1077058 - Add a "layer tint" debugging option

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Graphics: Layers, defect)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Currently if we want to tell what elements are on what layer (while looking at the device) the only real option we have is to turn on layer borders, but I find that kind of hard to use. What I would prefer is to have each layer get a different color tint. This would be very similar to how paint flashing works, except that the color would be assigned to a layer and dumped as part of the layer tree. That way you could look in the layer dump, see "tint=red" on a layer, and then look at the screen to see where the red-tinted layer is. I think we could probably even get rid of layer borders entirely if we do this.

Comment 1

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

Sounds like a good idea. I would suggest hashing the layer pointer into a color. That way the color would flash as we recreated the Layer object. It wouldn't take any storage either.

Comment 2

[Kan-Ru Chen [:kanru] (UTC+9)]

You could also use LayerScope. It slows down the phone quite a bit so is not suitable to use with things that need real time interaction.

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

I just tried LayerScope for the first time (I meant to before but forgot...) and it does a superset of what I wanted for this bug, so I see no reason to implement this really. I agree that it may not be that suitable for realtime interaction but I don't think I've needed that yet.