Hi! We are looking at improving our Timing Marker User Interaction and have a question for you. One idea we have is to make markers as easy as possible to create. We think by combining the creation of a pair and single marker we can improve your experience. To create markers you would do the following:
Start the Place Marker Interaction when the user clicks the Timing Marker Hint (this could be a dotted timing marker in the top timeline) or the user types the shortcut T.
The user places the first timing marker
Now the second timing marker appears for placement. The user can press ESC to cancel the interaction and now they have a single timing marker OR they can click and place the final marker for the pair.
What are your thoughts? Do you like it or hate it? Do you have an even better idea? Let us know!
I especially love it if I’m not required to provide a name when I create the marker or pair. I can always click on the marker tag later if I want to name it.
I’d also like a way to create multiple grouped markers so that I can measure multiple points relative to a start point. Step three extends to that by allowing following markers to be placed after the second marker and requiring ESC (or maybe right click?) to terminate the process.
For me, the current timer marker are quite a pain as the actual timing values disappear as soon as I cancel the “comment here”. What I really want is to be able to click two edges (on same or different channels) and have a frequency and period value come up and stay up on the traces. It would be great if I could then drag that measurement around so as not to obscure other things, and give it a name if I wanted to, choose its color, etc. But 99.9% of the time, I want two clicks (one on each edge) and to see the frequency and period - that’s it. No other clicks. Many times I’ll need to do 10 or 15 of these measurements on a single capture to get the answers I need about that capture and the way it is right now is clunky and slow to me.
I really like P.Jaquiery’s idea - the first click defines the start point, and then every click after that is a separate measurement from that start point. So if you clicked 4 times, you’d be able to measure three other edges from that first edge. Then ESC to stop adding measurements. That’s how a lot of PCB layout software works when routing - click to define wire points then ESC to stop that wire and pick a new one.
I hate both current implementation (a pain to add marker pair), and this topic’s idea (additional keypress to add a single marker).
Ideas of the people above me are quite nice, but I have mine: click on the time bar to add a single marker, as it is now, but click and drag to add marker pair (add one in the place of mouse down, and the second in the place of mouse up). Also auto-scroll when the mouse cursor is at the right or left edge.
And also display frequency for time differential measurements (perhaps also for automatic measurements on the waveform).
As for changing the UI for setting them. For me hard to say. It took me awhile to figure out I needed to go up to the menu to find it… I kept looking for them in the sort of tabs on the right of the display.
I don’t set them that often that makes much of a difference to me, of needing to do an extra keypress or two.
But: for me in many cases the V2 markers are less useful to me than the V1. As one of my main usage cases for them is to document timings, that I might post in a forum post. Things like: I am showing some SPI output from a processor example Teensy 4.1 and wanting to show how a set of timings in the picture, which could include:
Time to output one byte (or maybe just the timing of the clock
Maybe another showing time it took to output some message
And another one showing the time gap between messages.
I am not sure how to do that now. Yes I can include maybe the timing info shown some of the time on the right hand side of window. But some of these cases, what I take a screen shot of is just the portion of the window that shows the interaction.
in 3. I would place the timing marker at the nearest subsequent transition, on this or any other channel, associated with a popup that displays dT and frequency for the corresponding interval—and track the cursor location so that the marker and popup would move to other signal transitions in the main window as you move the cursor around. This way you could rapidly get a series of measurements with just one click.
This is an interesting idea and I can see how it will reduce clicks, although it might be hard for users to use if they want to measure things that might not be in the same view or have usability issue holding the mouse down (trackpads make this even more difficult) and dragging. Thanks for your idea!
I think you are saying you would click once to place the first marker and then shift click to place the second marker? We were thinking you would click for the first marker and click for the second and be done.
I hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, that I can click in the time scale to create a single point marker. Since I learned about ^T I have always used that to create marker pairs and drag the two markers into position using the snap to edge feature.
Maybe the fairly minor change we are looking for is to add a shift click behavior in the time scale that behaves somewhat like ^T - the shift click places the first marker but stays in marker placement mode so that a subsequent marker can be placed with a second click. If multiple marker groups become a thing then this extends trivially to placing multiple markers. Further shift clicks place subsequent markers until the final marker is placed with an unmodified click or ESC is pressed.
Is there a reason it is preferred to have an alternate Shift click as opposed click to place first marker, click to place second marker (pair) or Esc to just create a single market?
Yes, the shift click means there is no need to perform extra actions when you are just placing a single marker with an unmodified click.
I often use single markers to mark points of interest. For those I mostly don’t care about the actual time. It’s more like a bookmark so I can quickly navigate back to a point of interest. Keeping the cost of placing those markers low (a single unmodified click in the time scale) is a win.
When I’m placing marker pairs I’m always interested in timing and maybe in the markers as a bookmark. Often I’m interested in measuring from some start point to multiple other points of interest. Being able to place those markers as a series of shift clicks makes it really easy. (Currently I have to drag one of the markers around to make subsequent measurements.)
Note that the shift click to mean “place another marker after this” works with the current “place marker” (Ctrl Shift T) and “place marker pair” (Ctrl T) by allowing multiple markers to be added with essentially no change in the current implementation.
So, suggested modification to the current implementation:
1/ use T (unadorned - no shift and no control key modifiers) to start placing a single market as Ctrl Shift T does now.
2/ in any marker placement mode allow Shift Click to mean “place another marker after this one”.
3/ Allow multiple markers to be placed in a group so that timing with respect to the first placed marker can be shown for each marker in the group. (Note that markers placed after the first could be before or after the first marker. The first placed marker is always the reference and markers placed earlier in the data show negative deltas.)
The one problem I had with the measurement panel is you couldn’t have more than one measurement (frequency, rising edges, etc). This is with 1.2.29. I may be wrong, but if I am than doing so was non-intuitive. As far as the A1/A2 pair, the only issue I had with it was it didn’t stick until you caught an edge the GUI liked or you were zoomed in very close. I like the snap to an edge, but it didn’t snap too easy.
I am just getting used to the 2.3.4 software, and really love the colors. This is kind of hard to get used to after using the older stuff every day for 8 to 10 years, though. Big changes. Everything is on the opposite side - start button, channel selects, run time, sample rate, etc. The grab the screen and fling left or right with the damper was really neat on the old one. Not sure it is worked out yet on this one.
I meant essentially what P.Jaquiery said. The shift-click would be for placing a second (and subsequent) marker in a pair, normal click would be for pacing another single marker.