One of my colleagues is teaching a class on Cocoa and iPhone development, and it happens to fit nicely into my schedule. Today he was showing different bits of Inteface Builder and XCode, and I paused to ponder the Research Assistant:
It got me thinking that a Mozilla version of this would be great as a sidebar extension, which followed me around as I navigated through Mozilla source on the web, found in blogs, pastebin, bugzilla, etc. I’d love to be able to have the ability to right-click nsIFoo anywhere (not just in MXR) and get all this sort of info I’d love to be able to do it for Contract IDs too, oh and class members, and static functions, and…We have the power.
One of my goals for the winter/spring is to finish DXR and roll that into the Mozilla Developer Resource Kit. But what about an extension like this in addition? What would you want to see it do?
2 Comments
Yes!
I love the idea!
Like you describe, having the ability to roll over functions or classes and get some aggregated documentation would be fantastic. I think it’s one of the biggest hurdle’s for newcomer’s.
As a student in the iPhone course learning a new language and platform I find tools like the Research Assistant invaluable when penetrating into a new environment, I have been able to throw together some working code for both OSX and the iPhone (albeit simple applications) with less bashing of the head!
If I can help out this summer let me know Dave!
dave, if I had not told you before, I would like to contribute in this project even though you know how little I know but I know how will this project help me in the long run and soften the learning curve for students in the coming Fall
poke me by the end of April to get my hands to help putting it together but you can meanwhile get me for testing it
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