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Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2012 8:09 pm
by Fred
[19:07] * CheetahToo misses BenFenner

^ 1 hour ago! <3

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2012 7:47 pm
by BenFenner
I'll be back as soon as possible. Right now I'm getting tons and TONS or work done that has been on the back burner for a while, both personally and at my paying job. As soon as I get over this hump I'll be back in full force.

As a side note, AEM has finally replaced their aged data log visualization software. And as luck would have it, it looks very much like what I envisioned OLV should look like when the UI overhaul is done (albeit with more cruft and some stuff we don't need/want). Comments? Particularly about having the trace data labels and colors taking up horizontal real-estate.

Obviously we have way more resolution represented here than on your typical netbook, etc.

Image

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2012 9:28 pm
by Fred
Thoughts:
  • Love the rulers on the left, ideal format, can grow as it needs to, nice and compact.
  • Love the floating minimalist colour, name, unit, value boxes per section JUST as I said they should be.
  • Like the grid background, maybe optional and/or configurable colour, though.
  • Don't care much about the gauges and bar graphs and large numbers at the bottom, but they're obviously configurable, and if they're configurable, then it's a nice bonus touch, but certainly not a priority.
  • Blue "get value from here" line is not centred and is likely draggable, I like the idea of that, then you don't have to decide if you pull values from centre, left, right. Maybe abstract that concept and allow multiple "sample points" with stacked values in the id boxes with matching colour to the sample line?
  • I tend to think that the list of possible fields should be only visible when hitting "add" and I see no place to hit add, however, thinking about it again, why not just make clicking the existing values "add" and also cause X to pop up for each one, then they stay minimal most of the time. I can see the value in having the list present, but our list will be MUCH longer. So perhaps the "select" list and the "display list (right) should be separate concepts? Maybe they are in the AEM app?
  • There is too much wasted space along the top and bottom with the grey bars at the top and green ones per section. The green ones appear useless? If you had a neat and app-specific scroll bar on the right side like that, it'd be good for vertical scroll/zoom. Is it mac osx that has up and down both at the bottom? How about up and down both at the bottom, + and - there too, and a smaller scroll bar section.
  • Tabs at the top, maybe on a "if 2+ then show" basis. Saleae does allow multiple logs loaded, and we only really have a memory limit, not a code one, so why not. Tab space should be reliquished if only one is being shown if that's done.
Thanks for posting it, glad you like it without obscuring perfectly good trace area. Hooray, it appears that we agree! :-)

Fred.

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2012 10:01 pm
by BenFenner
I'll spare the details. Long story short, I'm pretty sure I'm wading back into OLV development.
In the next coming days I hope to get my feet wet again by tackling some of the stuff on the tracker.
It is good to be back.

Can't let EMStudio have all the glory!

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2012 11:20 pm
by Fred
BenFenner wrote:Can't let EMStudio have all the glory!
Amen! :-)

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Sat Aug 04, 2012 3:52 pm
by BenFenner
Well, some good things are happening. When I took a break, I thought the UI changes were next. That is going to be a lot of work and a real learning opportunity. But when I got back I found there were plenty of things to do before that happens.

This is what I've gotten done in the last two weeks since getting back into things:
  • Fast forward and slow down for playback work exponentially now instead of linearly.
  • Fling inertia and graph playing work at the same time.
  • The fling inertia timer no longer runs all the time.
  • Fixed an array index out of bounds error when leaving full screen mode while the graph is playing.
  • The Frames Per Second display got serious work. It gets dedicated placement, updates 4x as fast, and is actually accurate now. :)
  • Changed all painting from AWT style override of "paint()" to Swing style override of "paintComponent()". This and the FPS display are in preparation of the performance overhaul for the next release.
  • The behavior of the media-style control buttons got much more intuitive, and many more control buttons were added.
  • There is now a "reload file" option where you can load the last opened file quickly.

Right now the default color selection service is getting simplified, and in the future will become much better. For now at least it is not as bad as it was before, and better bones are there.

I'm looking forward to doing the performance profiling. I'm having second thoughts about doing that before the UI overhaul though, as I'm thinking that at least some of that work might end up pointless once the UI overhaul happens. The UI overhaul might also fix a couple performance things in and of itself (like extra paint events). I'm starting to think the UI overhaul might need to happen first. We'll see.

I'll get a current screen shot up to show the new buttons later.

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:30 pm
by Fred
Good work, Ben! :-) Just that little division scale bug to fix and it's a regression-free improvement!

Re performance or UI, I think it's important to get a streamlined efficient data flow through the app and to the screen up front. Then you can add things and performance test on the fly to check for regression of speed. As it stands if you complicate it with the new UI (which will have more aspects), then you'll not notice it get slower, as it's already slow, and might make making it fast harder. Right now you've got a pretty simple view and it should be straight forward to optimise. Not necessarily true post adding bells/whistles/rulers/scales/etc.

Image

I edited that pic to fix the positioning of the traces.

Fred.

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 4:42 pm
by Fred
I fixed the scaling issue, and a few more, so we're now 89% complete for 0.0.3 of OLV!

http://issues.freeems.org/roadmap_page. ... ject_id=15

To go:
  • Ben's clean up
  • My YAML + Mike's JSON
  • Remove duplicate quit on mac
  • Make colours get chosen at click time
And we're ready to release!

I just have to make sure the release services are functional and do some clean up of my own in the source base. I'll probably do this release from Madrid again. Bug me if I don't push the tag.

Fred.

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 12:56 am
by Fred
Ben, when you're done with quit and colours, you can pause, and I'll do a code review, then you can do some cleaning up with me observing. Once that's all hunky dory you can go to a dev branch and I'll finish my work on the file stuff and eventually release. I put a new issue in for my code review as a child/rereq of the clean up one.

Re: BenFenner's OLV development diary (comments welcome).

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 11:31 pm
by Fred
Colours are fixed and MUCH better now. Anything further has to be called "fine tuning" :-) Well done Ben!

Fred.