Scenario: Explore Morphic construction/rendering

[LinqLover]

• Roles: System learner (understand the entire process), system expert (find a specific bug)
• Goal: Explore the construction/toolbuilding process or the rendering/drawing process of a complex morph
• Examples:
  • ToolBuilder build: (Inspector on: #(1 2 3))
  • Project current world imageForm
  • Localize the text run that causes an invalidation in a NewParagraph during the setting inside a TextComposer (see Fix rendering of embedded objects in CompositionScanner babylonian-programming-smalltalk#55).
• Problems:
  1. Only linear stepping possible, no back-in-time display of prior construction/rendering states, no binary search to trace back certain changes to certain stack frames.
  2. Irrelevant stack frames distract understanding of the relevant process (e.g., Canvas clipping, Morph iteration).
  3. Intermediate result is hardly accessible: Need to reevaluate aMorph imageForm for every (relevant) step or to navigate to aCanvas form > "screenshot" and update the inspector manually (bug in Form >> #=).
• Possible solutions:
  1. :
     • display the entire trace at once
     • step into details later in the context of the original event state
  2. filter trace by method category/class/package
  3. similar to printbugger:
     • overview of single drawing steps of #imageForm (maybe sandboxed) from which the user can jump to the responsible stack frame
     • slider for efficient time-traveling (maybe fish-eye slider)