News for version 0.9.1

The new version of the Profiler is out with the following news:

added capability of opening multiple analysis views
added capability of switching root object in the workspace
added navigation in analysis views
added bookmarks
added PySide integration
– added user application data folder support
– added history for the Python command line and script dialog
– added save option to the keys input dialog
– improved notes: the toolbar now signals their presence
– updated Qt to 4.8.4

Also a new Demo version has been released, which as usual can be found on the product page.

UI Improvements & Bookmarks

The upcoming 0.9.1 version of the Profiler features some important UI improvements and the introduction of bookmarks. Among the UI improvements there’s:

  • the ability to switch root in the workspace
  • multiple analysis views displaying data of different roots
  • navigation

In this case a video is probably more worth than a thousand words.

These new features lay down the groundwork for some more interesting capabilities which will be added soon. Stay tuned! 🙂

PySide support

This is really a small addition which took just a couple of hours of work, but since it can come very handy, it’s worth dedicating a post to it. The upcoming 0.9.1 version of the Profiler adds explicit support for PySide. Thus, it will be possible to create Qt widgets and add them to the workspace.

Installing PySide

First of all, let’s install PySide. There are 3 ways to do this.

1) Install it from the qt-project page.

Make sure you select the package matching the current Python version used by the Profiler.

2) Install the package we compiled for you. It’s vanilla, directly from the original sources, but it has the advantage that it is guaranteed to work. In fact, at the time of writing the official package contains a bug (missing shiboken Python module) and so the first one is not really an option until it is not fixed.

Download
SHA1: 2024348E79890A167BB231098A6A16FC8BB02C9E

3) You can compile PySide yourself following the instructions at qt-project. At the end, use the installer created inside ‘c:\pyside-setup\dist’.

A code sample

Using it is even easier than the setup process. Basically ProContext has a new method called createViewFromWidget which takes as a parameter a widget created by PySide and returns a ProView which in turn can be added to the workspace.

Adding a widget to the workspace only takes the following line:

ctx.addView(ctx.createViewFromWidget(widget))

Therefore using an existing widget and adding it to the workspace is very easy. Let’s see a real-world widget like an official PySide sample: PySide/examples/effects/lighting.py. It’s sufficient to remove:

if __name__ == '__main__':

    import sys

    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)

    lighting = Lighting()
    lighting.setWindowTitle("Lighting and Shadows")
    lighting.resize(640, 480)
    lighting.show()

    sys.exit(app.exec_())

And add:

lighting = Lighting()
lighting.setWindowTitle("PySide widget")

ctx = proContext()
ctx.addView(ctx.createViewFromWidget(lighting))

Now we can add an action to execute the code or just insert it in the custom script box (Ctrl+Alt+R) and the view will be shown like this:

To set a custom icon for the view use setWindowIcon.

As usual stay tuned as the upcoming version is going to include some major additions and significant changes.