02-02-2019, 12:54 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-02-2019, 12:58 PM by Sebastian Staacks.)
It's always great to see that the editor is being used. Please, let me first say a few things about how the editor:
We wanted phyphox to be as customizable as possible with the possibility to create your own experiment configurations including data analysis and to share those as modules with students. This was achieved with our XML file format. However, the customization should also have a low entrance barrier, which is why we created the editor, so that the XML code could be created without scaring of users who have never seen XML before.
One major problem of this (or rather the visualization that we have chosen) is, that the editor cannot fully represent the XML format. The latter has a bunch of buffers and executes "analysis modules" sequentially to manipulate those buffers. The current editor however, connects inputs and outputs of those modules and the buffers become somewhat hidden as they are only represented as the "connection". This in particular means that the same buffer cannot be reused multiple times in the editor and that there is no good representation for "clearing" data from a buffer or for data that persists across multiple runs of the modules.
So, in the end, if you want to create .phyphox files with all the features, I highly recommend to write the XML code directly (at some point this is also more convenient than pushing a mouse). Of course, we want the editor to be able to handle as many experiments as possible (at the moment only two of the experiments in phyphox cannot be handled by the editor), but the main purpose is to allow simple changes to existing experiments and creating simple setups.
Why am I explaining this? Well, while I agree on all of your points, we have a capacity problem and probably will not improve most of them in the near future, simply because other aspects of the app have a higher priority at the moment. We used to have a student assistant who made some big improvements on the editor (especially resorting the operators is almost ready and will be released with the Bluetooth update), but he is no longer working on phyphox.
So, at least for now, the editor is the entry for the more advanced users, who hopefully can handle a few rough edges and there are several aspects that affect almost all of our users on which we have to focus first.
Edit:
I have also merged your request for a debug mode here, because unfortunately the answer applies to this one as well.
By the way. We will open the source of the editor soon as well. At the moment it's a rather ugly mess, but maybe we find some other programmers who would like to improve it...
We wanted phyphox to be as customizable as possible with the possibility to create your own experiment configurations including data analysis and to share those as modules with students. This was achieved with our XML file format. However, the customization should also have a low entrance barrier, which is why we created the editor, so that the XML code could be created without scaring of users who have never seen XML before.
One major problem of this (or rather the visualization that we have chosen) is, that the editor cannot fully represent the XML format. The latter has a bunch of buffers and executes "analysis modules" sequentially to manipulate those buffers. The current editor however, connects inputs and outputs of those modules and the buffers become somewhat hidden as they are only represented as the "connection". This in particular means that the same buffer cannot be reused multiple times in the editor and that there is no good representation for "clearing" data from a buffer or for data that persists across multiple runs of the modules.
So, in the end, if you want to create .phyphox files with all the features, I highly recommend to write the XML code directly (at some point this is also more convenient than pushing a mouse). Of course, we want the editor to be able to handle as many experiments as possible (at the moment only two of the experiments in phyphox cannot be handled by the editor), but the main purpose is to allow simple changes to existing experiments and creating simple setups.
Why am I explaining this? Well, while I agree on all of your points, we have a capacity problem and probably will not improve most of them in the near future, simply because other aspects of the app have a higher priority at the moment. We used to have a student assistant who made some big improvements on the editor (especially resorting the operators is almost ready and will be released with the Bluetooth update), but he is no longer working on phyphox.
So, at least for now, the editor is the entry for the more advanced users, who hopefully can handle a few rough edges and there are several aspects that affect almost all of our users on which we have to focus first.
Edit:
I have also merged your request for a debug mode here, because unfortunately the answer applies to this one as well.
By the way. We will open the source of the editor soon as well. At the moment it's a rather ugly mess, but maybe we find some other programmers who would like to improve it...