silly little typo or something that I don't notice unless I:

• notice that something seems broken
• open Chrome's developer toolbar, which I inevitably closed last time to get it out of the way
• hit the console button to see the list of errors

This little snippet uses Chrome's desktop notifications (unobtrusive pop-ups a bit like growl's) to give you an alert if there's an error on the page. Here I am only enabling it in dev. mode for obvious reasons.

I couldn't be bothered having it asking for & enabling permissions, so I have just enabled mine globally in chrome prefs.

---

Is there a better way of solving this problem?

It would be pretty easy to package this up in an extension, and then you can set the target URLs for the extension to include localhost, 0.0.0.0, etc or any other places that you want to show it. That would avoid the need for changing your Chrome security prefs globally and having debug code in your Rails views.

Good idea, I might just do that. Thanks.