elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

["Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey guys,

Continuing the list of awesome GTK tools is a tool that allows fiddling
with live GTK2 and GTK3 UIs. It's called GtkParasite and has been around
for quite a while, but was ported to GTK3 only recently.

For designers it means that you can push the pixels in the real app in real
time until you're satisfied and then just show the values to a dev. No more
recompiling things over and over to change one margin value over and over.
Edit away!

For developers... I'd better quote the official
website<http://chipx86.github.com/gtkparasite/>
:

Developing and debugging UIs can be a pain. When something goes wrong, it's
> not always obvious why. You can waste hours writing logging statements only
> to find out that a widget is in the wrong container, or an attribute wasn't
> set correctly.
>
> Developing isn't much better either. Ever spend time writing temporary
> code just to test a new feature, code you know you're going to throw away
> in an hour, and yet you end up spending the next 20 minutes debugging your
> temporary code? Sucks, doesn't it?
>
> What your program really needs is a good Parasite infestation.
>

Here's a good introductory screencast that explains the Parasite workflow:
http://chipx86.github.com/gtkparasite/video/parasite-intro.avi

Binary packages for Ubuntu can be obtained from
https://launchpad.net/~phurley/+archive/gtkparasite
The PPA currently provides packages only for Quantal. I've contacted the
author and asked to copy the packages to Precise series. In the meanwhile,
Quantal packages work just fine when manually installed on Precise/Luna.

Happy hacking!
-- 
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff
OS architect @ elementary