Thanks for the profile GUI, (and a brain-dump of ideas)

[James Benton]

Hi Carl,

Some great feedback here thanks, it's always good to get another persons 
perspective on anything which involves user interaction!

I plan to wrap up my work on apitrace this week (as I'm nearing the end 
of my internship at vmware), what I had planned for this week was to:
  - Fix that horizontal scrollbar
  - Add frame boundaries on the timeline view
  - More user interaction between the table / graphs / main window
  - Generalise the drawing code so it is easy to add new data views
  - Add support for gpu counters (e.g. the ones from nvidia nvperfkit sdk)

Seems like some of your ideas overlapped mine, but for the ones that didn't:

>    * We really want a single "GPU" row in the timeline, (simply the union
>      of all of the existing per-shader rows). This should be trivial to
>      implement and would be extremely useful, (for identifying stalls and
>      other bad interactions between CPU and GPU).

I'll go ahead and implement this for you at some point today, I'd rather 
do it quickly for you so you don't have to spend the time working on it 
as I plan to generalise the drawing code and that may result in a 
rewrite of some of this code anyway.

>    * There's a lot of information that's available only in mouse-hover
>      text. Some of that would be nice to put within the timeline bars
>      themselves so that it just appears when zooming in enough, (in
>      particular the duration of each call).
>
>      Perhaps even use two rows of text for each timeline bar. Name on the
>      first line, duration/etc. on the second line so that this
>      information is viewable even before zooming in enough to see the
>      full call name.
>
>    * It would be nice to have time details on the horizontal axis. This
>      could be in addition to, (or instead of), the existing frame labels
>      on the horizontal axis.
>
>    * I can imagine keyboard navigation being useful. For example, left
>      and right arrows could scroll to the next call in the timeline view
>      for the currently selected row.
>
I do agree these would all be nice additions however I may not have time 
to implement them, as I said at the start of the email we want to get my 
work on apitrace completely finished by the end of this week, if I have 
spare time at the end of the week I'll go ahead and work on these.

Thanks,
James