Logic 2.4.11

[markgarrison]

2.4.11 Download Links

• Windows
• Linux
• MacOS [x86_64]
• MacOS [Apple Silicon]

Welcome to the 2.4.11 release! This software release contains a significant UI refresh to core parts of the application, and we would love to get your feedback.

First, we’ve added a small toolbar to the top center of the application, centrally locating the capture button, as well as adding buttons for measurements, timing markers, and analyzers. This should make these features both easier to discover and faster to access.

Second, we’ve done a light reorganization of the sidebar. One of the big pain points of our existing sidebar was the difficulty in organizing the size of different sections within one sidebar. To eliminate this problem, we’ve split the timing markers, measurements, and notes into their own sidebar sections. One possible drawback is that it’s no longer possible to view these sections at the same time. We would love to get your feedback on this!

Third, we’ve relocated the device settings from the sidebar into a new flyout menu accessed from the top left of the application. Users who’ve used our older Logic 1.x software will notice a similarity with our older software. The main goal here is to elevate the device settings above the rest of the application features; the device settings button is now the largest item in the application.

Fourth, we’ve invested in the device list menu. The bottom left of the application now houses the connected device list. This does a few things. First, without any interaction, it helps inform users if they have a device connected to the software or not. This makes it easier to tell if a device is connected and working with the application. Although the software is typically used with only one device at a time, for applications where multiple devices are connected at once, the device list menu makes it easier to access those devices. In this specific case, the add session button will also prompt the user for which device they should use, making it easier for the user to manage recording with multiple devices connected.

This release also contains a handful of small UI fixes to dialogs and notifications.

Lastly, we’d like to address the purpose of these changes, and what we’ve been working on at Saleae. As you may have noticed, the pace of public facing software updates has slowed. For more than a year, the team’s focus has been squarely on developing the next generation Saleae product, and most of that work will not be visible until that product is released. We’re not ready to make more details available, but we would like to share that the Logic 2 software will continue to be the central tool for all our products, and we’ll continue to invest in new functionality that benefits existing and future products.

We would love to hear from you! Please let us know what you think of these UI changes, and report any issues that we may have missed.

Improvements

• New toolbar

• Device settings moved to the top-left of the application

• Small sidebar changes

• New device list menu

• Fixed display issues with several dialogs and notifications

[rei_vilo]

Thank you for the news.

Strange, page Logic analyzer software from Saleae still downloads the previous release Logic-2.4.10-linux-x64.AppImage for Linux, not the latest Logic-2.4.11-linux-x64.AppImage.

Good luck with the development of the next-gen Saleae analyser!

[rei_vilo]

I am not a big fan of the new toolbar eating vertical space.

Channel D7 is partially visible on 2.4.11…

…contrary to 2.4.10 where all the channels are fully visible.

Most screens are wider today, e.g. 16/9, so placing the toolbar on the right pane would save vertical space. Another option would be hiding the menu bar and/or the window title in full screen mode

[P.Jaquiery]

This doesn’t seem to be an automatic update. There is no prompt to update when Logic2 starts. Even the About dialog says that 2.4.10 is “up-to-date”.

Give rei_vilo’s comments about extra vertical space consumed by the new toolbar I’m somewhat ambivalent about updating anyhow. As a sample point: I never run Logic2 full screen because I have too much other stuff I want to keep tabs on. Maybe I need a bigger desk and a third monitor?

[markgarrison]

Thanks @P.Jaquiery and @rei_vilo for the feedback!

Two quick things:

1. We disabled auto-update for 1 week to collect a bit of feedback here before everyone gets the update at once.

2. Efficient use of vertical space is very important for us, but I noticed it looks like your channels are their original height. We have a feature buried in the application I wanted to check to see if you’ve used before or if you think it solves this problem well.

This feature will automatically resize all channels to attempt to fit them into the current window height. It will give priority to analog channels, but otherwise will split up space evenly.

Since adding this as a minor nice-to-have feature, I use it constantly. We’re planning to have this feature on by default as automatic organization, which will handle resizing your channels whenever you add or remove channels, or resize the window. The feature can be switched off to go back to completely manual organization.

