Dark Mode, Performance, and Usability

This update is another stability-focused update with a few new features. Namely, dark mode is now implemented! There are also many internal refactors and performance improvements included.

Summary of Changes

• Dark mode
• Hugely improved column selection UI
• Rewrite internal database code
  • Improved performance
  • Improved fault tolerance
  • Add pagination to capture lists (e.g. Analyze page)
  • Fix a rare, metadata-related, fullscreen crash
• Add a right-click menu to captures and recordings
• Fix high speed devices failing to capture
• Fix auto-update failing in some rare cases

Dark Mode

Dark mode is here! This long-requested feature is currently in an experimental state, but is largely complete. Please contact us if you see anything that doesn’t look right! We’ve done our best to check all visual aspects but it’s possible we’ve missed something.

Dark mode can be enabled by pressing the Sun icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. The selected mode will be kept even if the application is restarted.

New Column Selection UI

The UI for selecting columns from a summary in graphing pages (Cluster Heatmap, PairGrid, and Bar Plots pages) has been remade from the ground up to include categorization and filtering capabilities.

There are three categories:

• Luminance-Based: Columns that use paw luminance in some way
• Postural: Columns that are based on the position of body parts (distances, angles)
• Temporal: Columns that describe the amount of time spent performing certain actions

Each column has a human-friendly name and description associated with it now. This UI also has filtering capabilities, allowing you to, for example, choose every column that describes the hind left paw.

Internal Database Rewrite, Pagination, and Crash Fix

This large internal refactor is mostly invisible during regular use, but has allowed for new features and performance improvements. Metadata-related operations are now faster and significantly more fault-tolerant.

On top of the rewrite, we have implemented pagination for all places in the software that display a list of captures. This results in dramatically improved performance, especially when making a selection. The current page can be viewed and changed at the bottom of all capture lists.

The aforementioned rare, fullscreen crash has been fixed as a result of this rewrite. This crash happened in rare cases when metadata was not correctly saved by Palmreader, and the user then navigated to the Analyze page.

Right-Click Menu (aka. Context Menu)

A new context menu has been added to the capture lists. When a capture or recording is right clicked, a menu will appear allowing you to add it to your selection and delete it. In the future, this is where the option to edit a recording’s metadata will be. For now, this is very useful for deleting a capture or recording while a selection already exists, preventing you from needing to clear your selection, delete something, then remake the selection.

Fix High Speed Device

The previous update caused some high speed devices to unconditionally fail when starting a capture. This update fixes that issue.

Fix Auto-Update Failing

In some very rare cases, the auto update would fail due to an issue with the Ubuntu package manager. This update contains code that runs the necessary commands to fix this issue before each install, eliminating this failure mode.