Apple patent is for simultaneous viewing of multiple tool execution results
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 31, 2008 at 12:16pm
An Apple patent (number 20080028370) for simultaneous viewing of multiple tool execution results has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. According to Apple, facilitating analysis is disclosed.
A master track comprising one or more previously recorded inputs to one or more computer system components is played. Two or more sets of instrument output are received, each set generated during at least a corresponding portion of the playback of the master track. At least a selected portion of the instrument output is displayed in a manner that allows visual correlation of the displayed instrument output.
Here’s Apple’s background on the invention: “Typical performance analysis, debugging, and similar tools (hereinafter referred to collectively as “tracing tools” and “monitoring” tools) allow users to visualize data that, e.g., regards one aspect of the behavior of a process. For example, suppose a user is attempting to determine why a particular application that makes use of a remote network is crashing. The user may attempt to detect memory leaks by making use of a first program. To determine whether the problem is instead related to a faulty network protocol implementation, the user must use a different tool and run the application again because the results produced by the first tool are either incompatible with the second tool, and/or because the information determined by the first tool is not easily correlated with the information produced by the second tool. Even if both tools were operated simultaneously, it is possible that they could interfere with one another, causing unreliable results.
“Another problem with the aforementioned debugging process is that the user is left to guess whether the problem is the result of a combination of different aspects, such as a memory leak only critical when the network protocol implementation is incorrect.
“Additionally, the user must manually and repeatedly execute the process or processes that are being traced and cause the appropriate interactions with the program to occur (such as key presses and file opening operations). If the anomaly only occurs infrequently, such as every one in ten times the application is run, or if the interactions required (e.g., multiple mouse clicks) are cumbersome, the user’s attention is more likely to be focused on executing the suspect application and away from the debugging tool. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a better way to identify anomalies.”
The inventors are Stephen R. Lewallen, Theodore Goldstein and Maxwell O. Drukman.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
