UI/Interface Adjustments

[vanevery]

Move "open" and "close" out from advanced mode.
Make indicator for serial data coming through
Make indicator for port open/closed
Keep console and send behind advanced mode?
Any other thoughts @tigoe

[tigoe]

• Make sure serial data indicator doesn't affect timing.
• Run speed tests with an M0-based board (I can give you one)
• pass entire buffer to client and let client deal with parsing?

[kaganjd]

in thinking through some of the comments above + questions that came up in p5-serial/p5.serialserver#39, i put together these UI sketches. my thinking is that the serial control app should feel like a connection status monitor. there are two screens here. the first, which is displayed when you open the serial control app, shows available ports.

when you click a port button, you're taken to the next screen. separating the screens this way is just one idea to address confusion about the existing serial control port dropdown that resets to a default port value when the p5 sketch takes over, displaying a port that is not actually the one that's in use. this way, when you select a port, you're taken to that port's "dashboard" and you don't have to think about the other ports anymore.

there are two buttons in the top right: one to go back to the port list, and one to close and reopen the current port. the port bar is green when the port is open and red when the port is closed. this would give a clearer indication of whether or not you had closed the port with your p5 sketch.

there's a console that looks like the p5 web editor console where you would get status messages. you could also clear the console here.

one problem with this UI that i'm already not sure how to address would be monitoring multiple ports...

so... yeah! just wanted to get the UI conversation rolling. let me know what you think.

[tigoe]

One other thing:
If you implement the "dashboard" idea, I think it would be helpful if the monitor could show incoming bytes as either ASCII, their raw decimal values, or their raw hexadecimal values. Maybe even their binary values. See Tom Gerhardt's Cornflake (http://tomgerhardt.com/Cornflake/) as an example of this. It would help people to learn the relationship between ASCII and binary values