Could both of you test out this feature and let me know what you think?

Specifically, is your main issue here that you just need all channels on-screen at once, or is the need for maximum channel height equally important?

Personally, for digital channels, I don’t really care about channel height, and like to keep the digital channels short since extra height doesn’t really add any detail for me. Analog channels, on the other hand, I like to keep as tall as possible.

[P.Jaquiery]

Hi @markgarrison. I use the channel resize frequently and very useful it is too. I pretty much always set digital channels to minimum height - as you say, there’s nothing to be gained by vertically increasing the digital channel height. When I’m using analog channels I frequently resize and zoom individual channels depending on what is important at the time.

I usually have just the channels turned on I’m interested in then make the application window as small as it will go vertically without getting a scroll bar in the channel pane. That lets me use as much screen real estate for other stuff as I can. I pretty much always have a terminal application open watching the debug port on the DUT and always have a browser open to keep an eye on email, chat, build system, … . I fairly often have other analyzers (USB, USB-C PD, …) open on the same screen. My second screen is usually dedicated to the IDE I’m using - about the only type of app I ever run full screen.

I’m not so interested in an automatic resize. Usually that will wreck the size of analog channels I’ve already set to what I want to be. If I really want to resize all analog channels (implicit assumption: digital channels stay as small as possible here) I can use the “Fit all Rows to Window Height” channel popup menu option.

Now, if you can figure out how to get the application menu bar into the application’s title bar …

Anyway, just one sample point, I hope helpful.

[markgarrison]

@P.Jaquiery

Now, if you can figure out how to get the application menu bar into the application’s title bar …

We’re on it, I was supposed to do that this week but I’m currently working on a big Linux issue instead. I will get back to that soon.

Specifically, we’re removing the bottom right menu, and adding & updating items in the native application menu.

[Collin]

I don’t mind the new look at all. Sure, the top thing takes up a little bit of screen real estate but it isn’t a big deal to me. The fly out device settings seem decent too. I have a QHD (well, 2560x1600) monitor and Logic works well on a screen like that. Perhaps that’s why I don’t care about the stuff on the top - I have enough pixels tall that it isn’t an issue. The pixel pitch is small enough that I can just make all the graphs a little smaller and still see them. This could potentially be something to consider - what screen resolution are you really shooting for? At 1600 pixels tall the center icons aren’t a big distraction. On a 1024x768 monitor they probably would be. Usually people target 1920x1080 or larger these days. I can’t say how it looks on a 1080p monitor, maybe the icons scale down and are always the same relative size on screen? Anyway, just ramblings to maybe consider.

I did a test where I ramped up the capture buffer to 16GB (I have 32GB of RAM) and let it fly for a while. Got up to around 9.8GB of capture then started to scroll around. It worked for a while then crashed. Of course, I hadn’t started it from the console so all I knew is that the program disappeared. So, I reran it from the command line and did the same thing - captured a lot then started to zoom out so I could see the entire capture, drag around to pan, etc. Got it to crash again. Here is what the command line output said:

Crash reporting enabled. Machine ID: 61129137-d5ff-409f-bb04-4fd314984c78
@saleae/electron/main: renderer process died { reason: ‘crashed’, exitCode: 133 }
sendToFrame() failed: Error: Render frame was disposed before WebFrameMain could be accessed
Attempting to call a function in a renderer window that has been closed or released.
Function provided here: bundle.js:871:5498
Remote event names: close

Latest Ubuntu (23.10), I7 processor 13th gen, 32GB of RAM, have a 3D discrete card but wasn’t using it, just built in 13th gen Intel video. I was testing just with the demo data, two digital channels, same two channels analog. CAN analyzer running on both digital channels.

[BitBob]

I’m also not a fan of losing the vertical real-estate or adding extra ‘clutter’ to the UI. Could the new UI elements (optionally) be a semi-transparent, in a floating/dockable overlay (unless in mouse focus), and/or allow the extra toolbar to be hidden?

