History

One day, my mom asked me to observe when there is iPhone 4 sale in Apple Store, their online website. You know, China is popular with iPhone 4, so that most of the time the phone is not available. Then I must watch that sale page again and again. That’s boring, and doesn’t meet programmer’s style. So I decided to write one tool help me do this job automatically. That is, Inspector.

About the Logo

That strange characters you have seen in the logo, people call them leet. Leet is an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet. The logo’s meaning is Inspector.

Inspiration

In respect of how to show inspect an element in page, I influenced by Firebug mostly, even my project’s name. Firebug is a great work, I also referenced some JavaScript code in it.

I will appreciate Beautiful Soup and BSXPath too. With Beautiful Soup, I could parse bad HTML/XHTML markup comfortable. The Python standard library is also good, but it’s too strict. BSXPath is an extension for Beautiful Soup, so I can find an element by XPath.

This project is hosted by Google App Engine. Thank you, Google guys.

Development

This project has been open source, the source code is hosted by GitHub: https://github.com/xiaogaozi/inspector. Submit patch is always welcome. If you have any problem or suggestion, please visit this page: https://github.com/xiaogaozi/inspector/issues.

One More Thing

Special thanks to my dear girl friend. Without her support, I couldn’t accomplish this work.