MiniPlot and debugging

There are tons of function plotters and there is Excel to plot data series but I needed something else so I made MiniPlot.

This software lets you type in or paste any number of data series and generate corresponding line charts on the fly. It’s dead simple to use and there is no button to click to generate charts, it’s instantaneous.

Here is the feature list:

• Updates as you type
• Automatically fits all series
• Auto axis scale with window size
• Each series has its own color
• Chart types: line, point, column, area
• Save chart as .jpg image
• Copy image to clipboard

I spend a lot of time reading the Visual Studio output window and the lines coming out of logs and tracepoints. But it can be full of other garbage like other log categories that I don’t really want to turn off, or random Visual Studio output about threads, dlls and all.
When I need to visualize my data, I’d copy paste the VS output in a text editor, remove all the garbage and end up with my values properly printed each per line, I’d open up Excel and paste those values, insert a new line chart, and I’d finally have a chart representing my data.

Now, with MiniPlot I just select all the text in the Visual Studio output window and paste it in there and I have my line chart instantly.
Whenever I can I just add tracepoints to the program I’m debugging, put in the textbox something like: playerSpeed {playerSpeed}, and paste the output in MiniPlot (which ignores all the crap that doesn’t match the 2 supported formats to add a point) so I can visualize what’s going on without recompiling my application nor having to use a text editor + Excel.

Series can be displayed as line, point, column or area charts.

There is no install needed (though you need .NET Framework 3.5), it’s just a 500KB standalone executable.

Download and more info here

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It’s alive!

It’s been more than 3 years since I posted anything, the blog has survived and has surprisingly grown in traffic (between 1500 and 2100 views per months [not unique] for a total of 63,220 views)! Not much but way more than I expected.

This is mostly due to the Photoshop math with GLSL shaders and Level control shader posts that are being linked quite a lot.

Those shaders are used in several cool projects including:

• EyeEm (source)
• Ogre3D (source)
• OpenFrameWorks addon: ofxPSBlend (source)
• Xoliul-Shader 2 (source)
• NUI Paint (source)

I’m opening my new website www.shazbits.com where I publish my new technical experiments. This blog is part of it and also accessible at blog.shazbits.com.