Likewise, the original upper right ‘play’ (Start) button has been in a convenient and easy to find location, and might take a while to re-train my muscle memory if it is permanently relocated. Does it really needed to move vs. just adding the redundant access to the other ‘harder to find for new users’ elements?

Meanwhile, I’m okay with moving ‘device’ to the left vs. right (as it isn’t as frequently used anyway), so it makes some sense to increase its prominence in the UI. Of all the items being added to the top (Start, Analyzers, Measurements and Timing Markers) – I think maybe Timing Markers (and possibly Measurements) would be the most ‘on-the-fly’ (dynamically) used features, while Start and Analyzers could probably stay on the side bar only? So, if reducing list to just these 1-2 features, perhaps they can be re-incorporated into the new UI layout in a way that doesn’t affect vertical real estate at all (??)

Ultimately, I think it is nice to make more readily visible the ‘basic’ UI elements like timing markers and measurements, but I don’t think redundant icons for these features should come at an expense of more clutter/compressed vertical real-estate on the UI. If you really want to add a more ‘newbie’ friendly UI “in your face at the top of the screen” look, then please provide an ‘expert mode’ view where some of the extra UI ‘clutter’ can be hidden, if desired

For example, how about this (alternative) layout –

• Put the Start/Play icon back on the right
• Swapped the Timing Markers and Measurements (preserve original order)
  – Could also swap ‘Notes’ with ‘Extensions’ if you want to preserve more of original UI layout
• Eliminated the ‘waste’ on the top tool bar (I think everything on side bar is fine)
  – Tool tips with top-level exposed icon should be enough to help any newbies navigate the UI and find the ‘Timing Markers’, etc. now

(you can realign the side bar icon spacing as desired):

[timreyes]

@BitBob Thanks for the UI/UX feedback! I’ll share that with the rest of the team here.

@Collin Ouch… sorry for those crashes and thanks for sharing your Machine ID with us. We believe we’ve identified the root cause for this issue, and are working on releasing a fix.

This is the bug we’re working on fixing now.

Memory limitation on Linux

Hi @Collin, Thanks a lot for your fast reply. I unfortunately can also reproduce without any analyzer turned on. Would you have suggestions about debug data collection to be able to track further down why this error triggers? Regards.

[mao]

As already evident from the discussion here, there will newer be a layout that fits all.

Is it difficult to make it customizeable (don’t know the inner workings of your GUI framework). preferably like most IDE’s where you just drag stuff around and let it snap. I.e. let me drag the top toolbar to the right/left/bottom and let it snap there, even more advanced allow me to unpin it and let it float.

In my IDE i have different layouts depending on the current task. And i just drag the elements where i want them.
I imagine i would do the same in logic if possible. Sometimes i look at several signals and want vertical space, sometimes i am implementing a HLA, and want to see the terminal output alongside the trigger menu etc. etc.

[rei_vilo]

Thank you for the hint of the Fit all Rows to Window Height.

I like the design of BitBob, with a clear separation of the trace (centre) from the commands (right pane).

Vertical real estate remains an issue when I am on the field debugging on a 11" or 13" screen with a tablet (e.g. Microsoft Surface) or laptop.

I think there are two things here:

1. an analysis of the most frequently used commands, and
2. a tentative new design.

Could we keep the best of both? Take the results of the analysis (record button, analysers, time markers), and implement them on the former design (on top of the right pane)?

[BitBob]

FYI –

Here’s another slight tweak – adding more useful short-cut buttons to ‘Add Single Marker’ and ‘Add Marker Pair’ – as those are more frequently used and would be useful to have directly accessible in the top-level UI; thus these new icons will directly add the corresponding marker/measurement, rather than opening up a side-bar view / list of existing elements already added.

If you think it is useful, you could also add one for Analyzer – but it wasn’t as straight forward, as there isn’t an existing ‘Add New Analyzer’ – you still need to select which one you want from a list (and that operation isn’t likely done as often as adding Timing Markers or Measurements).

