If you don’t know what a variable is, or what debugging means, please look away - you might hurt yourself.
Let me introduce you to Apple’s Instruments, another amazing semi-hidden application that comes bundled with OS X Developer Tools (yes, I’m looking at you, Quartz Composer). It isn’t quite hidden, it actually lives under /Developer/Application; I’ve just never heard of it! But a few couple of minutes have blown me completely away. Just when I though It wasn’t possible to love the Apple any more.
Instruments is a super-complete debugging tool that allows you to really focus on application behaviour rather than code. It’s also an amazing software and hardware testing tool, with several modules that can measure everything from CPU time consumption, to UI activity or directories-only I/O. You can use it to run newly created instances of your apps or even by attaching it to running applications.
It is a pretty hardcore application in an extremely pleasant package - the kind with which Apple has pampered us, developers, for quite some time. And it makes me think: with products like this, what the hell have all the other development developers been doing? I mean, I’m still debugging the same way I was when I first started programming
Here are some more lovely screenies. Enjoy.
Let me update you with the latest news about pynpp.
I’ve been working on the internal console up until now, and I think it’s pretty decent. My first purpose was to be able to debug plugins trough a nice interface, that embedded well with Notepad++, but as the development went on I decided to build a proper console docked on Notepad++.
This console is quite stable, though not fully tested. For the future expect some colouring, maybe syntax colouring. I think it’s not important for now.
Also, I’m documenting the entire Python module that pynpp builds inside Notepad++ - it’s called pynpp (original, huh?). Here are those docs. This module will carry all the objects needed to create plugins in Python for Notepad++.
If you want a test drive, you can always download the latest DLL build, directly from the SVN repository through HTTP right over here.
Finally, here’s a screenie from the latest build:
Recently, I was thinking of improving QuickText to its next version, featuring better configuration files, mirror and randomly ordered hotspots. When I finally decided to get my hands dirty, I found myself trying to catch up with the C/C++ code I had done a few months ago - its readability was awful. Notepad++ allows plugins through DLL files that use the Windows messaging system to communicate with the application - mainly written in C ou C++. It all works beautifully but not as elegant and as productive as one would wish.
Today I started the pynpp project on Google Code, a plugin that offers Python plugins to Notepad++. It will feature an API for better and faster programming of plugins, and of course provide all the wonders of Python.
Also, QuickText will be completelly rewritten in Python and the project will be moving to Google Code.
[ The pynpp Google Code Project Page ]
