As far as I can tell from our users feedback, the Immediate Window was the most welcomed feature in the short life of awDebugger, and I’m not surprised, as it is the one that saves more time when you’re debugging. But…

The truth is that it doesn’t take much time to get used to a time-saver feature and as soon as you got used to it, you start to see how it can be improved to save even more time. We Clarion developers are a bit lazy, and I’m not the exception to that rule so… why should I copy code from the source viewer and paste it into the Immediate Window to evaluate it if we could just tell the debugger to display the results in a tooltip?

That’s how the smart tooltips became a new item on my to-do list for awDebugger, and I am happy to tell you that they are already implemented and will be publicly available in the upcoming v1.1!

Here’s how they work:

• if you place the mouse cursor over a variable name for some time, a tooltip will appear displaying the variable name, data type and current value (for the current thread).
• if the mouse cursor is over a Clarion equate, the value of this equate will be displayed in the tooltip.
• you can also have smart tooltips evaluating more complex Clarion expressions. Just select the text you want to evaluate in the source code viewer, and place the mouse cursor over the selected text.

I hope you enjoy it! I expect this and the rest of awDebugger v1.1 features to be available later this week.

We are currently finishing the new release of awDebugger. Our goal with this product is to shorten the time you spend debugging, and in this release we have added two new features that hopefully will help to achieve our goal:

• a Watch Window, for keeping a list of expressions to be evaluated at each step.
• Smart Tooltips, which displays the value and data type of the variables under the mouse cursor in the source code viewer.

I expect these and other features that were requested by our users to be publicly available later this week.