Hey y'all,
Our very own lucasr has built a cool thing called dspec. You can read
lucasr's words at http://lucasr.org/2014/09/08/introducing-dspec/, but
in a nut-shell it's an Android library that renders certain design
invariants (like margins and baselines) on top of Android Views.
lucasr's post has a call to action to use dspec to help Firefox for
Android development. I'd like to help by getting it building for
developers, but there are a few questions that I'd like to get some
feedback on first.
1) How do you enable it?
Rendering the design spec requires modifying either a View's onDraw
method or adding a DesignSpecFrameLayout somewhere into the view
hierarchy. It's the kind of thing that you either bake in and disable
until you want it, or you add only during development. Making changes
like this only during development is a great way to make sure a tool
isn't available when you want it.
2) Is this a thing that's only available on developer builds? In
Nightly (debug) builds? More generally?
We have a lot of freedom here, but shipping debug code up to release is
not a good idea; and shipping different view hierarchies for different
configurations is likely to cause future pain. Also, be aware that
Proguard is a harsh master and will strip anything that's not being used
or explicitly annotated as important.
My ask: can folks suggest a technical path towards making dspec a part
of our application, available when we want it, but not always shipped?
I imagine lucasr has a model in mind, but I can't think of another
Android library or tool that pulls this off.
Finally, those who were dialed in to the mobile-frontend meeting on
Friday will know that I totally missed the boat on dspec. I swear that
I read lucasr's post, but I interpreted it's goal completely
differently: I thought it was an alternate representation for defining
your layout, rather than an annotation of the design invariants of your
layout. Mea culpa, and I'm sorry for wasting everybody's time.
Yours,
Nick
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