Alfred Van Hoek, Björn Eiríksson and Thomas Tempelmann
The application you are using here utilizes the "Plugin Analyser" plugin and other plugins, and retrieves information from the classes, controls, methods, events and eventInstances from a plugin. This application also obtains the info from the resource fork of the plugin that is being viewed.
After starting up plunger several options are available, open a plugin, open the REALbasic plugins folder, open intrinsic REALbasic plugins. When you choose the plugins folder a window will appear listing all of the plugins that are residing in the plugins folder.
Double clicking a particular plugin will "open" the plugin and a window appears indicating what classes, controls and global methods are defined in the plugin.
You can also open all of the plugins ("catalog"), scan for conflicts, listing only plugins for a particular platform, and so on. To get the hang of this application, just try it out.
An important aspect of this application is that it can be used to retrieve additional information if a text resource is available in the plugin file. Plugins that come from Einhugur software do have them (info) in most cases; help files for e.g. the HTMLrendering plugin, only reside in the plugin file. In this case you would need this application to appreciate the rendering plugin.
Vice versa, plugin developers/authors can use RBplugin Plunger to add help files to their plugin, and even a non-plugin author has the ability to add or change those texts. For this you have to set the "user mode" under "Edit" to "Plugin Author". Then if you have a method clicked in the listbox, you then activate the lower pane (EditField) with a mouse click or tabbing. Any key pressed on the keyboard will open up an editor window, you can write in. Closing it will ask whether you would want to save changes.
This setup allows a plugin author to ship the plugin with all the info in one file.
There are more features you can turn of, turn on. RBplugin Plunger will create a preference file at the same level as RBplugin Plunger. RBplugin Plunger is at the moment a PPC-only application, also because most of the plugins are available for the classic environment. Remember, this application is not finished and in the near future also a carbon version will be available, stay tuned... (see about RBPlugin Plunger).
The complete source of this application is available and is open source. For information of where to get further info, please open the about RBPlugin Plunger.
Upon quitting: Several warning windows will appear when quitting RBplugin Plunger; you can change that behavior by opening the preferences file under "Edit".
