The bug with XML parsing I mentioned in the last post caused me days of grief. I’ve been trying to find the cause of that bug (off and on, albeit) for months. It turns out the fix was very simple. All that’s left is creating the breakpoint manager and then MacGDBp will be released. Hopefully by the end of next week v1.0 will be in your hands!
In this post, I’m going to talk about icon design. One of the ideas I had for this was to use the PHP logo in some way — but using logos in an icon is tacky. Instead, I decided to keep the purple of the PHP logo. Since PHP is internet-based, I decided to take inspiration from the words “World Wide Web” and I drew out a globe. So at this point, I had a purple globe. Now I had to decide what to design on top of the globe (because a purple globe only conveys internet connectivity). For this I really saw two options: a screwdriver and wrench or a toolbox. On Mac OS X, the screwdriver-wrench combination usually implies configuration (c.f. Color Sync Utility, Raid Utility, configure toolbar item, etc.). Debugging is not in the same vein as configuring, so I ruled that one out. The toolbox, while unused on Mac OS X (except for the Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit), seemed like a good fit. I should also note that I thought about drawing a yellow spray can — akin to the debug icon in Xcode — but quickly dismissed it for being too similar to Xcode.
This is the paper sketch I first did of the icon:
Then I recreated the sketches digitally. You can see how the design evolved here.
The final step (not outlined above) was adding drop shadow to the entire icon. This is the final design:
Hopefully the next post about MacGDBp will be the release announcement!