Quick update and introducing 'Da skinator'

Yeap, been few days already, but quite hectic ones, I did rushed a few small yet handy features but I wont write about them yet as I'm also working on a small video that shows them and some of the known stuff, hopefully within the next few days will be ready. And yes, spend quite some time paying code debt and sanitizing some code in the web workbench, work is not finished but it was getting out of hands already.

So what's that 'skinator' thingy? well, before going into that you have to pronounce it right, it is like the old Addams Family pinball when it says 'the mamushka', so sounds something like 'Daaa Skiiiinaator'!

Ok, now we know how to say it lets get into the explanation, sometime ago, about a year or so It occurred to me that because the scraper component in Murphy disassembles the user interface I then have a lot of information on how to reconstruct it, so what good is that?
Well, product customization is not a rare thing, co branding and stuff that modifies the original application and produces a custom version of the application has it's uses, too abstract so far? ok, let's look at a screenshot

The popup window shows a reconstructed version of the UI from the information the scraper got from the application (please be gentle, I spend just 2 hours today to do it so it is rather crude at the moment)
You could try out how would it look if you change the font size, colors and so, even cooler, as you watch the whole flow you could see how much of the application would look if you change for example the palette.
The point is that it would allow you to quickly preview mass changes in your application without the need for recompiling or even running it to see how it would look, for that it could then be zipped and sent to the customer for getting early feedback.

It is not a trivial thing to do but it is not that difficult either, anyway I don't have any immediate plans to move forward that functionality but wanted to show other kind of things that are possible to do once we have the model of the application.

Hope next post is about the video being ready.

-Mat