Glamorous Toolkit developments: endless GTPlayground memory, remote sharing, closeable panes and others

We, Alex Syrel, Andrei and I, are actively working on the Glamorous Toolkit.

First, together with the integration in Pharo 4, we have received a significant amount of feedback that we took into account. Second, we continued building new functionality.

Improvements

The contextual menu now contains multiple actions explicitly (including cut/copy/paste).

Cmd+o changed to become Cmd+g, and the action is now called Go. The reason for the change is that in Pharo, Cmd+o is already mapped on global composite shortcuts for opening various tools. There is still an ongoing discussion to change it again to simply be triggered via the Inspect when inside the Playground or Inspector.

The default object inspection presentation changed its title from State to Raw. It seems that State got people confused, and we found that Raw better denotes that the presentation is showing the raw object structure.

Close-able inspector panes

A feature that people asked for is the ability of closing panes in the inspector. Now, the Pager user interface offers the possibility of closing the last pane. To make it feel comfortable, we also added an animation of sliding the rest of the panes to the right when one closes. For this feature to happen, Glamour now supports one presentation specific action that is rendered in the title bar.

One question that might arise is why make this action available only on the last pane? First, we do not want to allow closing arbitrary panes. This would be a reasonable request if the panes would not be causally connected. But, the inspector keeps track of the exact inspection session and removing arbitrary steps would break this contract. Second, we could have the action of closing a pane from the middle of a session to mean removing all panes to the right. This might conceptually work, but it would be a surprising effect for a newcomer. As a consequence, we offer the possibility of closing the only last pane.

Shrinking tab labels

One concern about the design of the inspector is that the tabs rendering does not scale if we have too many presentations. To address this problem, Alex Syrel worked along two directions. On the one hand, tab labels shrink when there is not enough space.

On the other hand, shrunk tab labels expand on mouse hover so that you can still read the contents.

Of course, the same mechanism also works on the object title. There are still things to improve. For example, when a label is even larger than the available tab space, you will not see the complete. A solution here would be to have the printout be rendered as a popup right on top of the tab. Nevertheless, the current solution is already pretty workable.

Instant caching

Remembering code changes when the text changes. In the previous version, the current code was remembered only when pressing Cmd+g. However, the real goal is to not lose anything that is typed, not just executed. So, now, the playground remembers the code on every text change.

To support this feature, Glamour now offers the possibility of hooking a custom action when a port changes. A simple example looks like this:

GLMCompositePresentation new
   with: [ :composite |
        composite rubricText
          onChangeOfPort: #text act: [ :textPresentation |
             Transcript cr; cr; show: textPresentation text ] ];
   openOn: 'Type something and check the Transcript'

On disk playground caching

Still related to remembering code, up to now, the playground remembered the code in memory. This was nice, but as soon as you moved to another image, the code was not available anymore. Furthermore, if the image crashes (it typically does not, but once in a while it does) or you forget to save, you again loose the contents in the playground.

To solve the problem, the playground now saves/loads the content to/from disk. By default it works with a folder named ''play-cache'', but one can choose a custom one via a setting.

Playground remote sharing

A not so seldom use case is that of prototyping a code snippet and then sending it around via pastebin or a similar service. Best would be to service this use case directly in the Playground. *Sven created a shared workspace>http://ws.stfx.eu* a while ago, and we shamelessly replicated the client side behavior in the Playground. Triggering the ''save to cloud'' icon publishes the contents of the workspace and then conveniently copies the url in the clipboard.

These are a couple of new features that we worked on recently. More will come soon. Stay tuned. Actually, don’t stay. Better use the tools and give us feedback.

Posted by Tudor Girba at 24 October 2014, 11:50 pm with tags moose, pharo, tools, analysis link
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