Finally, depending on how the scrolling of the timeline might overlap/interfere with these buttons, they could be made ‘semi-transparent’ unless moused-over, or just just move them to the top 3 buttons on the side bar and visually ‘grouped’ together as a set of ‘add’ buttons under the Play/Start button above the other ‘menu’ buttons. Also, they could be moveable and/or hidden, so people to tweak the looks to their own taste (if you think it is worth the extra effort to do that – I’d rather have a horizontal cursor on the analog channels myself ). Meanwhile, I do now think these could be a useful addition to the UI, and not redundant with the existing side bar menu.

I put icons in both places – just to visually prototype the idea:

[P.Jaquiery]

I got an automatic update to 2.4.12 (no announcement at this stage?) with the new UI.

It messes with my muscle memory!

If I were coming to it fresh I’m not sure if the new UI would appeal more or less than the old UI. I think the start button in the top middle wouldn’t work so well for me, but that may be because our own software has one of its start buttons (we have two! ) top right (the other is bottom right) so maybe I’m trained to look to the right edge.

The pop out panel icons (Analyzers, Measurements, …) seem to take up much more vertical space than they need to. At minimum vertical height (please don’t increase that!) the Notes, feedback and menu icons are hidden below the bottom of the window. I do like having the Notes icon/panel shown however.

For me there is not much advantage in having the add buttons in the top panel. I use markers a lot, but always use shortcut keys. Measurements I add with shift drag so I won’t get much use out of that button. Analyzers I use a lot, but only add occasionally so having to dig a little is not an issue. Same goes for device settings actually - setup once for an extended debug session and alter very occasionally.

The “Add xxx” hover over popups look like a menu entries, but aren’t. If the top panel stays, should those become menu entries?

Anyway, my two bits worth. YMMV

[ndiddy]

I agree with the other commenters that the increased vertical space usage is an issue on a widescreen monitor, especially when using analog channels. I don’t think that adding redundant buttons for functionality accessible from two clicks on the sidebar is worth losing the vertical space. If you do want to add shortcut buttons, I much prefer BitBob’s approach of having them on the right sidebar.

[Thomas]

I installed 2.4.12 in response to a pop-up notifying me it was available.

Vertical space is much more important than any possible gain from relocating the buttons.

I recommend some mechanism that allows specifying the location of the controls.

I went back to 2.4.10.

[BitBob]

I did the same; thanks Saleae for maintaining: Saleae - Changelog so I could revert to the “more comfortable” version. In fairness, I did at least try out the new GUI, but I found my muscle memory ached too much for the Start/Play button back in the upper right corner (my #1 complaint) – which I’d argue this is a ‘better’ spot for it to be placed, too. It should least be in one of the four corners vs. centered on an edge – and ultimately, why move it at all ?!?

Meanwhile, I fully empathize with the conflicting desires to innovate new features vs. maintain some familiar utility to your existing users. Perhaps you can check your download logs and see if there has been a ‘spike’ of people hitting the 2.4.10 download links after the new 2.4.12 update was pushed out – as that could give a ‘silent hint’ as to how many other users aren’t happy about the new UI changes?

FWIW, I did (eventually) get used to the Microsoft Office Ribbon Bar, even though I still don’t really like it – and at least Microsoft does allow you to ‘hide’ it. Microsoft also added >1M rows in a spreadsheet and other new features (i.e., new benefits worth the “pain” to adjust to the refactored UI/UX design). However, Microsoft also later dropped/reverted the 2007 “Office Button” design in favor of a more familiar “File” tab, too.

My point: it is good to innovate and add new functionality that will help acclimate the new users and keep Saleae ahead of the competition, but it’s also nice to reconsider some design choices and respect the installed user-base who are your hidden marketing team and biggest fans, too

Please seriously reconsider adopting an alternative UI/UX design that accomplishes your end goal, but isn’t quite as ‘painful’ to (some of) the current power users.

[joerg]

the new UI is “unusual” - since I am using Saleae for quite a while already…
I am more in the fraction of “please move the controls back to the right” - since especially nowadays in HomeOffice situation and many signals monitored at the same time, vertical space is an issue!

My biggest ‘problem’ with that new UI, as I am always searching that Start button:
please move it back to top-right corner, and(/or at least) make it green again (and Stop red)!!!