Event secrets in PI

So I’m sitting in a meeting today discussing how we can improve the UI for Performance Investigator (PI) in future releases. We have a lot of issues to address to improve the usability, clarity, and usefulness of the tool and are working hard to define the changes and when they can be delivered. One of the items to look at struck me by surprise. I didn’t know that PI did that and I had actually documented the main feature over a year ago for Carbide 1.2 or so.

Needless to say I was a bit verklempt about the whole issue. Then I realized if I, who worked across the room from the developers didn’t know of these features, it was a pretty good bet that the vast Carbide audience hadn’t stumbled upon them either.

So, let’s talk about them.

As everyone may know, PI provides the ability to gather data into a file using the Profiler application on a device. You then transfer the data file back to the host machine and import it into Carbide using the File > Import > Performance Investigator > Performance Investigator Data wizard. The PI data is then shown in an editor view for analysis. If the file contains button event information it appears in the Thread Load graph as red lines ending in boxes and the event name underneath.

Ok, so feature one is that even if the button event has text there is some additional info you can view. To see it, simply click the button event and a tooltip appears with additional information about the event.

If you double-click the button event, the second feature appears which is an editor dialog where you can edit the name and add a comment to the button event. Click OK to save your changes.

Needless to say I’ll be adding info on these two features into the PI manual some time soon. As always, I’m left to wonder how many other ‘hidden’ features are lurking out there that need documentation. It’s the stuff of nightmares.