the debugger window

[kentyler]

the debugger window seems crippled. first the funny made-of-rubber chrome competes heavily with the text, then it doesn't seem to be smart about how many lines of text it has loaded, or what its dimensions where when it last opened.
it also seems to be restricted to about a quarter of the screen.
its a laszlo window, has anyone considered rewriting it ?

[hqm]

the debugger window seems crippled. first the funny made-of-rubber chrome competes heavily with the text,

I don't understand what you are saying here.


then it doesn't seem to be smart about how many lines of text it has loaded,


Can you explain what the issue is that you are seeing?


or what its dimensions where when it last opened.


Can you give an example?


it also seems to be restricted to about a quarter of the screen.


Everything in the Laszlo app is constrained to be within the canvas. If you want to make the canvas larger, use the width and height attribute, for example you can say <canvas width="1024" height="800"> for example.

Due to restrictions with Flash 5, the horizontal scrolling of text within the debugger window is limited to the canvas width. In the next release you can add a maxtextwidth attribute to the canvas to circumvent this.




its a laszlo window, has anyone considered rewriting it ?


It's written in Laszlo and the source code is included with the release. If you have improvements, please go ahead and make them.

[kentyler]

Let me try to be more specific.
The debugger is drawin with a kind of exagerrated 3-d effect and a dark color. Following Tufft's rule, most of this is "ink" that does not need to be on the screen to provide the functionality that is there. It reminds me of some of the things proposed in Togazzini where you have computer screens that are tactile and you can drag things by touching them. it seems affected.

every time I open the debugger it opens to the same tiny dimensions, every time I have to drag it open to read the text. it seems like it should follow the "yesterday's weather" principle and open to the last size it was set to.

The canvas its set in is realtively small on my screen, and I don't run at a high resolution, sometimes I can open the window enough to read all the text. Since the window does not respond to a dragging select (it doesn't scroll the text when the mouse pointer goes past the edge) you have to open it enough to view all the text if you want to select all the text.

It should probably also have a buffer, or multiple buffers that acted sort of like the windows clipboard,so it could "remember" the past few results.

I will rework it as soon as I work through my current 2 projects, which are reviewing the javascript functions and the remond components.

[kentyler]

I've tried changing some fundamental things, like font sizes or window sizes in the debugger, I even tried deliberately introducing an error into the code and restarting the server, but none of my changes is every reflected when I call the debugger window up. I'm changing debugger/debugger.lzx .... I must be missing something simple.

[antun]

every time I open the debugger it opens to the same tiny dimensions, every time I have to drag it open to read the text. it seems like it should follow the "yesterday's weather" principle and open to the last size it was set to.

I believe this will be fixed in the next release of the LPS - it's been mentioned already. The debugger won't "remember" where it was last time, but instead you'll be able to position it declaratively in the code.

For now, you can set the debugger as follows:


<canvas debug="true" oninit="debug.setWidth( 450 );
debug.setHeight( 350 );
debug.setX( 10 );
debug.setY( 10 );">
</canvas>



It should probably also have a buffer, or multiple buffers that acted sort of like the windows clipboard,so it could "remember" the past few results.


And so it does. Use the up arrow on your keyboard, but this only works with the Flash 6 player (that limitation is out of our hands unfortunately).

-Antun

[ows]

Originally posted by kentyler
[B]Let me try to be more specific.
The debugger is drawin with a kind of exagerrated 3-d effect and a dark color. Following Tufft's rule, most of this is "ink" that does not need to be on the screen to provide the functionality that is there. It reminds me of some of the things proposed in Togazzini where you have computer screens that are tactile and you can drag things by touching them. it seems affected.


These are useful criticisms. I will pass them on the designer (and make a note of the missing features).


I've tried changing some fundamental things, like font sizes or window sizes in the debugger, I even tried deliberately introducing an error into the code and restarting the server, but none of my changes is every reflected when I call the debugger window up. I'm changing debugger/debugger.lzx .... I must be missing something simple.


This is a known bug; I don't know yet whether it will be fixed for 1.1. Try including something like this in your app (I haven't tested this yet) to force the compiler to notice that it needs to recompile the debugger:

<include href="debugger/debugger.lzx"/>

[hqm]

+ The next release has a <debug> tag which you can use to specify the initial dimensions of the window


<debug width="500" height="500" x="400" y="200" />


But for now you have to use the oninit mechanism that Antun mentions.

+ The ability to "select all" on the debugger output text, or do a dragging select, and paste it to the clipboard is on the wish list. For 'historical' reasons, the scrolling mechanism used in the debugger is not the same mechanism used by the redmond scrollbar. The ability to use the native Flash 5 text scrolling API was added just in the last release, so that portion of the debugger has not been written to use it. On my list of things to do is to see if using the new text scrolling API improves the performance
of the debugger output window.

+ The scrolling should be working for both the vertical and horizontal scrollbar. You can click anywhere on either side of the "thumb" to scroll up or down a page, or you can drag the thumb to scroll anywhere in the history.

+ to get around the bug whereby the debugger does not recompile automatically when it's source is modified, you can modify your test app source file using "touch" or just modifying it by adding a new line, and that will force the compiler to recompile the debugger.lzx file as well.