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pmuellr is Patrick Mueller

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

web beep()

I've blogged before about making use of audible feedback for debugging. One of the things I'd like to eventually get around to doing for WebKit's Web Inspector is to add first class audible breakpoints. Just like you can "click" on a line to add a breakpoint where the debugger will stop the next time that location is reached in your program, an audible breakpoint wouldn't stop, but play a sound clip instead.

There's some infrastructure that needs to be added to Web Inspector before tackling that feature, so I figured I'd go on the cheap instead. Using HTML5's new audio element, I created a beep() function which just plays a sound clip when invoked. Wherever you might put a console.log() invocation, you can put a beep() invocation instead. Actually, I created a boop() function also; a single sound is rather boring.

Of course, having to modify your source for debugging is so 1980's. So my beep() functions can also act as wrappers. Pass them a function, and they'll return a new function you can use as a replacement of the original function. When that new function is invoked, it beeps (or boops, or whatever), then invokes the original function. The new function also contains a reference to the old function, so you can unwrap as needed. Using this, you can augment addressable functions from within your REPL-y JavaScript debugger console, without having to muck with your source.

The sample code is up here: web-beep. Seems to run fine in Safari and FireFox 3.5.